11-30-10, 12:28 PM
Character Analysis: Yagami, Light
Anime Relations: Death Note, Death Note Rewrite
Yagami Light: “I am justice!”
Being a great strategist could have its own disadvantages. That’s my personal vote on the matter of course. Seeing through the other’s plans and end-games would eventually make playing and winning games boredom and tiresome. Unless you’d have an even greater motivation behind playing their games that is; for example CREATING A NEW WORLD!
As the story of Death Note begins, Yagami Light is a highly intellectual student who is at top of his class. His family is a normal happy one and his loving father is a high ranked police officer with a great sense of responsibility. His mother is housewife who seems to be more excited than Light himself about his great marks in exams.
One day Yaghami Light finds a notebook in school yard which on the cover of it says that if one would write a name in it, with the consideration of very simple and few rules, the person whose name has been written would die.
The simplest reaction to the DeathNote’s owner would be asking himself/herself “who do I like to kill now?” Watching the news, Light gets the face and the name of a criminal and he decides to test the DeathNote and so he successfully kills a human being! A week later the owner of the notebook,a Shinigami, visit him to find out not only Light is not in shock of getting someone killed, he’s written more than dozen of names in it already! We see that not only Light has the ability to face a supernatural phenomenal and yet keeping his calm, he already has a full planed future in mind by using the DeathNote. He wants to create a whole new world with no crimes in it and then he wants to rule that world.
How he plans to remove the crime from the world? He’d punish criminals with death! Using DeathNote, at first he writes the names of who has committed big crimes like corrupt politicians, mass murderers and then he brings his justice upon lower type of criminals to the point when no one dares to commit any crimes at all. After all, FEAR has been one of the greatest creators of human society schemes in history.
When it comes to Justice Yaghami Light is a bigotry one. From what we see in the anime, he doesn’t really kills criminal because he wants to rescue the possible victims. His strong sense of justice is all about wanting what he thinks is the best thing for himself. Like a megalomaniac person, he believes he is The Good and whatever stands in opposite side of him is The Evil. So lying, betraying, even killing hundreds of people due to his supreme deeds wouldn’t bring any sort of guilt to him at all. He is dissatisfied with the world hence he wants a better world and not only to live in it but for ruling it as its god.
Laity could be easily fooled indeed and a smart person like Light wouldn’t overlook this fact. A few months after Light kept punishing criminal with capital punishment, people creates dozens of websites and communities to emotionally support their savior, Kira, the name media had chosen for the person/s responsible for eliminating the criminals from the society! [How lucky for them that Light wasn’t suffering from a tragic past which could give his personality destructiveness sides as well!]
What is Evil and what is Good is differ from nation to nation, time to time, place to place and sometimes even person to person. Quoting a character from Code Geass here:
Lelouch: "forcing your good intentions on others is no different from an evil act."
Keeping that in mind, Yaghami Light was raised by his father who was fighting the crime in society as a police officer but as good as he was to his son’s eyes, his efforts were not effective enough because the criminal activities were not going to diminish from society with the work of police only.
The great thing about Death Note show was that the judgment of the rightness or wrongness to Light’s logic was left to viewers; So you can decide for yourself if you’d like to accept such justice or not!
Posted by afflatus | 11-30-10, 12:28 PM | 1 comments
 |
kingasb | 11-30-10, 5:45 PM
I like it. nice and clear.becouse there are some long character analysis that the writer puts his opinion of the character instead of the main thing wich is the analysing of the character. You focused at the analysing maybe it long but you showed us the essence of Yaghami Light’s thought. Great job ^_^ By the way I liked the Quotation :) |