#13meta

[13eyond13]

"Kill his family at last resort" meaning? He did save sayu despite disadvantage.

He did, and the narrative made sure to point that out via Ryuk's commentary so we noticed it as a possible motive:

Light also mentions to Ryuk in chapter 3 that it is something he might have to do, though. He's taking extreme precautions because it is something he very much wants to avoid, but it also indicates that it's a possibility he isn't necessarily ruling out, either:

When Soichiro volunteers to halve his remaining lifespan it shocks and saddens Light. But he also allows it to happen, and he doesn't offer to take his father's place or anything like that. This is pointed out by Ryuk as well:

I'm not someone who thinks the edgiest and most callous interpretation of Light is the most interesting or deepest one by any means. But I do think that a big part of his character is how ruthless and particular he can be when it comes to the things he will and won't sacrifice in order to achieve his goals.

[13eyond13]

did L want kira to stop because he just wanted to keep his job? i can't see L not supporting kira's ideas because of his morality... he tortures people for solving cases lmao

L mostly takes on cases because they're interesting and challenging to him imo, as is explained in the manga when he is first introduced. And yes, I think his position as the ultimate criminal catcher was being threatened by Kira's existence in a way too. I'm sure he didn't think what Light was doing with the notebook was great either, but I'd say for the most that part he is more concerned with being right and being entertained and winning than he is actually doing anything out of a sense of duty or heroism or due to possessing a strong moral code

[13eyond13]

Do you think Ohba improves as a writer? From Death Note to his current work Platinum End.

I don't think so, no. Going from reading Death Note to reading his second series, Bakuman, wasn't that big of a difference to me writing quality-wise. I wasn't as personally interested in Bakuman and didn't end up finishing it, but I thought then that maybe it wasn't due to a drop in writing quality so much as that it was just a totally different genre of story that he isn't as suited to writing. Bakuman is more of a light-hearted low stakes slice of life/educational story teaching kids how manga is made. And though I did find the informative aspect of it interesting and think he structured the story well and so on, I don't think he's particularly good at writing warm human connections like romances and friendships and such. His super plot-heavy style and pessimistic outlook and dry sense of humour suits a detective/horror thriller type story much better than that kind of story, maybe.

The steepest drop in quality I saw was from Bakuman to Platinum End, which really shocked me in a bad way and made me question how competent of a writer he actually is. Even aside from all the lazy and offensive and cliche aspects of the premise and plot and characters, the directions he took things every time an interesting opportunity presented itself in the story seemed to be the worst and most bewildering choices nearly every single time. I found it pretty unreadable and cringey and boring, and was very disillusioned with him as a fan of his previous works by the time I finally gave up on it.

What was pleasantly surprising to me was how decent the 2020 one-shot for Death Note was which came out after that, actually. Because I wasn't expecting to like it at all after reading Platinum End. I thought Minoru was an interesting and likable character that fit into the world as a later generation character well, and that the notebook situation created for him by Ryuk to navigate was an interesting scenario to analyze and discuss with others as well.

It's possible that Ohba's changed as a person or a creator for the worse in the decades since achieving such massive success with his debut work. But I think he probably also just has some major strengths and major weaknesses as a writer, and that Death Note happens to be the kind of story that naturally plays to his strengths the most.

[13eyond13]

does death note pass the bechdel test???

I think that it barely squeaks by as a pass, according to the criteria listed here: 1) That at least two women are featured (and sometimes people specify the female characters should also be named)

2) that these two women talk to each other 3) That they discuss something other than a man

From what I recall the female-to-female interactions in the series are pretty rare. And the vast majority of their conversations with each other are entirely centered around the male characters, like so:

Sayu and Sachiko are almost always focusing on Light and Soichiro's lives, emotions, and accomplishments whenever they speak to each other. Misa is nearly always obsessing over Light as well, including when she talks to the other girls (like that scene she has with Kiyomi where they are having a catty dinner together while fighting over Light).

@mikami checked the whole manga for this before and said it passed The Bechdel Test because it had a few scenes of Misa and Rem discussing the shinigami eyes with each other and other little things like that. Here is her post about it that goes a bit more in-depth:

I honestly never viewed death note or ohba as sexist on a whole, I only saw light's character written as sexist but I figured that was on pu

[13eyond13]

I have noticed you make lots of light's relationship headcanon based on his relationship with L. Do you think light would kill his s/o for the sake of ambition?

