Give me the Death Note, I can be trusted to act rationally. The only “undeserving” to end up on it would be people who step through Metro doors and immediately stop, even though there’s people behind them.
More seriously I know the author has said it’s about power corrupting, but if that’s the story he wanted to tell then he should’ve chosen a different protagonist. Its also a silly mantra, we do not live in a Tolkien novel, power isn’t some supernatural force.
Light is a dumb teenager with a 4chan edgelord worldview who killed a bunch of people in the edgiest way possible. The Death Note was truly wasted on him
Peace be with you
Light was a really, really bad example for that. He was arrogant and contemptuous even before the Death Note. All the Death Note did was remove his inhibitions. In my opinion, people without a conscience are way more easily corrupted by power. That’s why my favorite killer is still Dexter Morgan😄. At least he has a code and knows damn well that he’s an asshole.
But all of those people were convicted by the Japanese legal system, which famously never falsely convicts anyone…
Look, power corrupts, except when you give some designated prodigy richkid supreme authority over Interpol and Japanese police
Watching this as a teenager, I pretty much immediately realised that there was nothing in the mechanics of the Death Note stopping you from saying people died of old age having lived an ethical and fulfilling life free from crime after <the date the entry was written>. The real power of the Death Note was in the apparently unlimited ability to set the conditions of death, and it was barely used.
There is,
- you can only control the victim’s actions for like 3 months
- you cannot extend life
I just looked it up on the wiki, and the closest thing I can find is the 23-day rule, which isn’t mentioned in the anime, and only adds the condition that if you specify a specific time within 23 days and specific disease that wouldn’t be fatal in the timeframe you specified, it defaults to a heart attack. If you specify a disease that takes over 23 days to develop and no specific time, then the disease will progress starting when you write at its natural speed. Old age as a cause with no date seems to fit the latter category.
i wouldn’t say that “old age” is a disease. it’s a state where actual diseases can kill you way easier, their incubation time would probably be lower than normal in that case.
but you could probably go for something like HIV which takes 1-10 years and might be fatal, especially if untreated.
After 39 days, you’re visited by your Shinigami, and can ask them for help workshopping how to phrase dies of some disease that can’t happen until they’re old so the auto-selected date is some point where they’re already old, but if they were already going to die before that, dying at their predestined time of an accident or disease is fine, too.
The conditions weren’t unlimited and you could not exceed 30 days from when you wrote the name, if you did they’d just die of a heart attack.
You could not make the person do something that was far outside their character (like make Bezos give up all his money). But then again that seemed to get dropped since he made the FBI lady go straight home and off herself. Then again that rule was just what Light believed it to be, so the author has some cover there.https://deathnote.fandom.com/wiki/Rules_of_the_Death_Note/Manga_Chapter_Rules doesn’t mention anything about a 30 day limit, and does say that any human is considered capable of suicide. I watched it closer to my birth than to now, so I’m just going off vague memories of what I thought when I watched it and the wiki, which might not be perfect.
Its not the suicide that’s the bit, its the “getting told who Kira is and doing nothing about it” thats the un characteristic bit.
There’s also this
Neither suicide nor accidental death can cause a death that directly results in the death of anyone other than the person whose name is written. If it would cause the death of another human being, it would be a heart attack under circumstances where the person named would not cause the death of a third party."
So thats another limit i suppose.
It also says a human can’t use the Death Note to extend their lifespan, but then again it also states that
The use of the Death Note in the human world sometimes affects other humans’ lives or shortens their original life span, even though their names are not actually written in the Death Note itself.
So it kind of seems like the author is making it up as they go along. Its been a while since I read it as well and I remember something about a time limit, but now its not there, so I guess thats just Nelsom Mandela hitting me with those dimensional rays
edit: found this for you
You cannot set a death date longer than the victim’s original lifespan. Even if the victim’s death is entered in the Death Note, if it is beyond his or her original lifespan, the victim will die before the set time.
And then theres also the thing about “old age” not being a cause of death
After your first go, you just need to wait 39 days and your Shinigami appears, and you can ask them questions which they have to answer to the best of their ability (which isn’t guaranteed to give you the full detail, as they might not know it). That should give you a good opportunity to workshop exactly how to phrase dies of some disease that can’t happen until they’re old so the auto-selected date is some point where they’re already old, but if they were already going to die before that, dying at their predestined time of an accident or disease is fine, too and make it work.
I did see that there’s another tab to the article that phrases the 23-day rule differently, stopping you set death times further in the future than that, but then immediately explains how death times after that work for diseases, so that’s obviously self-contradictory.
white
He’s Japanese though?
Everything else is accurate though. Picking a uniquely unfit person to give power to isn’t a story about power corrupting.
Spiritually Caucasian, Honorary aryan
edit; thats my guess about the mentality anyway, I’m just reposting the meme
If you storm into the elevator before anybody has the chance to get off, crowding it even worse, oh you better believe I’m writing your name.
Get this person power over death immediately







