Film Theory: DEATH NOTE–How Deadly Was it?

i've set things up so theories will continue to appear over the next three weeks just watch me theorists i'll make dinner with my right hand and write theories with my left i'll take a potato chip and eat it i'll take my leftovers and reheat it i'll play mario and beat it i'll open the script for doctor who part three and complete it well maybe not that last [Music] one [Music] 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 people's recently purchased death notes it makes me wonder whether they're fans of the show or just haters who want to end the channel by any means necessary either way i'm totally in the clear since i don't take chances and sign with a misspelling of my name it's totally true the paranoia is real seriously if you have ever asked me to sign your death note check it out usually what i do is i attach a little bit of extra text at the end where i'm like haha this isn't how i actually spell my name also side note apologies to any matpats out there who spell their name with a double t anyway today we're talking about death note since netflix just released a live-action death note movie and since i'm writing this episode before it comes out let me just cover my bases here man it was the worst i mean l in public light second guessing himself i can't believe that they didn't stay true to the original anime or wow it was so great right ryuk was perfect and they nailed mises character sorry i hate to make you guys work like that but i thank you for going the extra mile and inserting the appropriate of the two responses so let me just put this out there i love love the original anime it's like 25 of the best written episodes ever put to a tv screen but matpat there are actually 37 episodes like i said 25 of the most tense densely plotted episodes ever put to air for those of you unfamiliar main character light yagami has it all the top grades in his class the attention of all his female classmates and a magical notebook that has the ability to kill people when he writes their names in it okay so one of those things is not quite like the others unlike most people who get kind of icky over the prospect of killing people with the flick of a pen light sees this as his opportunity to purify the world of evil taking out all the world's criminals and in the process becoming the vigilante known as kira and no that's not a racist way of saying killer his name is actually kira along the way he attracts copycat killers and plays an intense game of cat and mouse against the brilliant deductive mind of a mysterious detective known only as l it is without question my favorite anime but as i get ready to watch the netflix movie it suddenly occurred to me we spend so much time zoomed in on the personal conflicts between light and l that we as the audience lose sight of the larger conflict here just how many killings are happening over the course of the series light has some epic montage sequences well about as epic as you can get when the action consists of writing people's names down the entire point of these montages is to illustrate the extent of these killing sprees but when it comes to the question of how many names were actually written into the death note things kind of get blurry so today i'm working to get the best estimate possible for how many lives light cut short during his reign as kira now i say estimate since most of his killing occurs off screen meaning we can never get a 100 accurate number that said though we can get close if we know one the duration of time during which kira is active and two the rate at which kira kills so number one how long does kira kill for well it's a simple question that has a complicated answer you see for one thing there are a total of four people who operate under the kira alias at one point or another as light creates these complex notebook handoffs in his attempt to evade capture making matters worse is that sometimes multiple kira's are active at the same time with as many as three death notes at 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 bonus 13th volume of the manga and it bears mentioning that yes this is a timeline covering the manga however it tells the exact same story as the anime only time shifted three years earlier because it came out first they kept the months and days consistent from manga to anime only changing the year by 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 mapping out the whole series so go binge watch it and then come back here seriously it'll be a great weekend activity for you everyone back great and here it is yep it is a lot six years of killing 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 boy it is more confusing than light playing musical notebooks in the woods but at this point we have a solid idea of how long each of the kiras was in operation as expected light was the longest at 2033 total days the second kira model and actress misa amane is only active for 67 days primarily because she was less interested in killing for justice and more interested in getting into lights life light's life kyotsukehiguchi is kira 3.0 active for 136 days and finally tirumikami a devoted disciple of tyra holds the note for the shortest amount of time only 61 days but he's also the most enthusiastic about it [Music] well backspace on up there 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 rates of killing man if this video doesn't get flagged by youtube as being advertiser unfriendly it will be a miracle so the key to estimating light's rate of killing lies in his first encounter with ryuk light shinigami or god of death when ryuk first appears we learn that light's been writing the names of criminals in the death note for five days several death notes have made their way into the human world in the past but you're the first to have written this many names look at how many people you've killed in only five days and look we do the show gives us a glimpse of his open notebook where we can observe that he writes names divided into four columns and 39 rows each that's a total of 156 names per page that clip also shows us that light's already completed two full pages a total of 312 names if we take the lowball estimate and assume that light only has filled those two pages in the five days then the average comes out to 62.4 names per day now realize that this is only an average light obviously isn't writing exactly 62 names every single day for instance there's one day where he kills exactly 24 criminals one every hour to make a very specific point to l and then on the days where he's under surveillance he probably kills fewer criminals but we also know that light likes to cue up criminals to die even on days when he's not diligently writing names in his death note so what matters here is the average not the exact he writes down on any given day so that 62.4 is a good baseline then comes the five intermission after light defeats elle during which light is acting completely uncontested assuming the role of kira and knight and the role of the new l during the day and as you can imagine since he's a serial killer leading a task force out to catch him he's not too good at his day job during this period a narrator tells us that the kira killings accelerate in the summer of 2012 kira's killings increased at an unprecedented rate light's first five days as kira are a pretty good representation of what an unimpeded kira looks like he comes from from school does his homework and then spends the rest of his free time writing names in his notebook like a lovesick middle schooler when like defeats l he still has to perform his day job with the police task force and at night misa is also distracting him wink wink don't you hate it when the blonde actress model who adores everything that you do pulls you away from your nightly killing spree so let's assume that the rate of his killings during this period doubles per day it's nothing too extreme just an extra 60 or so names at night because he has misa helping him do research running those numbers across his 2033 days as kira gives us 242 112 names in the book hold up 242 000 approximately 62 names per day times 365 days doubling for when l is defeated and run that for five years yeah that number checks out and that's a conservative