Fox and Talen's Blurty

Exactly as planned!
I'm annoyed to consider that which motivates me most to write is not good writing, but bad.

I have recently finished reading two very different manga series. One of them was an intense, epic story that spanned a variety of diverse artistic styles, utilised an asynchronous timeline, and an impressively large cast that touched on a lot of interesting different character types, showing character evolution over a wide scale, and it was called 20th Century Boys. The other series, I say, somewhat flippantly, was Death Note. The former was recommended to me by no people, but rather by the knowledge that it was authored by Naoki Urasawa, the author of the seriously brilliant manga Monster. Before we go on, I have to profess to a proactive bias, uncoloured by fanciful metaphor or extreme comparison; Monster is one of the greatest manga I have ever read. I have deleted this paragraph three times because it starts being all about how great Monster is, so to give it a three-word review: Read it. Now.

I had intended to give a spoiler-free overview of the two series here, however, I found that 20th Century Boys, being in my mind the far better series, did not deserve to suffer shelf space with Death Note, and its analysis spiralled out into a tale of lightly-spoilery criticism, with an attempt to summarise my thought process; so instead, let me talk to you about Death Note. Eschewing spoilers from a discussiion Death Note is to basically eschew examples. All the highlights of the series, all the elements that make up the story's better moments are spoilers to some extent or another - even the simplest notes of dialogue that I like come in an advanced stage in the series, making it very difficult - or even impossible - to really convey how well the meaning translates without the context. Context requires spoilers, and spoilers beget spoilers in this series. It's not quite as bad as Trigun (a series where even the name of the series is a spoiler), but it's still a very ornate series. And ornate is a fine word for it.

I'm going to say some rude things about Death Note in this review, though. I'll avoid spoilers for sensibility - and yes, to preserve the mystery for those of you who wish to read the series later - but I won't avoid insulting the story, or a mindset I see that might drive the series fanbase.

Note that when I draw a conclusion about a series' popular fanbase, I am not making a blanket rule. I can't lie, it's all armchair psychology, it's all worthless to some extent. I find it very easy to slip into the minds of people, to see what they like and why they like things, and to then work backwards. I may wind up with a caricature of a personality, but these broad strokes can be seen to have some truth to them as trends - or, better yet, they can demonstrate how these elements seem from the outside. I've been mulling over this habit, but since I have had three people note that my Watchman review perfectly summarised why they liked Ozymandias at first, I have been considering it might well be a mental practice that has some value, some merit. So, onwards, into the realm of penury and scorn.

It is very hard for me to not think of Death Note's fanbase as anything but unreasonable. There are a number of scathing summaries I could use for the story, but the phrase that continually comes up when I try to explain it to friends is a phrase I first acquired from Yahtzee's review of Assassin's Creed: The World's Biggest Dickhead Competition. There are stretches of the manga where you will go page after page after page and see nobody with a redeeming trait. Dickhead A talks to Dickhead B and manipulates Dickhead C into being a dickhead to Dickhead B, while Dickhead D waits in the wing for his chance to be an unwitting dickhead to Dickhead C, fucking up Dickhead A's plan of making Dickhead B be the one to be a dickhead to Dickhead C, and therefore being a dickhead to Dickhead A who again, is manipulating other Dickheads into being dickheads to another Dickhead, making him a dickhead. There is nobody to like. Oh, there are people who are liked. The fanbase adores L's 'quirkiness,' his odd behaviour and his fascination with sweet food (which in Japan, is a covert message tantamount to a scrabble board where your first four turns are spent spelling out 'L LOVES COCKS'). Light in turn represents a classic Japanese stereotype of a willful young man with a massive, massive brain, who studies brilliantly, pushes himself rather than let his parents push him, and bleeds and oozes success. Misa is well-loved by the male fans for being 'so devoted' and 'lovable,' which I find not just wretched, but disturbing. Misa is roughly tantamount to a child in her emotional development, a victim falling in love with a cycle of violence, mentally arrested and obssessing about a trauma.

What really revolts me about these characters, however, is that they aren't characters. They're each a hundred-page long establishment shot. There is nothing that any of the characters choose to do, or how they choose to behave that is influenced by the story itself. The way they behave and act on page 1 is how they behave and act in page 108, when the whole story's concluded. I might be a fuddy-duddy, clinging to the old ways of how stories 'should' go, but I think of character development as core to a story. I couldn't provide an extensive, theoretical application for this idea - it just seems to me as something essential to enjoy a story. If someone goes through the story and is unchanged at the end of it - and I mean literally unchanged, not reaffirmed - was the story really that big a deal?

The characterisation within the story isn't just flawed when we deal with the characters. It requires everyone to leap between bouts of extreme, hyper-competence, with detectives making literally epic guesses that are nonetheless always completely on track (and we, the audience know it), followed by everyone around them demonstrating a complete lack of competence. If you're over the age of twenty in Death Note, you are pretty much guaranteed to be crap at your job.

There's also this messy business of how the story influences the world. The world in which Death Note operates seems to work on a kind of emotional level comparable to that of a child; a belief that the rest of the world is more or less exactly like upper-middle class Japan, where people behave out of a fear of punishment, rather than the principle of being good. You know what'd happen to the criminal world if five criminals in Japan dropped dead, with the only commonality being heart attacks?

Fuck-all.

Fifty?

A hundred?

A thousand?

A thousand a day?

Fuck-all.

The world of Death Note is a small, tight place, where people are divided into an easily predictable, sheeplike mass who see a monstrous bully as acceptable, where principle is completely meaningless, and the small, the elite, the we few of intelligent people who know better than that.

The story of Death Note, from its premise could be compared to a Thomas Paine story about a ring of invisibility. In Paine's story, the protaganist gained a ring that made him invisible, and with it, he went about performing wicked deeds of steadily increasing levels of wickedness. Without any consequence to his actions, he truly flew off the rails, but he started stealing silverware and moved up to murder, and probably, since this was the 18th Century, rape. Paine's idea - one that was very reflected in his day to day, a world dominated by world religions and without much in the way of an understanding of the greater universe - was that mankind was fundamentally, a horrible little troll of a creature, kept only in the basic patterns of proper behaviour because of social pressure from the people around him, and that this behaviour was simply the natural effect of mankind freed of consequence. See also Lord Of The Flies.

Now, ignoring for a moment that I personally reject this philosophy, it is a worldview that is nonetheless popular to take to in fiction. It rings in Death Note's outset - a young man finds a book that he can use to kill people without any ramifications and consequence. One would imagine that there could be a chance for a character evolution through this, no? With an outset like this, surely there will be a progression, stepping further down a spiral of dehumanisation?

Nope! Light merrily jumps - and this isn't a spoiler because it's all in the first fucking chapter of the manga - straight into messianic self-delusion, merrily killing people as experiments, and becoming a mass murderer in something like a week. Where, exactly, is the pathos? The sense of scale here? It's out the fucking window, because our protaganist, our window into the story, is not actually a normal human or a human avatar, but is instead a man in training for the World's Biggest Dickhead Olympics.

And again, these are isolated murders in Japan, where the murderers' names and faces are posted. Know what poppy-sellers in Afghanistahn are going to say about that? What the Finnish mob will think? What Canadian grass-runners will think?

Who gives a shit?

This is a point I already consider a given based on Freakonomics' treatment of most criminal enterprise. It's like a competition - you have risks if you lose, and a payoff if you win, and most people who enter into this situation are not doing it out of some malicious lack of disincentive - there are plenty harsh disincentives for this kind of thing, and as the story indicates the police have the rights and means to kidnap and torture celebrities without it causing any problems later on, I find it hard to imagine that the real hard-boiled crooks in Japan went into their job position without the understanding that they might die. They also outnumber the police and the media significantly - the reason the news talk about murder and theft and violence and rape so heavily is not because these things are happening and they've caught them all - they're talking about them because these issues are very good at grabbing public attention, and with that done, they can be assured you're going to keep watching.

So, in essence, Light was peeking through a keyhole into a tiny, tiny cross-section of criminals bad enough to get caught, killing criminals to whom he attributed genuine malice, and this somehow is enough to make the American criminal population piss its pants. Again, the deaths are centered in Japan!

So the whole underlying principle of the world is that it is a world composed of late to teenage Japanese upper-middle class boys who would do whatever they want if not for the fact they can't get away with it. The series attempts to legitimize its premise, but the more it goes on, the more if fails to - repeating a silly line in a serious voice, multiple times, does not actually make the line less silly. If anything, it multiplies its silliness. This is a world, not of six billion people with a diverse world, amazing cultures, rich history, deep social and political emnity, important religious and dogmatic beliefs, most of whom are not in constant contact with one another, but a tiny world slightly larger than a school, with everyone in more or less the same social and economic strata, playing chinese whispers with their mobile phones between lunch breaks.

The premise and setting aren't the only things that are bad. Just as writing out the word 'dickhead' enough will make it lose all meaning and humour value, Death Note uses every basic way to communicate over and over again. Concepts are exposed time and again, with gordian knots of dialogue and massive slabs of info-dumped text being used to serve as proxy for development and exposition, with four characters with near-identical character voices spending their time trying to second guess, third guess, fourth guess one another. There is a reason why this kind of dialogue is eschewed from most storytelling, because it's bad.

In the anime rendition of the series, the characters who do this internal monologuing colour-tint the screen as they do it. While this could be used as an interesting narrative tool to determine to the audience elements of their nature, with blue being a cool personality and red a fiery one, it's not. This device is utilised so the audience knows who's talking. Even if the character dialogue was distinct, this would be like a squeaky mallet guide to keeping track of things.

Ostensibly this similarity is to highlight that Light and L are supposed to be two sides of the same coin. Again, if this is true, this is a terrible way to demonstrate it - they're not different sides of the same coin, they're the same fucking character. They speak the same, they anticipate one another and even basic conversations are chained sequences of manipulation. This is not intense, psychological conflict, because conflict requires an investment. Conflict where you don't care about the outcome isn't a conflict - it's just a noise. Again, I understand that some people are invested in these characters. That is its own problem.

Much as any review of Resident Evil 4 can't help but point out the racism (that may or may not be there, depending on the reviewer who even if he doesn't think it's there is going to talk about it), I feel one criticism I can boldly and clearly lay against Death Note is a claim of sexism that borders on outright misogyny. While I did jump in the later third of the manga - I hopped from chapter 78 to 100, operating on the prediction that the story was going to spiral out the way it did, with the World's Biggest Dickhead competition accelerating with more challengers to the throne of Dickhead - in the preceeding chapters, there were four and a half female characters. Two were killed off as footnotes, to highlight the cleverness and manipulative skill of Light. One was a maguffin traded for with about four lines of dialogue, none of which had any substance. One was Misa.

Do I need to discuss Misa?

Do I?

Oh, and that half? Revealed to be female once, everyone thereafter refers to her as a male. Not because they think she is one, or because of interesting, sensitive gender issues. But because they don't know she's female. And why would they? She, after all, does something.

Everyone in this series who is important is male. Everyone. Female characters are easily-manipulated or obedient dolts who exist to be bartered over. The tiny population of female characters are objectified in a disgustingly passive way. A very competent woman is told by her husband doing the same job that her role should be that of a housewife and she complies. She then dies, after he does. He comes back into the story. She doesn't, at least, not in the manga chunks I read. If she does come back and kicks some arse, she's not there at the end of the story, which indicates she probably got outwitted and killed. Exactly as planned.

What makes it all so sickening to me is the way the story treats it like it's irrelevant. That there is nothing odd, nothing odd at all, about a woman jumping from the role of FBI agent to housewife at the behest of a husband doing THE SAME FUCKING JOB.

Oh, and Misa. I can understand if lots of fangirls hate Misa. I hate Misa. I don't hate Misa because she gets in the way of the shipping, but I hate her because she's a popular female character in what seems to be an insanely popular story and her entier existence is predicated on a childish infatuation. I hate Misa for the same reason I hate Bella Swan. I hate her because she is nothing but a shallow, cardboard cut out, maneuvered around and manhandled by the storyline as a convenient and stupid engine to further other, more important characters' aims. I hate her because there are girls in Japan who honestly like her and aspire to be her. I hate her because there are people who view her conclusion to the story as dreadfully romantic. I hate her because of what she represents, a childish, fawning ignorance, an enshrined simplicity, a bobbleheaded sex doll with no wants but to pleasure our chaste supposed-hero.

I keep veering into the realm of wanting to cite examples, so perhaps it's best to move away from the work and talk about its appreciators. You know one of the things that I think will be forever etched on my mind throughout this experience? Death Note afficionados that I spoke to when voicing my concerns about the series as I experienced it either chose not to comment (probably based on me, personally, rather than on their views on my views), or would always cite attractiveness. Near was cute, Mello had an exotic allure, L's mannerisms were adorable, Light's intensity was sexy, etcetera. I am quietly gobsmacked at the way this was constantly brought up. And it started to get under my skin, and I think I know why. The fanbase for Death Note worries me. Not worries me the way that the fans of Gor or the fans of FATAL worry me. Those people are degenerate, subhumans with deeper issues that need to be dealt with before they wind up putting bits of women in the trunks of their cars. No, the fanbase for Death Note worries me because the series seems to be geared towards enshrining all the wrong elements and providing bad rhetoric to people who will use it as an excuse.

A good example of this is Fight Club. There are men who nonironically spout Tyler Durden's philosophy of controlled self-demolition and nihilistic dehumanisation without realising that the man in question was very literally someone's psychosis (OH NO SPOILERS). The irony that these men are probably also homophobic just compounds the black comedy of the scenario. Watchmen suffers this, too, where Rorschach has fans who genuinely think he had the right idea, who write Alan Moore talking about how much the world needs men like Rorschach. These are the kind of people, who when you confront them on being horrible people to other people, will spout some nonsense, no doubt gained from someone other than themselves about how the world they live in is rotten, and how people are sick to the core, or how they are not their fucking kakhis. It puts tools of non-argument into the hands of people who shouldn't have them.

While Fight Club and Watchmen arm the cannons of the self-styled would-be macho minute-men of our socities, however, Death Note provides ammunition for another segment of society, one who I wholly have come to disdain. The series makes a strong note throughout it that Kira is somehow at his core considered an acceptable option for the world. That this world of terrified little boys is somehow better of being ruled and controlled by an insane, capricious dictator with infinite power but not infinite wisdom or infinite information. That there is no principle, and instead people will make unreasoned, knee-jerk behaviours based on their immediate lives. It also highlights that Light is a childish, bratty super-genius capable of managing his time perfectly, passing judgment on the world, and disdaining boring things like sexual contact with womenfolk, and in fact, disdaining everyone who doesn't have the ability to share his intense, totalitarian focus on this one thing here. He's a jerk to every person he deals with, interacting with people in the most superficial and manipulative of fashions, he doesn't make jokes, he doesn't laugh throughout the series (except for, well, you know, the crazy kind), and he flies into a rage over tiny emotional slights that he perceives as attacks on his self-esteem, throwing tantrums despite being a grown man. He overplans everything, and because everyone he deals with is functionally retarded, the events all conspiring to make his plans work, that's seen as genius rather than being socially stunted. He is, simply put, an incomplete person. That's okay, kind of, because so are all his oppositional forces. L and others oppose him purely because it entertains them, because he is their obssession.

If this sounds familiar to you, it's probably because you're male, on the internet, and found that if you claim you have asperger's syndrome, you get a free ride on behaving like a jerk.

This series is basically a love letter from the self-diagnosed autistics to themselves, because nobody else gets them. This goes beyond being an inspiringly disabled kid who competes in the normal basketball games despite being stuck in a wheelchair, and into a creating a world where only the 'sufferers' of this syndrome are capable of interacting on a 'real' level, and being given prey to amazing, superior powers and stories fall into their laps, while silly people who actually interact and can focus on more than one thing at a time and don't get strange looks from women are just cattle for the slaughter.

Worse, the series' dark, death-focused tone leads to people saying things like 'I identify with the evil,' or something like that. Calling what Light does in this series 'evil' is like calling what Misa experiences 'love.' The world of Death Note is not one given to such depth. The 'evil' in this series is eensy-weensy evil, the equivalent of not inviting people to your birthday party - not because people don't die (and far as I can tell, nobody comes back from the dead), but because one of the core ways to demonstrate evil is to treat people as things. There aren't people in this series. There are just things. The narrative treats them as things. The thousands killed, supposedly, are not a good reason to oppose Kira, but finding patterns in the static, that's important.

Should the autistic have a series of their own, something they can love? It'd be callous of me to say no, but even the autistic deserve far better than this.

This ties back to the story concern I have with people identifying the attractiveness of the characters. It's a very shallow appreciation. The characters - and I won't lie, there are many times where I myself look at various Death Note characters and consider them, in their own ways, very attractively drawn - are vague suits into which people can imagine themselves. Near is an example of this - to demonstrate his aspergersian focus, he's constnatly shown making awesome matchstick models, or building New York out of dice, or playing with Gundams, or Transformers, or Lego. He's an underaged supergenius who outwits everyone, even other, slightly older supergeniuses, and he plays with toys all day, and he turns up at work in his pajamas. Oh, and he's adorable, but he likes to be outside the group, out on the edge, and as the series denoument demonstrates, he has no moral imperative to do anything - he is just as selfish as Light, despite his rejection of Light's perspective one chapter earlier.

A series with no heroes, a story with nothing but shallow caricatures, the story of Death Note bills itself as an intellectual, subtle, and clever psychological thriller. Having read The Silence Of The Lambs, I must disagree and instead file Death Note on the same shelf I would tuck pornography. If there was a series that so blatantly fanserviced its female characters in such grotesquely overly done way, it would be reviled and I would be considered a cro-magnon for liking it.

That said, if you like Dresden Kodak, chances are, you'd love a gender-flipped Death Note.

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