I dunno. The first two kills can be seen as justified since they directly prevented murders and then a rape. But then it skips two weeks and Light has murdered hundreds of criminals who were already in prison and not about to commit any crimes and then declares himself to be a god. I personally see that as the point…

1) Ryuk is a Japanese god of death. Shinigamis are not part of the American supernatural folklore. Unless they show up on the next season of American Gods (Shinigamis don’t seem to be present in the book as far as I can remember), they have nothing to do with American culture.

The anime literally depicts Light with these demonic looking red eyes. Christian culture or not, I feel like that’s a pretty universal sign of evil.

THIS!! This right here!

With how huge TV is now, I can’t understand at all why they would make this a movie and not a Stranger Things esque mini-series.

I’d say that’s a bit of a generalization, in that plenty of people who watch Death Note morally disagree with Light, but find him a compelling villain-protagonist. Or, like many of my friends who watch the show, just flat out hate Light all together.

Nah, with this particular text, if you’re localizing to America, it makes sense to make the main characters white, because it puts Light into the correct social context. Leaving him Japanese changes pretty much everything about how he’s perceived by the police and his peers. Making him black and American, for…

I was curious enough to follow up with google, and this link claims that 95% of hostage situations are resolved with zero deaths of any type. That seems much more reasonable to me.

If this truly was a localization, it would be Death Notebook (Note being the Japanese term), given to him by a Grim Reaper in a black hood(Not a Death God or Shinigami). Sterling (To choose a more American groan-worthy name) would adopt the name Killer (Kira is the Japanese approximation). What this was, was…

I think he knew from the beginning that he was the villain. He never lied to himself about his motivations and fully acknowledge that he wanted to kill the royal family for personal revenge. It just happened to be easier to do that by leading a revolution for the greater good, and he was constantly looking to pass off…

I’m not even remotely an expert on Japanese culture but I think they have a different visceral response to people taking the law into their own hands to dispense vigilante justice. In the anime (I haven’t read the manga), Light is depicted unequivocally as a villain and murderer. In America, we have a tendency to…

Exactly he’s straight up a villain protagonist, the fact so few even now gets this baffles me.

I assumed this Death Note adaptation was a series until it finished principle photography. Trying to fit this sprawling story into a single movie (or even two movies, like the Japanese live action version) seems futile. The biggest appeal of the story was the cat-and-mouse game that evolved over time while Light…

It’s a review. You probably think it’s biased because it is. That’s how reviews work.

It looks good—the violence is gory and shocking and constantly reminds you that these kids are playing with lives of actual people.

The thing about the adaptation of Death Note, premiering today on Netflix, isn’t that it’s bad. It isn’t even the questions raised by the whitewashing controversy. It’s that everything in it happens so fast that it’s hard to care about any of it.