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 thought Near’s final speech to Light demonstrated pretty succinctly that Light is just a serial killer who latches onto justice as a means of justifying it to himself and others.
I do wish that the anime delved deeper into the idea that Light wasn’t any sort of god in practice, rather he was just carrying out the will of capitalist police institutions all over the world. At no point in Light’s process does he ever personally investigate any of his victims’ innocence or lack thereof. But it is somewhat present in the subtext, it’s the reason why Light loses to Near in the long run. Like, this idiot has the full backing of the United States plus supernatural death god abilities, but he still loses to a twelve year old leading a defunct CIA offshoot.
In the end, Light is exposed as a total fraud, just a garden variety fascist hog who unfortunately comes across a magical WMD. When he’s caught, he goes on an embarrassing meltdown in front of all his closest “friends” who he spent years manipulating, pathetically begs Ryuk to save him like Rem did, runs off with multiple gunshot wounds, and finally dies when Ryuk writes his name in the Death Note.
Yeah, the thing that’s really getting to me is that he’s fundamentally just being a cop, he’s the police state given paracausal powers, he’s just amplifying and further facilitating the existing system, and it narratively treats him as something entirely distinct and at odds with the system. It portrays him as an aberration, some sort of independent monster who’s going too far, when he’s not something unique or external at all: he’s literally a cop brat, his worldview is that of the police state he exists in, his actions are the same violence that that system is enacting.
And it just doesn’t connect these concepts at all. It’s a detective story, it’s a monster story: Light is something inhuman and outside the world’s context, instead of a product and reflection of the system he aspires to be a part of and later is literally a part of. I think it also makes him too charismatic and good at masking his true thoughts in a way that contradicts how impulsive, violent, and arrogant he is, but that’s kind of a narrative necessity: if he couldn’t hide it he’d have gotten caught immediately, even if a real Light would have been an unstable rage demon who’d probably end up with a substance abuse problem to deal with the stress and trauma and him being Kira would have been an open secret to everyone around him who kept quiet because they were either afraid or agreed with him.