I think that his relationship with L is by far the best example in canon of Light showing something like strong feelings for a peer. I genuinely believe they both picked each other as their favourite people in the story, so it's usually the relationship I'm going to be thinking about when answering relationship hypotheticals for either person in the pair.

I think Light as Kira would only really stop at sacrificing his own life for the sake of his goals (which is ironic, considering how liberal he is with the taking of other people's lives). The most important thing to him on earth is protecting and prolonging his own lifespan. We saw this with his refusal to ever make a deal for the shinigami eyes, and during the finale when seeing his terrified reaction to facing his own death.

[13eyond13]

So ahh, idk if you answer this kind of question, but why did Ryuk go to Earth instead of Sido?

There's a rule that Shinigami can't go to their realm if their DN is on Earth and Ryuk uses this as a reason to stay with Light most of the time, but technically he's not the owner? He's carrying his own DN on his belt. Also, for some reason Light was able to see Ryuk after touching DN and not Sido. I just can't grasp the concept behind this, every shinigami has only one DN attached to them, but if another shinigami takes it it becomes theirs in that moment?

hey, that's a good question and one that's a bit confusing for me to think about as well. I will try to think up a way this makes sense based on the rules we were given, but successor arc canon is extremely fuzzy in my mind at the moment, the eye technicalities and notebook swapping stuff are some of the things that confuse me the most in the story, and I could very well be forgetting some rules or mixing things up. I'm also just getting my list of rules to reference from a Quora answer, since I don't have my manga boxset handy (X). So please keep in mind that I haven't actually gone to dig out my manga to fact check all the rules, and I'm just kinda guessing about this stuff too.

So apparently Ryuk sneakily stole Sidoh's notebook without him noticing and then dropped it to the ground on earth, telling others that it was actually his notebook:

And there's a rule that states any notebook dropped to earth automatically becomes property of the human world now:

So maybe Ryuk stealing Sidoh's notebook and dropping it to earth is like overriding/erasing Sidoh's claim to ownership of the notebook? The human who first uses it once it lands on earth becomes the priority owner of it instead, and then the first shinigami who attaches themselves to that person becomes the notebook's death god. I think Ryuk became that notebook's shinigami since he came down to earth first and touched that notebook and introduced himself to Light.

There's also another rule that seems to indicate that it's possible for a shinigami to claim ownership of another death god's notebook by stealing it or cheating them out of it somehow, so maybe Ryuk owned it already even before Light picked it up:

This particular scenario could be similar to what happens when a shinigami dies while attached to a notebook. If a notebook has no current shinigami owner then apparently the ownership of that notebook is usually transferred to whatever god of death first touches it after that:

So maybe Ryuk stealing Sidoh's notebook and dropping it to earth means that Sidoh now owns zero notebooks, and that Ryuk owns two notebooks... the one he stole from Sidoh, and the one he always has attached to his belt. Once Light gets Rem and Ryuk to swap their notebooks this all gets very confusing to follow for me, and even more so once fake notebooks are also added into the mix. But that's the best guess I can come up with right now lol

[13eyond13]

(1/4) What would happen if L couldn’t solve a case? Just look at what happened in the Yotsuba arc. He does not take loss well. One of his weaknesses in my view, is the fact there’s always going to be someone smarter and faster than you. I have a scenario I think you’ll love: the concept of L loosing and being outfoxed at every turn, not by the mighty Kira, but by a person who hides in plain sight.

Hi! Interesting question and interesting scenario.

I honestly think that two of the only things in the world L passionately cares about are proving himself correct about his theories and winning whatever challenge he accepts. So you're right that him losing or being incapable of actually solving a case would be extremely difficult for him to deal with or accept. I don't think he actually would accept it, and he would probably either continuously keep attempting to prove himself correct about it or basically die trying, as he did during the Kira investigation. But I think L would only take a case like that one on in the first place if he was already pretty close to narrowing down who the main suspect actually was in some way.

