…saed

well farewell fellow surfers.

Death Note ran in Shounen Jump, and although it bears little resemblance to other Shounen Jump titles, at its base, I think it works like many other shounen titles: there’s a message hidden behind lots and lots of action. The action in Death Note is deducing. Just because the majority of the series is focused on its action doesn’t mean there isn’t meaning behind the action. In shounen, the boys fight - the theme/meaning/point is in WHY they’re fighting. Light decides fairly early on that he knows what justice is. L thinks he knows, and his opinion differs. Then he and Light out-deduce each other for a million pages. A number of side characters get involved, and each person has a different idea regarding what constitutes justice - the police believe that justice is maintaining the law, that lawyer who shows up later in the manga (forget his name) believes in a more universal justice that the law can’t provide, Near believes in ending evil without compromising international law/ethics at all, etc. Mello and Misa both believe in self-gain, aka a type of personal, selfish justice (”I’m going to get what I want, because no one has the right to tell me I can’t go after what I want”). These characters are, pretty much without exception, flat. They don’t grow over the course over the series. That’s not the point. We don’t need to see characters go through epiphanies regarding what justice is, because their one-note characterizations represent at least half a dozen different INTERPRETATIONS of what justice is, and the manga itself isn’t trying to drive any one point home - it lets the reader decide. The only message that the manga itself pushes by the end is, in my opinion, the futility of mortality. As humans, we’re only pawns in a greater game, and there’s only so much control we have. But that doesn’t eliminate the possibility that there IS a sort of universal human justice. It’s up to the reader to decide, after s/he has been exposed to a number of different viewpoints. Hell, the reader can come up with his/her OWN viewpoint after digesting all the characters’ views - God knows most of the characters weren’t shown in a positive light. The manga lets the reader decide who is good, who is evil, who is right, etc.

I think it’s monumentally important to look at a work in the context in which it was published, and I think that’s what’s holding Death Note back in a lot of people’s eyes. Death Note ran in a magazine primarily aimed at junior high school boys. (Way more people read Shounen Jump, obviously, but that’s still the main, historic targeted readership.) It based itself off a standard shounen formula - quick set-up, obvious character motivations, and then lots and lots of action while each character fights for his or her own reason - but then introduced uncommon themes like widespread present-day murder, crime & punishment, the true difference between good and evil, what constitutes justice, etc., and let the reader make his/her own judgments. That is BRILLIANT. Talk about taking your readership by the hand and then leading them into a whole new realm of thinking - and specifically by NOT telling them what to think. (By the way, the young readership is yet another argument against Death Note being too long-winded - kids have to be able to follow what these super geniuses are thinking, hence the sometimes long explanations.)

So I think Death Note had a definite, noble purpose, and it nailed that purpose. Hard. And I always assumed that was what elevated a manga from “good” territory into “great” territory. I’ll stand by Death Note until the end of time.

You say Death Note has a “very direct handling of tricky issues regarding…what constitutes fighting for the greater good,” but in my opinion, that was the *promise* of the series and I felt like it never actually delivered. Oh, sure, characters hammered the point home by sometimes admitting that they could understand where Kira was coming from or agreeing with him, or by declaring him nothing but a murderer and denouncing him.

But where was the actual debate? By the end of volume 2 or 3, Light has made the choice: he will protect himself and his ability to slaughter criminals, regardless of whether it costs innocent lives. He becomes a more or less flat character and doesn’t show any regret, hesitation, or internal debate until his death. As such, he becomes evil, and the debate ends.

Instead of debate on good, evil, and justice and it became a complex and increasingly unlikely cat-and-mouse chase. Now, at this point I can bring in the long-winded argument– if the series was simply going to be a complicated detective story, it could have been shortened and made less clunky and would have been a perfectly acceptable detective story.

But I would have preferred something that actually explored the themes it brought up at the very beginning, rather than what sometimes felt like the author saying “look how brilliant I am! I can come up with a super-complicated maze and then I can get out of it! Woohoo!”

