Death Note is a pretty clear example of ‘above-average’ entertainment, alongside Prison Break and Pirates Of The Caribbean. It’s actually harder for me to quantify what I mean by this than I initially realised – I mean to say that it aims to be entertaining without being challenging; it’s not going to go anywhere truly scary or uncomfortable; it’s going to skirt the line, maybe, but things will basically work out as they ‘should’, by the definition of the work, with a crucial element that it’s going to be fun as hell while it does that, and the ‘above average’ works in particular always have some creative element to spark interest beyond their basic competence. Prison Break has the level of detail brought to Michael’s plan; PotC has the spectacular visuals and sophisticated cast. Death Note has the two parts of its premise, Breaking Bad-style: the plot idea of a magical notebook in which one can kill a person by writing their name and, if you choose, the cause of their death, and the thematic idea of this book falling into the hands of a gifted teenager who uses it to kill criminals and shape the world into a utopia.

Much of Death Note is given over to larger-than-life plotting in which protagonist Light Yagami uses the literal wording of the rules of the eponymous Death Note to get himself out of jams; one early episode shows him experimenting with how much he can manipulate people’s behaviour before he kills them (learning, for example, that he can’t get them to do anything they couldn’t reasonably do themselves), which he then uses later to kill an FBI agent following him without drawing attention to himself specifically. This quickly gives way to an investigation by a quirky Sherlock Holmes-esque private detective named L, with Light and L playing complex (and sometimes downright ludicrous) mind games with each other in an attempt to catch and kill the other; Light needs L’s real name to kill him, and L needs absolute proof that Light is the guy killing criminals.

One of the things that generates meaning beyond the basic entertainment value is the surprising richness of the characterisation, and one of the most interesting things about the work is how that richness specifically comes from the function the character serves in the plot. One of the most fun examples is Soichiro Yagami; one of the initial plot turns is that the Japanese police all get together to say “hey what the fuck, thousands of criminals are dying from heart attacks, what’s up with that”, and one of the early twists is that the chief of police we’ve been following is actually Light’s father. This serves to simultaneously give Light a significant advantage – he has easy access to the criminal investigation into his killings – and to tighten the noose around his neck – once L joins the investigation, he calls for the specific investigation of the chiefs of police and their families, which eventually leads to Light joining the investigation as a detective. Simply by existing, Soichiro serves as a bridge between protagonist and antagonist.

(Going back to Breaking Bad, he serves a similar purpose to Hank)

Then, once the actual plot is motion, Soichiro serves as a voice of reason. Death Note has a fundamentally pulp approach to dialogue, by which I mean it never misses a chance to exposit or to explain what we’re looking at through a character. Soichiro provides a specific perspective, focused specifically on the goal of arresting Kira (the name the police give to the unknown serial killer), and he frequently explains the rationale behind L’s extreme methods, making them sound more rational than they may first appear. The immediate side effect is that he comes off the most fundamentally decent of all the characters; Light is almost immediately played as a childish villain, and L’s methods to find the truth are deliberately allowed to go to extreme places. Meanwhile, almost every other character has limits either in their intelligence or their resilience, with multiple detectives quitting because they can’t handle the strain.

There are two long-term effects. The first is that Soichiro’s resolve comes off incredibly heroic; he physically degrades over the course of the series, with his hair visibly greying and the bags under his eyes getting heavier, alongside the fact that he suffers a heart attack from the stress. Both Light and L are firmly in the supervillain tradition; I’ve always found meaning in the fact that when Light realises he’s killed two people in the first episode, he initially horrified to the point of nausea, but after that he shows no psychological stress from any of the things he does, L frequently does incredibly stupid things to his own body (eating nothing but sugar and sitting in a way that gives me back pain just looking at him), and both are shown to be effortless geniuses who accomplish literally anything they try – test-taking, tennis, dating – with no effort.

