The simplest way to put it is that it's about two high school then college kids who attempt to outwit each other in games of strategic internet keyboarding.
Right! Sounds like MAL eh BA DUM TISHHHHHHH
Ok sorry.
Anyway, the biggest thing to note about Death Note is that like everything happens in the first few episodes. In that span we go from someone who has the power of life and death over all kinds of people and what that might entail to a cat and mouse game between an ace detective and a clever high school student.
The problem though is that it became kinda hard care about either one of them after a certain point, they admit at certain times simply to being bored, self-possessed, hating to lose, and otherwise go to great lengths to hurt and destroy the other (even if it means sacrificing other people in the process)
In other words, it's hard to take the messages about justice and light and L very seriously once they've killed so many people.. textboxes and internet messages being their weapons of choice.
It seems Death Note was animated by the notion that society is too permissive of crimes in general and indecisveness, but that's pretty backwards! No Death Note that's not right! It's often far too harsh. It seems to me even Light realized that, hence the severe interruption and transformation of his goals into one of simply evading capture.
Light wanted to show that he wasn't afraid to take a stand, but I get the sense he also kind of realized he was going too far at times.... or maybe he just wanted to show he was capable of these acts and it would take someone like L to stop him.
One way or another, Death Note just wasn't very enjoyable, it had the back and forth of something like Dragon Ball Z but without any of that extra-intensity solar flare chaos that DBZ can summon out of nowhere, no Kamehyahya, just, texts and emails.
The fact is, Death Note really amounted to initially a kind of extreme moral system, if you are guilty of a crime, and in a justice system of some kind, anywhere around the world basically, you deserve to die. If you aren't, you don't, it's a strange concept really, I don't know if that's what they were saying.. but that's what it seemed like.
Really,though, instead of Death Note, you could just watch a good Batman movie or something and watch the villains go at it because that's more or less what DN is all about.
But I'm not going to pass judgment so harshly in this form of live or die in the way of Light and L, right? RIGHT.
In fact, Death Note was kind of fun at times! I think once it moved away from Light and L and big struggle it was just about like sillier stuff like L's addiction to candy (something I can definitely relate to mwaha. er ^_^)
That would be simply taking Death Note's messages a bit too seriously, the rather frequently false idea that everything rises and falls on that brilliant chess play, instead I would say it wasn't super exciting, but not the least fun, just, a 5.