estimate think about that 200 000 names that's more than the populations of 47 separate countries in fact near the end of the series near yeah his name is actually near calls the death note the deadliest weapon of mass murder in the history of mankind that's a pretty tall order but when you actually look at the numbers it's true the third death note alone the one light yagami used during his five years uncontested killed more people than the atomic bomb dropped on hiroshima at the end of world war ii which was itself the single deadliest attack in recorded history in the end you're 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 killings and by that definition kira comes out on top by a huge margin some of the deadliest serial killers in recorded history louis garavito and pedro lopez have fewer than 200 known victims while kira's number in the hundreds of thousands even the deadliest conventional serial killers are around only one tenth of one percent as deadly as kira and that is just light we still have three other kilas uh kiras to discuss misa's number is just a drop in the bucket compared to light's killing spree only around 400 she had a short run and only killed her attention any killings that she does do during that five year intermission period are more for helping out lights total because he's the type of person who wouldn't allow that power to anyone else he probably wants to savor all that writing to himself and as we see during the montage for that segment they're both on computers together researching but he's the only one that we ever see writing names when the audience learns that higuchi is the third kira we see his notebook laid out on the table and it shows that he's written a total of 64 names 16 rows across 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 earlier an average of 64 names per day times 136 days works out to 8704 people dead at a gucci's hands and lastly terumikami out of all the kiras mikami holds his death note for the fewest number of days but he fills in one page per day that might not sound like much but one page for mikami is serious business with over 6 columns and 76 rows per page mikami is executing a whopping 456 people every single day i'm not sure what's more impressive the number of names that mikami manages to write every day or that he manages to squeeze them all in there mikami might not be the brightest when it comes to executing light strategy but you've got to give this guy points for penmanship with a total of 61 active days mikami's total kill count tallies in at 27 816. 27 000 people in two months so to recap our tallies are light yagami 242 thousand one hundred twelve missa amane three hundred 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 dead to give you a point of comparison that is just shy of the 300 000 americans who died during world war 1. the only wars to kill more u.s soldiers were world war 1 2 and the civil war and remember this estimate is a conservative number we don't see proof of it but misa could absolutely be more active during that five-year intermission if light allowed her to be and light himself could definitely be more aggressive in his writing if he wanted to be for an even better comparison of the vastness of the number of people these guys are killing consider this when we see light's notebook open yes we see some western names but there's also a few names written in japanese this makes total sense since the series is set in japan and light's first language is japanese so it would just be an easier place for him to target in 2009 japan's prison population was 75 250 just a fourth of keira's total kill count in other words during his six years he could have exterminated japan's entire prison population and still had time to deal with the rest of the world's criminals that said the u.s has a few more people in prison 2 million 217 000 to be exact so even if kira's efforts were entirely concentrated on the u.s it would have only been around 13 of the total u.s prison population furthermore worldwide there are 874 100 people murdered last year oh holy geez that's a huge number so even if kira only targeted murders his total number of killings over six years would only be 32 percent of the total number of murders in one the world is kind of a scary place sometimes and i gotta be honest light for all is purging the world talk made it a bit scarier you see even though he sees himself as the embodiment of justice i am i am justice he kills innocents along the way in order to stay out of prison ray pember ray's fiance 11 fbi agents that were sent to investigate him l watery then of course the killings that were done by the other kiras light justifies these deaths as necessary in his quest to bring peace to the world and in truth those people make up only a tenth of one percent of kira's total death toll 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 false convictions which happen more frequently 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 a rate of three exonerations per week other criminal justice studies have shown that in the u.s specifically as many as 4.1 percent of death row inmates in the u.s might be innocent and that's only in the u.s and only for people who've been convicted we know that in some cases kira simply targets suspects if 4 of the people kira sends to death would have later been exonerated that means kira has killed over 11 000 innocent victims not quite the drop in the bucket that light seems to think it is there's also plenty of other issues that exist in the criminal justice system for example in the u.s 94 of all cases are decided by plea bargains where people confess guilt to a lesser crime to avoid the risk of being convicted of something more serious even if they're not guilty at all they just don't want to run the risk or waste the time in trial some estimates put the number of innocents who are currently serving prison time due to plea bargains at around 20 000 and japan has a big problem with wrongful convictions suspects arrested for questioning can be held up to 23 days during which the suspect isn't allowed to have contact with an attorney there is even one case where a prosecutor threatened to kill a suspect during his interrogation japan's conviction rate is kit this 99.8 percent let me make this easy for you if you're in court in a japanese courtroom you are going to prison just stop wasting your time get started on your prison sentence and get it over with faster it's a system where guilty until proven innocent really prevails and in kira's eyes they're all guilty regardless of the evidence by the end of the series people in governments just send him names with light killing hundreds of thousands of people you think he's got time to check each and every one so what's the upshot here is kira truly justice well let me give you the numbers and you can go debate it in the comments near the end of the anime we find out 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 stopped and global crime rates have been reduced by over 70 percent a 70 decrease in the number of worldwide murders would decrease the number of killings in a given year by six hundred and eleven thousand eight hundred and seventy so by killing an average of forty six thousand five hundred people per year around two thousand of those being innocent kira prevented over six hundred thousand murders every single year and that's not even mentioning all the other violent crime that went down this is the dilemma of death note light is clearly clearly a villain saying he's driven by a better world when in actuality his ego and lust for power are his true driving motivations and yet you can't deny he got results so was he right all along the show provides no clear answers and remember it's all just fiction but it raises a great debate a debate that hopefully i was able to help you out with by providing more accurate numbers so you can assess the situation and although i can't answer any of those questions definitively for you i can at least present you with one final and slightly lighter question related to death note could kira kill goku spoiler alert the answer is obviously yes but go ahead debate it in the comments because remember it's all just a theory a film theory and [Music] cut [Music] you

