• Mood: okay
• Music: D12 - Just Like You

all we do is pop pills and stay in jail

masakochan and I made a deal a couple of weeks ago -- if she reads Bleach, I'll read Death Note. Which I did, fully expecting to fall in love even though I need another fandom like I need a third ear.

I've never before read a story with such unsympathetic main characters. I almost quit reading at ch30 and then again at ch53, but a promise is a promise, so I stuck around hoping it would get better. But not really. Well, it did get better after L's departure because Near's a lot less creepy and the action was definitely smoother, but, like, it's page after page of infodump with very little feeling. A lot of the L/Near thoughts on yaoi Kira could have been completely excised because the images did enough to convey what they were thinking (since the reader already knew, most of the time, what they were thinking. It's already established they're both geniuses and it's tiresome, not illuminating, to read their perspective immediately after learning Light's evil planz!1)

I cared more about Rem and Yagami senior than I ever did about Light or either of the opposing boy geniuses. I can see the "meta" reasoning behind Light's personality, but that's the problem; it's meta. The creators took a concept and built a character based on it, but the concept only works well in meta from an outsider POV but not when you try to get inside the mind of a person; you need more than meta-reasons to explain his motivation, otherwise it rings false and the character falls flat -- which Light does, at least he does for me. L is just repulsive in how creepy and infantile he is. I seriously cringed every time he showed up on the page and tried to just read what he said and flip on past. o.O;;

Completely unrealistic real-world setups -- I mean, it's a tale about the supernatural so obviously it won't be all 100% realistic, but "supernatural" doesn't mean *everything* is supernatural. L builds a private skyscraper in Tokyo over a period significantly less than a year? Please. No amount of money can buy that in this day and age. And that's just one example. There's a lot I'm willing to overlook in fiction, but the minute you start breaking real-world rules while trying to use real-world logic and claiming your story is set in the real world, you fail as a storyteller.

Female characters defined purely through stereotype -- I realise this is to be expected, to some extent, in a manga like this, but Misa's portrayal was downright offensive. I liked Weddie's brief appearance, but of course she was always squeezed into a high-tech hacker girl outfit and doing kickass hacker-girl things with zero personal motivation given. For about three seconds I thought Mello was a girl, but no.

The only thing I liked about it was the concept of a Death Note. The plot is incredibly clever, but I felt zero connection with any of the characters, so in the end, I give it a thumbs down. SORRY EVERYBODY. >.>