It is CRUCIAL that Light initially thinks of the Death Note as a prank. He doesn’t think it’s real. He berates himself for how far he is taking the mental experiment on who to kill because he’s not actually of the opinion anything will happen.
That’s normal teenager behaviour.
Don’t tell me ‘oh no, thinking about who to kill is super creepy and normal teens would never’. Just go on reddit and check the bazillion threads of ‘if you head a Death Note, who would you kill and why?’ and watch people debate about irl murder. Go on supernatural forums and read about teen’s stupid experiments in summoning demons, raising the dead, cursing people, whatever.
It’s normal.
And the reason it is this normal is because most people don’t think anything will actually happen. It’s a thought experiment, though a malicious one, and a lot of people make it. Light finds what he thinks is an occult prank and he gets curious to try it - that’s something that’d occur with a lot of teens. The seriousness of his thought about it is more of a testament of how chronically bored he is intellectually - he’s turning it into a mental test for himself to ward off boredom, not because he thinks anyone would actually die.
And that’s why his initial reaction to confirming the notebook’s power is pure horror. Because he wasn’t expecting this, because he was playing a game with himself when he wrote that first name.
Like, duh. If you accidentally kill someone, that’s not something you walk off like ‘oh yeah that happened, this will in no way affect my mindset as I keep going on with my life’. There’s nothing ‘supernaturally corrupting’.
It’s just like any origin story. Innocent person - > death of some sort - > innocent person changes, becomes edgier in some way, gains different moral views.
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