Soichiro, conversely, shows a physical human cost to what they’re doing, and it’s both sad and beautiful. Secondly, Soichiro becomes to most potent moral voice in the story. Multiple characters – including L – decry the idea of killing criminals at random to improve the world, but it sounds the most true coming from Soichiro as he’s holed up in a hospital bed, recovering from a heart attack, trying to convey the evil of Kira to Light. It means something to watch a father try to convey Good and Evil to his son; it means something when he sneaks out of the hospital shortly afterward to slam a truck into the side of a fucking building to take a whole bunch of assholes hostage in order to get around one of Kira’s plans; it means most of all when Light witnesses all this and doesn’t think about it, even for a second.

Many of the other characters have this kind of emotion going on as well. There are two inherent pieces of ludicrousness you have to buy into in order to enjoy the series: that Light could predict and control things well enough to pull off his plans, and that L could deduce what’s really happening. The main reason it gets away with this is because the story leans in on the fact that Light and L think rather alike; when someone asks how L could possibly know that Kira (and thus Light) is childish and hates losing, he famously replies, “Because I am also childish and hate to lose.” All stories, no matter how much they purport (or even successfully conform) to realism are subjective experiences that convey how someone sees the world; even when the work is the result of a collective, an audience will still look at it and say “Yes, this is how the world works.”

(This is why I enjoy analysing trash just as much a high art and fandom bullshit just as much as sophisticated critical work such as what we do. Art, both its creation and its spread, is the result of a human being making a decision, and all decisions can be learned from.)

There’s a lot of goofy childishness inherent in Death Note; one major element notable for its lack of presence is anyone pointing out that people can be wrongfully convicted, put in prison for a crime they didn’t commit, and thus Light has definitely killed at least one innocent person (the questions the story raises about Good and Evil are generally more about abstractions). There’s a strong sense that this was, itself, made a gifted teenager who tests extremely well, watches a lot of movies, and fantasises about what they’d do if they were in charge and everyone listened to them without arguing. I tend to take that in stride because I was a gifted teenager who tested extremely well, watched a lot of movies, and fantasised about what I’d etc, but I also stop paying attention to that goofiness at points when Light and L are together.

Some of the more meaningful moments of the story are essentially that geeky test-taker kid’s version of Vincent and Neil meeting in Heat; it seems to pierce Light’s very soul when L remarks that Light is the first friend he ever had, and there’s tremendous fun just in bouncing the characters off each other in your head – comparing and contrasting them and seeing the ideas that emerge. Light is brilliantly creative, pulling these grand schemes out of nowhere as he spots connections between ideas; L is brilliantly deductive, creating nothing but making dizzying observations. Part of Light’s creativity is his creation of a persona – initially, creating this idea of Kira and who Kira kills and doesn’t kill, gradually switching over to a fictional Light persona (what would Light plausibly know and do if he wasn’t Kira?). There’s a sense that Light was always vaguely going through the motions; there’s an early monologue where he says when asked a question, most people would give a ‘politically correct’ answer so that they look normal, and in retrospect this comes off as projection.

Meanwhile, L is aggressively eccentric and tactless, making zero effort to hide who and what he is from the people around him. Aside from the fact that he’s enforcing a basic social code that Light is flouting – an unsanctioned civilian does not get to murder people whenever they want – he’s also surprisingly empathetic, always taking the time to understand where people are coming from and never forcing an ally to do anything they don’t want to do. At one point, Light angrily asks him to imagine being falsely accused of being a serial killer, and L pauses before remarking it was the worst feeling he had ever experienced. There is something Mordin-like in how L shows neither shame nor offence to the idea that people disagree with him; his goal isn’t to be well-liked, it’s to catch Kira and see him executed for his crimes.

In essence, Light sculpts a persona whilst L seeks the truth.

I think if Death Note is ‘merely’ above-average, it’s because it has these ideas but, due to a weak dramatic structure, doesn’t take them somewhere interesting. This kind of thing is always very fandom-friendly; I once read a Death Note fanfic that presented an alternative world in which Light never found the Death Note and discovered he had depression, which turned out to be a more interesting interpretation that jumping-off point for a story. Nevertheless, it fascinates me how much meaning can be gained out of simple pragmatic plot decisions; I know I enjoy factoring random chance in my own writing as a way of avoiding a work ossifying. You start with something that’s not real, and you let it become real.