#emstargazer

[ephemeral-orbit]

Your use of color is astonishing... I'd love to see your take on the Sun Station!

Star has reached end of natural life cycle. Now approaching red giant stage. WARNING: Evacuate Sun Station.

Ooh I'm surprised I haven't gotten a request for Sun Station yet tbh. The palette for this one had more colors initially but I think limiting it to three instead did well for this one ::) And thank you! I'm glad you like these ::D hope this works !!

[13eyond13]

Hii! I don't know if you were asked this before, but I'm curious whether you prefer the manga or anime ending of death note and why? Also, your berserk meta posts are always such a delight to read!

Hi hi! It's admittedly been a long while since I've either read or watched the series at this point, so I took some time going back over my asks to see if I could find one where I'd talked about this before. Didn't come across one, but I've definitely contemplated this before, so I'll just do my best to remember what I thought.

So I like both of them in different ways, basically. But if I had to choose one over the other I'd choose the manga ending as the one that I prefer.

Here is a quick rundown of what I think are the biggest strengths and weaknesses of the anime ending:

The best things about the anime ending to me:

-Portrays the horrific awkwardness and tension in the warehouse between everybody leading up to and including Light's confession extremely well. I get so on the edge of my seat and anxious during the buildup to his big breakdown every time!

-Excellent voice acting and iconic laughter during Light's big dramatic Kira confession scene. Who DOESN'T remember that moment, it's definitely one of the anime's best

-Takes a slightly more gentle and merciful and quiet and melancholy approach to Light's death scene with the sorrowful music and the pretty sunset behind him, and takes the time to do things like flashback to his pre notebook innocent self, which is actually the only scene in the series that always makes me cry. Lets Light have a certain dignity and sadness to his death by allowing him to escape off by himself from the others and look as though he's drifting off slowly to sleep. For audience members who still empathize with Light on some level or see the sad side of how he was corrupted by the notebook this can be a choice that they prefer

-Gets so ridiculous and campy at certain points with things like Mikami stabbing himself to death with a pen and then exploding like a bag of blood that I can't help but laugh through the pain a bit

-Makes some nice aesthetic choices like having Light die symbolically on a staircase (which seems like a nod to the fact that he's going to Mu / an in-between or "nowhere" sort of place after he dies, or that he was stopped halfway up in his journey before he could truly attain the "godhood" he desired, and also seems like a bit of a parallel to the rain scene of him sitting on the staircase with L – also gives a little visual flashback nod to L during Light's final moments).

The worst things about the anime ending to me:

-Cuts a lot of important moments and stuff out of the conversations between Light and Near that really enhanced the overall meaning of the story and added to making Near a much more interesting and sympathetic character to me in the manga (particularly stuff like Near talking about what they have in common, and about letting other people have agency and freedom of choice, something that Light was uh not super great at)

-Did Mikami pretty dirty and cut most of his awkward interactions with Light in the warehouse (I feel like he doesn't even get to yell "you're not God!!" at Light in the anime, does he? I'm kinda forgetting now)

-Makes the SPK and the Task Force look a bit dumb and useless in how they're just saying stuff like "there's nothing we can do, he will be dead in a few minutes" while Mikami's bleeding out on the floor and just letting Light escape and run away from them all... also kinda makes it look like Light was SO wounded by the gunshots that he would've died soon anyway. Which takes away some of the dramatic impact that comes from Ryuk writing his name in the notebook!

-In the anime Ryuk seems almost to be writing Light's name in the notebook as a mercy killing, or like he's trying to put him out of his wounded misery, which I find detracts a bit from the whole idea in the manga that Light is forced to experience the same cold and cruel fate of somebody deliberately taking his remaining years of life from him with a death note against his will... something that he remorselessly inflicted upon so many others previously himself. The two of them also don't have any discussions before Light's death in the anime like they do in the manga, which were some pretty interesting and chilling parts of the ending to me (especially Ryuk saying stuff like "you're no longer entertaining me, so you should die right now" to him)

-There is no flashback in the anime to Light and Ryuk talking about EVERYBODY going to Mu after they die no matter how they behaved on earth, which was kinda hugely important as part of the point of the story to me (because I think it forces the audience to draw their own conclusions about who they think was truly good/bad or right/wrong in this story without pigeonholing any of them into one category or another, or by sending anybody to rewarding or punishing afterlifes... I also like that it doesn't treat the notebook users as any special category of person)

-As brutal as the manga ending is in how humiliated and frightened and alone Light is while he dies, I also think there's a certain poetic justice to the horror and embarrassment he experiences during that time. He was constantly taking other people's lives and treating them like pawns in his games, backstabbing and deceiving and discarding them once they were no longer useful to him, and even cruelly gloating over watching them die. I don't particularly enjoy watching him suffer except for how it is a bit narratively satisfying, in a tables-turning "you live by the sword you die by the sword" sort of way

-In general the anime kind of gave me the vibe that it thought Light losing in the warehouse was more about L's team finally winning against Light and getting revenge on him for L's death than about the deeper and more interesting philisophical/ethical questions and themes at play, and about all the entire cast of characters' journeys as a whole

--

Overall I'd say if you want a more narratively satisfying and logical ending with more food for thought and cruel irony and deeper character interactions and existential dread and poetic justice going on then the manga is superior in basically all of these ways

HOWEVER I do still also love the final episode of the anime, I think it's one of the best and most memorable episodes of the entire show, and if you decide to turn off your nitpicking brain a bit and simply enjoy the emotions that it conjures there are some very good dramatic/aesthetic/symbolic choices that it makes