Death Note

I found myself incredibly bored reading through all the detailed psychological nuances that, in reality, are impossible to predict to such a precise degree. There are way too many outside factors, coincidences, and cirumstances that would completely fuck up the detective deductions that they made. I was pretty dissapointed in the manga's overall focus. Instead of being centered on the concept of having the power to kill anyone, and what that power could do, the manga focused on Light's endless struggle to pretend to be innocent. Which, frankly, was a pretty moot point. I can't imagine it would be difficult to avoid the authorities by moving across country borders on a regular basis, and killing anyone following you(which he proved he was willing to do).

In addition, I didn't find Light to be a very likeable character at all. He seemed to have two emotions: anger, and elation. He is completely indifferent to other people. His own father died as a direct result of his actions, and he didn't give two shits. He acted sad, while giving an internal monologue about his irritation that his father didn't kill Mello while he had the chance. In fact, all of the major characters aside from Misa seemed to be like this. Light, Near, Mello, and L apparently had no need at all for meaningful human contact and relationships. A symptom of genius I suppose? In any case, I found the characters to be shallow for a manga with the psychological tag.

A third turnoff was the minor plot hole of the Death Note apparently being infinitely long. At the beginning, I believe the Ryuk mentions that the note is only 60 pages long. I don't care how small your handwriting is, you cannot continue to kill people daily for 5 years(I think it was), in addition to ripping out pages pretty regularly. Even with three notebooks(a total of 180 pages, front and back I assume) This point is further accentuated towards the end, with Mikami using up pages at an extreme pace of 1 per day. I don't recall how long he had the real book for, but assuming that it was already reasonably filled, he was using it for much longer than should have been possible.

I suppose that's why it's a shounen though...

Of course if he hadn't been strategically stupid it would have been a much less dramatic story because nobody would ever have realized the culprit was in Japan, much less suspected him personally. But every time he pulled off some impressive, beautifully calculated tactical move I would think "You wouldn't have to fool around with that if you hadn't messed it up from the start!"
It's amazingly trivial because killing street criminals is perhaps the most useless possible employment for that power. Note that he isn't given any amazing powers to tell who's guilty or innocent, so he's less likely to get things right than the courts; probably a third of the people he kills are innocent. Even if he could get it right, the death penalty for street crime has been tried--they used to do it in the 18th century. It didn't deter crime then, and copious literature makes it clear that the death penalty still doesn't deter crime now. People commit crimes of passion, or they commit crimes expecting not to get caught, something he can't change because his powers are only good for killing people, not investigating. He can kill all he wants, he won't change the crime rate unless he actually makes it worse. Finally, killing street criminals doesn't make a dent in systemic problems. It doesn't stop wars, it doesn't deal with hunger or poverty in any way, it doesn't remove dictatorship or promote democracy, it's piddly. He does seem to think of it as some kind of stepping stone to world power, which is possible, but it's a dashed inefficient approach even for that.

It's morally myopic because having decided on his course of action, which he wrongly believes will be of some use, he doesn't even seem to bother thinking about the masses of people he kills, many of whom are bound to be innocent and many others of whom are either not that serious of criminals or might well have been rehabilitated or both. And he doesn't even bother to consider the huge literature both ethical and criminological that suggest he's doing exactly the wrong thing. He never makes a case, to himself or anyone else, for the value of his approach, he just assumes it. The manga annoys me by carefully never letting the cops make any of the strong arguments that could be made; I presume the mangaka doesn't know them.

It's strategically stupid in two ways. One is, as I said, the guy seems smart enough most of the time that clearly if he'd wanted to make sure there were no geographical clues to the identity of the killer, he could have. Instead he decides to allow the search to zero in on him, apparently intending to have himself investigated and cleared as a suspect. This is idiotic--there are 7 billion people in the world. How can he think it's safer to be one of, say, a hundred who have been seriously considered as suspects, even if "cleared" for the moment, than to be traceless and anonymous among 7 billion? The second way is, he could kill anyone. He could choose his killings to have profound political effects. He could kill every dictator in the world. He could monitor corporate whistle-blowing, and wherever it involved life and death issues kill anyone who tried to sack or harass the whistleblower. He could kill terrorist leaders and leaders of child-soldier militias. He could kill people profiting from blood diamonds. He could kill tobacco executives. He could kill every leader who started a war or took a political prisoner. Overall, he could totally put together a strategic approach that would cause massive change for the better and require far fewer murders to do it, and if he wanted to be king of the world that would be a much better stepping stone than creaming masses of street criminals. But nooo, gotta waste anyone holding up a 7-11.