Death Note

Now, let's move on to the 3rd game of the 999 series...!

Psych! :P No, don't worry, I'm finally changing the topic. It's still very "chrisish" and maybe it won't interest you too much, but well, that's why I try to write the posts in a funny way so you won't sleep drooling on your computer (or iPad...). 

My last post came to an end with a little cliffhanger. "Talking about animes..." was the last sentence.

And that's what I'm going to talk to you about in my next two posts. Two animes I enjoyed so much that I can't resist to tell you about them. And I think they're actually kind of opposites one to the other. The two are short ones (approximately 40 episodes each), so you're invited to convince yourself of their quality. But now, let's begin with the first one.

Death Note is, just like most anime series, based on a manga, by the writer Tsugumi Ohba and the manga artist Takeshi Obata. The main character's name is Light Yagami (just his name is amazing) and he's a high school student at the beginning of the story. But Light is extremely intelligent, actually he seems to be quite bored in school and of the everyday life. He's sick of the daily news of murders, kidnappings and all the other crimes and he would like to live in a world without any bad people doing bad things.

Then, one day during class, while he was looking out of the window, he saw a black note book falling down to the ground. He didn't know where it came from so he was curious about it. Later, he went to the place where the book had fallen and examined the note book. What he found wasn't just a normal note book. On the cover he read "Death Note". Then he opened the first sites ob the book and began to study them. There was apparently a kind manual with rules of how to use the death note. These were the following ones:

• The human whose name is written in this notebook shall die.
• This notebook will not take effect unless the writer has the subject's face in their mind when writing his/her name. Therefore, people sharing the same name will not be affected.
• If the cause of death is written within 40 seconds of writing the person's name, it will happen.
• If the cause of death is not specified, the person will simply die of a heart attack.
• After writing the cause of death, the details of the death should be written in the next 6 minutes and 40 seconds.

Just as everyone would do, Light thought that it was a kind of a very sick joke. But for some reason, he didn't decide to throw it away and so he took it home. His thoughts couldn't resist to return one time after another to the strange book that he had found. He was saying to himself that it had to be a stupid invention of an ill mind and that it was just nonsense. But finally Light wanted to try it out, his human curiosity won against his rational intellect. That evening he went to a shop and there he saw how a little group of men were molesting a woman outside. Light was just disgusted by the actions of the men and when one of them said the full man of one of his companions (Puuuuuure coincidence!), he decided to use him to do the experiment with the book. So he wrote down the name he just heard and added "Car accident" as the cause of death below. So he waited 40 seconds...

When the 40 seconds had past and Light was just about to turn around having confirmed his theory, a truck swang off the street and hit the man head-on. Naturally, the man had died. Light couldn't believe what had just happened.

Later, at home, while he was still thinking about the power he had with this new book and he could use it for the sake of the good people, a strange creature suddenly showed on his bed. The masculine human-like being (or well... actually not being... I'm going to explain in a minute!) introduced himself as "Ryuk" and he said to be the actual owner of the death note. Light was shocked in the first place, but quickly he regained his cool mind and listened carefully to the explanations of Ryuk.

Ryuk stated to be a "shinigami", a god of death (typical for the japanese folklore). He explained that there exists something besides of heaven and hell where the shinigamis live. And every shinigami has its own death note. With them, they cause the death of the humans, adding the initially remaining lifetime of the human to their own. Sometimes a shinigami lets his death note fall accidentally into the human world. Then, he or she has to come down fast to get his o her death note back before a human finds it. Because at the moment any human touches the death note, it begins to be his own possession. And then the shinigami has to stay on Earth together with the human until he dies to take his death note home again. The shinigami on Earth can only be seen by people who have touched his respective death note.

 The main characters (from left to right): L, Light Yagami and Ryuk.

Light began to think that it was a kind of a divine destiny that he had found the death note. From that point, Light set as his objective to create a new world by exterminating step by step all the bad people leaving only the good ones. But early, he started to get crazy and to think of himself as a kind of god of a new world. Still, he was very intelligent. And quickly, he got an enemy. When Light continued killing more people with his new almost invincible weapon, the police got aware of the mysterious murders and asked L (yep, his code name, just an L; this has style, don't you think?) for help, a very stange guy in the same age as Light who was working in the shadows for the extremely hard cases for the police. A fight between the two geniuses had begun, when L was trying to find out who was the hiding murderer and Light was trying to plan all his murders in perfection to not get caught by L.

The best about this anime is to follow the mind battles between Light and L and the tragic incidents which accompany their almost divine fight. This anime gets you stuck onto the screen, you just want to know always what's going to happen next and you're deeply fascinated by the incredible deductions and gambits Light and L do during the story.

With a protagonist who is actually the "bad guy", the anime also makes us think about some very big questions: Is it justified to take someone's life if that person did something very bad? Where are the limits between the ones who deserve to die and the ones who don't? Who should set these limits? Is it correct to decide about the destiny of a person's life?

Ah, I forgot to mention. Ryuk is just a hilarious character. Really.

This one makes you think and as you surely know, I love that. So, if you're interested to have a little look, here you have the first episode: