Film Theory: DEATH NOTE–How Deadly Was it?

I've set things up so that the theories will keep coming out for the next three weeks, just look at me theorists, I'll make dinner with my right hand and write theories with my left, grab a French fry and eat it. My leftovers and I'll reheat them. I will play Mario and I will beat him. I will open the script for Doctor Who, Part Three and complete it well. Maybe it won't be the last. Hello Internet, welcome to

film

theory

, so here's a fun fact when I'm at conventions. One of the most popular things I'm asked to sign are Death Notes people have recently purchased.

It makes me wonder if they are fans of the show or just haters who want to end the channel by any means necessary. Either way, I totally agree. of course, since I don't take the risk and sign with a misspelling of my name, it's totally true, the paranoia is real, seriously, if you've ever asked me to sign your

death

note

, check it out, normally what I do is attach some extra text at the end where I say haha ​​that's not how I spell my name also side

note

apologies to any matpat that spells their name with a double t anyway today we're talking about

death

note since netflix just released an action movie real Death Note and since I'm writing this episode before it comes out, let me cover my bases here, man, it was the worst, I mean, in the public eye, I doubt I guess, I can't believe they did it.

I don't stay faithful to the original anime or wow, it was great, right, Ryuk was perfect and they nailed Mises' character. Sorry, I hate to make you guys work like this, but I thank you for going the extra mile and inserting the appropriate response from both of us. let me post this, I love it, I love the original anime, it's like 25 of the best written episodes ever seen on a television screen, but matpat, there are actually 37 episodes, like I said, 25 of the most tense episodes and with a densest plot ever broadcast. those of you who are not familiar, the main character, Light Yagami, has all the highest grades in his class, the attention of all his classmates and a magical notebook that has the ability to kill people when he writes their names in it, it is Okay, so one of those things isn't quite like the others, unlike most people who get a little icky at the prospect of killing people with the flick of a pen, he sees this as his chance to purify. the world of evil, eliminating all the criminals in the world and in the process becoming the known vigilante. like kira and no, that's not a racist way of saying killer, his name is actually kira on the road, he attracts copycat killers and plays an intense game of cat and mouse against the brilliant deductive mind of a mysterious detective known only like me, it is without a doubt. my favorite anime, but as I was preparing to watch the Netflix movie, it suddenly occurred to me that we spend so much time focusing on the personal conflicts between me and the light that we, as an audience, lose sight of the larger conflict: how many Are there murders? happening over the course of the series, the light has some epic montage sequences, as epic as can be when the action consists of writing down people's names, the point of these montages is to illustrate the scope of these killings, but when This is about The question of how many names were actually written on the death note, things are getting a little blurry, so today I'm working on getting the best possible estimate of how many lives were shortened during her reign as Kira, now I say estimate since most of her death occurs off-screen, meaning we'll never be able to get an exact number of 100, although we can get close if we know one, the length of time Kira is active and two, the speed the one kira kills, so number one, how long does kira kill?

Well, it's a simple question that has a complicated answer. For starters, there are a total of four people operating under the Kira alias at one point or another, as Light creates these complex notebook transfers in his attempt to evade capture, which makes matters worse. that sometimes there are several kira active at the same time with up to three death notes in play. Fortunately, we have access to the complete timestamped list of all the major events that happened throughout the series thanks to the handy timeline that was printed in the 13th bonus volume of the manga and it's worth mentioning that we do. , this is a timeline that covers the manga, however it tells the exact same story as the anime, only the time changed three years earlier because it came out first, they kept the months and days consistent only from the manga to the anime. changing the year into three years, so really the absolute time that Kira is active remains the same, so now, spoiler alert, I'm about to show you a timeline that describes the entire series, so check it out and then seriously come back here.

It's going to be a great weekend activity for you all, all great and here it is, yes, that's a lot of six years of murder spread across four main kiras using three separate notebooks and a partridge in a pear tree. Add to that the police, the mafia and ooh, wow. It's more confusing than the light playing musical notebooks in the forest, but at this point we have a solid idea of ​​how long each of the kira was in operation, as the light was expected to be the longest at 2033 days in total, kira's second model and actress, misa amane, is only active for 67 days mainly because she was less interested in killing for justice and more interested in entering the life of lights, the life of light, kyotsukehiguchi is kira 3.0, active for 136 days and finally Tirumikami, a devoted disciple of Tyra, holds the note only for the shortest possible time. 61 days, but he's also the most gung-ho about it, back up buddy, because now that we know who had a death note and for how long we can calculate how many people each of them killed based on their man murder rates if this video YouTube does not mark it as unfriendly to the advertiser, it will be a miracle, so the key to estimating Light's death rate lies in his first encounter with Ryuk Light Shinigami or god of death.

When Ryuk first appears, we learn that Light has been writing down the names. of criminals in the death note for five days several death notes have reached the human world in the past, but you are the first to have written so many names, look how many people you have killed in just five days and look we make the program gives us a A glimpse of his open notebook where we can see that he writes names divided into four columns and 39 rows, each one is a total of 156 names per page. That clip also shows us that Light has already completed two full pages in total of 312 names, if we take the estimate low and we assume that the light has only filled those two pages in the five days, then the average is 62.4 names per day.

Now understand that this is just an average. The light is obviously not writing exactly 62 names. Every day, for example, there is one day when he kills exactly 24 criminals, one every hour to leave him a very specific point, and then on the days when he is under surveillance, he probably kills fewer criminals, but also We know that Light likes to point out criminals. die even on days when you don't diligently write names on your death note, so what matters here is the average, not the exact one you write on any given day, so 62.4 is a good baseline , then comes the five intermissions after Light defeats Elle, during which Light acts unopposed taking on the role of Kira and Knight and the role of the new I during the day and, as you can imagine, since he's a serial killer who leads a task force to catch him, is not very good at his day job during this time. period, a narrator tells us that kira murders accelerated in the summer of 2012 kira murders increased at an unprecedented rate the first five days of the light, as kira are a pretty good representation of what a kira looks like. unhindered, he comes home from school, does his homework, and then spends the rest of his free time writing names in his notebook like a lovesick high school student when, as defeats, he still has to do his day job with the school work group. police and at night mass also distracts him, wink, wink, don't you hate it? when the blonde actress model who loves everything you do takes you away from your nightly killing spree, so let's assume that the rate of her murders during this period doubles per day, it's nothing too extreme, just about 60 extra names per night because has mass helped him research those numbers throughout his 2033 days, while kira gives us 242,112 names in the book, he retains 242,000 approximately 62 names per day multiplied by 365 days, doubling by the time he is defeated and executed for five years Yes, that number is verified. and that's a conservative estimate, think about those 200,000 names, that's more than the populations of 47 separate countries, in fact, near the end of the series, close to yes, his name is actually close to calling Death Note the deadliest mass murder weapon in human history, that's quite a tall order, but when you really look at the numbers, it's true, only the third Death Note, the only light Yagami used during his five years without opposition, killed more people than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II, which was itself, the deadliest attack in recorded history, in the end you are nothing more than a crazy serial killer.

Oh, no light is much more dangerous. The term serial killer specifically excludes war crimes and government-sanctioned murders, and by that definition, Kira emerges victorious. By a wide margin, some of the deadliest serial killers in recorded history, Louis Garavito and Pedro López, have fewer than 200 known victims, while Kira's number is in the hundreds of thousands, even the most conventional serial killers. Deadlies are about only one-tenth of one percent as

deadly

as Kira. and that's just light we still have another three kilas uh kiras to discuss mass number is just a drop in the bucket compared to light's killing spree only around 400 she had a short career and just killed her attention any murder he does during that The intervening five-year period is more to help turn out the lights altogether because he's the kind of guy who wouldn't allow that power to anyone else, he probably wants to savor all that writing for himself and, as we see during the montage of that segment, they are both on the computers together researching, but he is the only one we see writing names when the audience finds out that higuchi is the third kira, we see his notebook on the table and it shows that he has written a total of 64 names in 16 rows in four. columns if that's what's in a day's work for higuchi then that would make his daily body count almost exactly the same as what we calculated for light above an average of 64 names per day multiplied by 136 days equals 8704 people dead at the hands of gucci and Lastly, Terumikami, of all the Kiras, Mikami has his death note for the fewest days, but he completes a page a day, which may not seem like much, but a page for Mikami is a matter serious with more than 6 columns and 76 rows per page.

He's running a whopping 456 people every day, I'm not sure what's more impressive, the amount of names Mikami manages to write down every day or that he manages to get them all in there. Mikami might not be the brightest when it comes to running light. strategy, but you have to give this guy points for his handwriting with a total of 61 active days. Mikami's total death count stands at 27,816. 27,000 people in two months, so to summarize, our counts are Light yagami 242 thousand one hundred twelve missa. amane three hundred and ninety-two kiyasuke higuchi 8 thousand seven hundred and four and two mikami 27,816 adding up to just under 280,000 total victims 280,000 people killed to give you a point of comparison that is just shy of the 300,000 Americans who died during World War I .

