Supernova - A Light Yagami Analysis
((Yo. This is casuistor reposting my old analyses on a new blog because tumblr has literally terminated my old account twice in two days for shits and giggles, so here we are. In any case, I’m hoping this time there won’t be any hitches and this will stay up for everyone’s perusal. Enjoy!))
So the inevitable has finally happened. Stars aligned and Kim finally did something productive and voila, I have written a character analysis for Light Yagami of Death Note. Love him or hate him, the chessmastering bastard is a damn compelling protagonist.
The reason I’m writing this is because 1) Light’s my favorite character of the series and 2) I’ve found that there’s a pervasive belief that an underlying psychiatric disorder is what leads him to do what he does. I’m not going to waste time being diplomatic about my thoughts on theories like these. These interpretations are not only completely unnecessary, the implicit argument that extreme violence must have a root cause in mental illness is unbelievably toxic. I’ve said this on a different post, but this point bears repeating as I cannot say this with enough emphasis. Under extraordinary circumstances, people can be driven to commit heinous crimes and Light is not exempt.
So what am I trying to accomplish with this post? Well, we’re going to do a thought experiment together. Occam’s razor says that the theory that makes the least amount of assumptions is the most likely to be correct. While that certainly isn’t true of all explanations, I wanted to give this approach a spin. We’re going to put DSM-5 away and we’re going to analyze canon together. This analysis is by no means a complete analysis of Light’s character. It’s geared specifically towards understanding Light at the start of canon. We’re going to see if we can grow a mass murderer without resorting to medical diagnoses or supernatural curses/hijinks from Light’s foundations. Spoilers: we definitely can.
SO WITHOUT FURTHER ADO.
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