Obviously I feel like I have a legitimate argument. Is it strong? That’s up to whoever actually reads this.

I’m not going to go into detail regarding why I think Death Note is so brilliant, because, as I briefly mentioned, a billion other people have already written essays on why Death Note is a very strong manga (ESPECIALLY considering it ran in Shounen Jump). My point was that I thought Death Note was one of those few titles that everyone could put aside his or her preferences for and appreciate for being unique, morally complicated, hyper analytical, well-drawn, far-reaching, etc. I’m always surprised to hear people call it “bad” or “weak” or even “disappointing,” and I’ve yet to hear really good non-visceral (”it’s boring”; “Near is annoying”) reasons why*, which let me make a point about what I think makes a bad critic. Also, I was trying to be funny…my reusing the word “great” was supposed to be funny. Anyway, I was hoping nobody was going to judge my ability as a critic based on that single post, considering it’s come (as it was intended) as a brief observation/rant after I’ve written a bazillion other reviews for this website. But whatever.

*(The strongest arguments I’ve heard against Death Note so far are the inherent misogyny lurking behind the story and the long-windedness of the plot. But I think Death Note more than makes up for those weaknesses with its broad scope, its very direct handling of tricky issues regarding death and crime and what constitutes fighting for the greater good without cramming any one view down the reader’s throat, its unique insight into the insane rumination brilliant sociopaths are likely to go through…dammit, I said I wasn’t going to go into Death Note itself here, because I have less-discussed manga to discuss. I’m done now.)

-A “bad” artist has no sense of perspective, inconsistent character designs, poor depth (unless a flat look is intentional), etc. A “good” artist avoids all of those problems and also has a unique style, backgrounds that complement the foreground well, etc.

-A “bad” writer has a sloppily inconsistent tone, plot holes, inconsistent characters, an incoherent story, etc. A “good” writer avoids those problems and also has a meaning/purpose/point to his or her work, even if the point is there IS no point (such as in a gag manga). Also, “good” writers tend to explore ideas, plots, emotions, etc. that aren’t overexposed, or at least provide new perspective on old material.

I don’t think something selling well means it’s “good,” nor do I think that something selling well means it’s “bad.” Both “good” and “bad” things sell. But these general senses of “good” and “bad” are based on, as mentioned, a number of general observations that I think most critics can agree on, and it’s the critic’s job to look for these traits regardless of the genre of the work or who the work is aimed at. For example, if a critic is a 30-year-old man, he should be able to look at a work aimed at a teenage girl and judge it on its art quality, story comprehension, the aim of the work, etc. and give it a fair review even if the critic is NOT a teenage girl and has no interest in reading anything for a teenage girl. (Also, I think part of a critic’s job is to evaluate a work in a more global sense AFTER evaluating it in a vacuum - for example, maybe a work is solid on its own, but it’s weaker if it’s just a retelling of something told many times before by other works - but that’s the topic of another post.)

Anyway, it’s very late, and I’m very tired. But in summary: there’s no such thing as “objectively good” for everyone, but I think that critics share much of their criteria for what makes a work strong or weak, and thus some works can meet enough universal criteria for “what makes a strong work” to be considered, to an extent, “objectively good” in general by critics. If a critic trashes something that most would call “objectively good,” and said critic doesn’t provide many solid reasons for that, then that’s a good warning sign that the critic is crippled by bias. We all have bias - but a good critic doesn’t let it blind him or her.

So is this “objective goodness” determined by majority? And if so, why would we need critics at all? We could just decide what to buy based on the top sales lists

Nah, I don’t think it’s a critic’s job to make a broad, sweeping statement about what is “good” and what is “not good.” I think their job is to put themselves in their readers’ shoes and say, “I think YOU will like this (even if I don’t).”

It’s the job of the critic to recognize good works of art even outside their own preferences.