The only wars that killed more American soldiers were World War I and the Civil War. Remember that this estimate is a conservative figure, we see no evidence of this, but Misa could absolutely be more active during that five-year interval. If Light allowed him to be and he himself could definitely be more aggressive in his writing if he wanted to be for an even better comparison of the immensity of the amount of people these guys are killing, consider this when we see Light's notebook open, yeah, we see. some western names but there are also some names written in Japanese, this makes a lot of sense since the series is set in Japan and Light's first language is Japanese so it would be an easier place for him to target in 2009, Japan's prison population was 75,250 people. a quarter of Keira's total kill count;

In other words, during his six years he could have exterminated the entire populationJapan's prison and still had time to deal with the rest of the world's criminals who said that the United States has a few more people in prison - 2 million 217,000 to be exact - even if Kira's efforts had been concentrated entirely on the US. In the US, it would have only been about 13 of the total US prison population. Also, worldwide there are 874,100 people murdered last year, oh my goodness, that's a huge number, so even if Kira just pointed out murders his total number of murders in six years would be only 32 percent of the total number of murders in one the world is a bit of a scary place sometimes and i must be honest the light for everyone is to purge the world talk did it a little scarier look, although he sees himself as the embodiment of justice, I am, I am justice, he kills innocents on the way to avoid going to prison, ray pember ray's fiancé, 11 FBI agents who were sent to investigate it, then of course, the murders that were done by the other Kira Light justified these deaths as necessary in his quest to bring peace to the world and in truth those people represented only one tenth of one percent of the total number. of kira deaths, but is he right in this assessment when we say that Kira killed 279,024 criminals, that's under the assumption that all of those people were guilty, but what Light doesn't take into account are the false convictions that occur with More often than you might think, according to the national registry of exonerations, the number of prisoners being released as their crimes are disproven has been increasing since 2011 at a rate of three exonerations per week; other criminal justice studies have shown that in the US specifically up to 4.1 percent of death row inmates in the US could be innocent and that's just in the US and only for people who have been convicted.

We know that in some cases Kira simply points out suspects if 4 of the people Kira sends to their deaths had later been exonerated. it means that kira has killed over 11,000 innocent victims, it is not even the drop in the bucket that the light seems to think it is, there are also many other problems in the criminal justice system, for example in the US. , 94 of all cases are decided by plea deals. where people plead guilty to a minor crime to avoid the risk of being convicted of something more serious, even if they are not guilty at all, they just don't want to take the risk or waste time at trial, some estimates estimate the number of There are around 20,000 innocent people currently serving time in prison due to plea deals and Japan has a huge problem with wrongful convictions.

Suspects arrested for questioning can be detained for up to 23 days during which the suspect is not allowed to have contact with a lawyer there. There is even a case where a prosecutor threatened to kill a suspect during his interrogation. The conviction rate in Japan is 99.8 percent. Let me make it easy for you. If you are in a Japanese court you are going to prison, just stop wasting your time. It starts with your prison sentence and ends faster. It's a system where guilt truly prevails until proven innocent, and in Kira's eyes, everyone is guilty regardless of the evidence.

At the end of the series, people in governments simply send him names with light. killing hundreds of thousands of people, you think you have time to check each and every one of them, so what's the result here? Kira is truly justice. Well, let me give you the numbers and you can debate it in the comments near the end of the anime. notes that by the end of Kira's six-year reign, the world's violent crime rate has fallen by 70 percent since Kida's appearance six years ago, wars have ceased, and global crime rates have dropped by more than 70 percent, a 70 percent decrease in the number of murders worldwide. would reduce the number of murders in a given year by six hundred eleven thousand eight hundred and seventy, so by killing an average of forty-six thousand five hundred people per year, about two thousand of whom were innocent, Kira prevented more than six hundred thousand murders each. year and that's not even mentioning all the other violent crimes that occurred, this is the dilemma of Death Note Light is clearly a villain who says he is driven by a better world when in reality his ego and lust for power are his true motivations and, However, there is no denying that he got results, so was he right throughout the program?

It doesn't provide clear answers, and remember it's all fiction, but it creates a great debate, a debate that I hope I can help you with by providing you with more accurate numbers. You can assess the situation, and while I can't answer any of those questions definitively, I can at least present you with a final, slightly lighter Death Note-related question. Could Kira kill Goku? Spoiler alert. The answer is obviously yes, but go ahead. debate it in the comments because remember that everything is just a

theory

, a cinematographic theory and I'll cut you off