Like multiple times it has characters have a turn to the camera moment where they say some shit like “Kira is absolutely right about everything, but oh woe, oh calamity, for he is breaking the law and doing the violence that only the state is permitted to do, oh but what a tragedy for the legal system is too soft and permissive, and the police state too friendly and lenient towards the underclasses and so Kira is a necessary evil!” and the narrator keeps having bits about how Kira’s policy of extrajudicially murdering everyone the state accuses of a crime is working and creating a gentler, safer world and it’s just so fucking bad.
Light is a monstrous little fascist dipshit with the dumbest plan anyone has ever had, and his ideology is fundamentally deranged and abhorrent. Like how the fuck does “so he’s changing the world, by just killing everyone accused of a crime after they’ve already been arrested and locked up!” even fit into anything but the most unhinged boomer brain as a solution to anything? His targets are almost exclusively people who are either innocent or who have already been neutralized and contained as a further threat, what does purging them accomplish? It’s just turbo fash dipshit stuff.
Light is just a dumber rehash of Batman’s League of Shadows foil that’s used to show that Batman, who agrees 100% with the League of Shadows’ entire ideology except for its inevitable logical conclusion, is actually Good and Pure and doesn’t do bad violence stuff because that’s the job of the police who get special good boy passes to do violence for the state.
Even the narrative itself doesn’t offer any criticism other than showing Light to personally be a vile, abusive piece of shit behind the mask he puts on around other people, and it emphasizes him fighting back against the cops who are after him as being this moral event horizon moment more than all the literal mass murder because the TV man told him to shit he did. So far as the story has a moral it’s this fundamentally reactionary liberal take about how the police state should be more repressive but it also shouldn’t go too far, and that violence is the job of state-sanctioned actors and not the public.
It was pretty entertaining as a suspenseful horror thriller though, and the “cerebral back and forth” shit with Light and L was incredibly funny because it was all just Light being a self-defeating dipshit digging himself deeper and deeper by being a bloodthirsty egomaniac and L running in circles around himself trying the rhetorical equivalent of a Wil E Coyote gag as bait.
I only remember one instance, when Light graduates and joins the police force. But even when I was a teenage reactionary idiot who supported him, I understood the narration to be how he views himself and not how the audience is supposed to view him because it matched his arrogance.
Considering Ryuk warns Light that any human with the ability to kill eventually becomes corrupted, I don’t see how it supports this view. The police also give up on the investigation and try to appease Kira which causes the task force to essentially become vigilantes.
This does happen, but considering most of the characters in the show are literal idiots besides L, Near, and maybe Light’s dad, I think it’s a decent portrayal of how the normal, average person would view Kira.
Considering how the setting gets warped around him with huge swathes of the public just spontaneously embracing his particularly brand of dipshit fascist thought it definitely feels like the narrative is that diegetically his ideas work, because they are written to work, and it just ends up coming across as tonally incoherent reactionary wish fulfillment, like the guilty fantasies of a reactionary liberal who still thinks of themself as a good person because they hedge it in “ah, but that’s going too far and even worse that’s illegal!” getting mixed into the horror thriller stuff where Light is every bit as vile as the real people who share his ideals.
Like I said, Light’s the League of Shadows, Batman’s foil that holds up a mirror that says “this is you, this is what you believe, this is what your worldview actually entails isn’t that fucked” and gets shut down with “yes, it is, but I’m better and as a responsible member of society I leave the deadly violence to official state-sanctioned actors!”
Also L is more Wil E Coyote as Sherlock Holmes than Batman. Batman’s a silly nepobaby vigilante, L is a galaxy brained reclusive nerd.
Do you think this is so far off from how the real public would react? Billions of people pray to their gods, and now some guy is able to show that he has the power to kill anyone anywhere, I imagine this would cause such a rift in the public’s mental wellbeing than encountering an alien. The US has a literal kill list (deposition matrix), the closest you’ll probably get to a death note, and no one bats an eye
And his ideas do not work. Crime is “reduced,” but the show also explains that the world lives in absolute fear and zealous reverence to do anything let alone commit a crime. Maybe that’s the author’s ultimate dream, but I don’t think anyone with a critical mind and who truly believes the motto “if you choose security over freedom, you deserve neither” would see this as a positive outcome. Also, L and his cohorts are shown to be intellectually superior from the getgo, and they either ultimately win, or continue to oppose Light and the usage of the death note.