From what we see of how L initially takes on the Kira case, he lurks the case from afar for a while and starts his own investigating in secret before ever contacting anybody at Interpol about it. My guess is that L might normally only officially take on a case and/or make a bold move like the Lind L. Tailor stunt if he is already extremely confident beforehand that he will be successful at it when he does.

I feel like L cares more about proving he is correct to himself than he does about proving he is correct to anyone else, as well. I think he's a mostly intrinsically motivated character, in that the satisfaction he feels internally from solving cases is genuinely the main motivating factor for him instead of something more external, like a ton of praise and money and admiration from the other people watching him work. He's always entertaining and impressing himself with his own correctness, first and foremost. He certainly doesn't mind being looked at as important and powerful and successful by others for being so good at solving cases either. But he'd probably still be wanting to solve those intellectual puzzles 24/7 anyway, even if nobody else was admiringly watching him or rewarding him for doing his work. In a way I think L mostly just officially takes on cases so that he can continue to test his own theories and scratch that itch and go "lol yep I was right yet again" to himself more than anything else.

So all that being said, I think that in order to find a case like that anonymous mob boss one interesting L would maybe first have to have uncovered some sort of strong leads on his own that gave him a pretty good idea of who he was looking for already, maybe. I don't think he would actually be tricked that easily by X not being like your typical mob boss, because L is just meant to be a super clever character who is always noticing all the odd little things that nobody else who does that job is normally noticing. I think a lot of his initial interest in Kira was simply because he had been picking up on clues and forming strong theories that nobody else seemed to have been coming up with yet. And I feel like L is written to be the guy who always thinks of the stuff the other guys don't think of because they're sticking to the usual profiles instead of thinking more outside the box, not the other way around. And if there was nothing there for him to latch onto when it came to finding this mob boss then I'm not entirely sure the case would even intrigue him enough to be something he'd get involved with in the first place, either. Because without that feeling that he was the only one noticing something important that everybody else was missing about this case it probably wouldn't be tickling that little part of his brain that gets him really interested and addicted to trying to solve it, if that makes sense.

[13eyond13]

hi! i saw one of your posts (or maybe it was @mikami ‘s) saying that L: Change The worLd was not part of the manga DN universe and just wanted to ask if the case was the same with the labb murder cases, I’ve always assumed it was canon due to the fact that beyond birthday’s serial killings were mentioned in the manga

Hi! It is included in the official timeline of events for the manga series in the How to Read Vol. 13 book. But I don't think that it was originally conceived by Ohba and Obata as something that was meant to be included in the manga timeline; I think it was mostly the brainchild of the writer NISIOISIN, and it was published shortly after the manga series ended as official Death Note affiliated content.

The way I picture it probably going is that Ohba just made up a name for a case that L remembered Naomi from without thinking up too many more details about it (as Ohba claims in the HtR13 interviews that he hadn't really fleshed out L's past at all whenever he first started writing him as a character):

And then later on NISIOISIN (an established professional writer in his own right) wrote the novel, and he decided to take the name of that case from the manga and to make up the story behind it. I am not sure how much O&O collaborated with him on it, if at all. The cover art for it was made by Obata, and apparently Ohba has read it and seems to like it, because he mentions it a couple times in the HtR13 interviews. Though it also sounds like some of the things that were included in it were surprises to Ohba.

These were the references to the novel I could find again while skimming the behind the scenes book:

So I think how much you want to take it seriously as canon should be kind of up to you? The way I see it, if you couldn't get the story behind the LABB case from reading the manga itself then it technically shouldn't be considered canon to the same degree that the original manga story is, especially since it wasn't written by Ohba.

But that being said, I do like the novel, and I love B as a character. I like imagining it as part of the storyline too, and so do a lot of other fans. It does somewhat create plotholes for the manga timeline and make Wammy's edgier than it originally appeared as well though, so I don't necessarily take it all that seriously. I always prioritize the manga's version of characters and rules and events over the novel's, and if the novel ever conflicts with the manga I usually ignore the novel's spin on things in favour of the manga's. To me the novel is more so the canon source for stuff about B himself than for stuff about Wammy's and the other previously established characters, if that makes sense. In my eyes it's like a fun additional thing you can look to when creating fan content, but the main source of material for when I do critical analysis of the original story and so on is just the manga itself.