Channel: The Film Theorists

Views: 10,750,532

Keywords: death note, death note movie, death note trailer, death note netflix, deathnote, death note opening 1, death note opening 2, death note anime, anime, netflix, kira, light yagami, film theory, film theory death note, film theorists, matpat, matpat death note

Id: WUtsg8AlNxY

Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 31 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/selfproclaimed]

Funny that you mention Light being able to kill Goku with the Death Note. The very first rule lays out the big key point in that matchup.

"The human whose name is written in this note shall die."

Key word on "human". Goku isn't human at all, he's a Saiyan. Based on that wording there's a possibility the Death Note won't do anything to him.

[u/JeremyTiki]

My bad shaboozeybot, automod beat you to the punch on this one.

[u/FrozenTangerine]

The death battle-eque match up at the end made me wonder what would happen if Kira went up against Batman in a death battle of wits using their detective skills.

Who would figure out the other's identity first?

[u/JoeJoeBinks97]

While I haven't seen the full series of Death Note, it's pretty cool to see the sociology and psychology of the show for what is Justice and how far a person goes.

[u/Kannivoor]

I wish he would do a theory about light beeing reborn as a death god...

[u/dr4gen_sl4y3r]

One problem that I thought of with mat's death note theory is that when he just hears teh name on teh radio light will spell the name several times just to be sure. this works mostly for Japanese names but maybe for a few English ones as well. So there might be a margin of error on his theory, I'm not sure how one would calculate that maybe the thing he used in teh super Mario maker theory where he subtracted his total by a certain number to factor in mistakes.