Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2008-06-29 05:07 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2008-06-29 05:07 pm
[ SECRET POST #541 ]
⌈ Secret Post #541 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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Notes:
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aa_secret, Ace Attorney secrets!Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #078.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 2 3 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat ], [ 1 - empty comment ], [ 1 - random link ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
Re: 101, 107, 151
*isn't at all ticked off, but is a new fan who loves discussion*
I love Light--love love love him--but he's wrong, and he's doomed. Killing off people, even evil rotten people, even if you don't care that you corrupt yourself doing the killing, is never gonna make the world a better place. You make a world built on fear, not on natural goodness. And Light's doomed from the moment he decides to kill Lind L. Taylor-- who's not an evil rotten person--because he might catch Light. That's the moment Light crosses the grey line into blackness.
Re: 101, 107, 151
And this might just be my own personal analysis of Light, but I think he killed Lind L. Taylor to make an example of him as somebody who threatened to catch Kira, not because he was afraid Lind might actually catch him. Because there's no way that Light didn't realize that there was practically no chance of anybody tracking him down, infamous detective or otherwise. How could a Death Note be traced back to him?
Re: 101, 107, 151
Your analysis about Light making an example of Lind L. Taylor is valid! However, what does it say that Light killed him to make an example of him? Don't you think that crosses a line?
Re: 101, 107, 151
I'll concede that law enforcement is more about containment than punishment, because I can't argue against that. But I do think at least 99.9% of the criminals Kira killed would have gone through those checks and balances and gotten similar results. As I said in my first comment, Light was very selective about who he killed, many of his victims were already in jail. Also, Kira never did anything to suggest he would be the sole punishment; as a matter of fact, he depended on law enforcement to find the criminals and reveal them, so that he could judge the ones that were bad enough to be killed.
Of course killing Lind L. Taylor crosses a line, but Light was crossing lines from the very beginning. He freely admitted that. He killed him to establish that Kira existed, and had the power to kill anybody, anywhere. Otherwise, people would always be uncertain about what Kira was really doing.
Re: 101, 107, 151
A good point about law enforcement being part of Light's checks and balances, and them doing Light's work for him. But a breakdown occurs when we remember Light and law enforcement are not on the same side, because law enforcement has not ordered the deaths of these criminals. Light didn't target only those criminals who were on Death Row. Law enforcement deemed the criminals who were not already caught should be caught and then put through the process of trial, and deemed the criminals who were in prison should be in prison--not killed. So Light is taking on sole responsibility to judge who should live and die.
I don't know that Light killed Lind to establish that Kira existed. He killed him because Lind opposed him, because Lind called him evil. That's huge. Freedom of dissent is a significant right of a free society. I harbour a bit of belief that if Light had said at the beginning that he would use the Death Note to punish the wicked and that he would never touch the non-wicked under any circumstances, and stuck to that, he'd have stayed in the "only I can do this thing for the greater good" grey realm of things. But as soon as he gets into the "...um, and those who speak against me and those who run the risk of stopping me," excuse, he's fallen.
Re: 101, 107, 151
Yes, Kira and law enforcement were at odds, but if the justice system wasn't flawed then there would never have been the need for Kira in the first place. People who commit crimes can go free with a good lawyer and/or circumstantial evidence, and because Light saw that as unfair, he killed the people who were certainly (or at least very likely to be) guilty. I'm not mistaking him as anything less than a vigilante, I just happen to think that he's a vigilante who was right. If he had been handed an Imprison Note that locked people in cages instead of killing them, I'm sure he would have used that in the same way and for the same reason. But he was handed a Death Note, so he made use of the power he was given.
Light got mad because Lind called him evil, but what makes him mad and what makes him act can be different things. If he was killing anybody who spoke out against Kira, I think they would show more than just one open-to-interpretation example of it. Light went after L more intensely than he should have, though, and that's where Kira and I differ--if I was Kira, I would not think L was a big deal at all. But Light was always bored with life, and he starting to get bored again even after he became Kira, so he threw himself into the excitement that L's chase created. Without that conflict, though, Death Note would be a pretty dull story, so it was pretty much required.
Re: 101, 107, 151
I think I cannot go further with your thoughts regarding utopia--my perception is that the question has become, "If the theoretical became real, would you call it only theoretical then?" The equivalent of "If b be came a, would you agree that a=a?" when my argument is that b is highly unlikely to become a.
One of the most significant characters in Death Note, I'd argue, is Matsuda, because his thoughts reflect what a lot of the audience thinks. Matsuda knows at heart that what Kira is doing violates ethical decency, in performing killings, but is doing it for the greater good, to remove bad people from the population and make the world a better place. And there are a lot of positives in what Kira's doing. Matsuda's not afraid to say these things to his fellow agents. (Well, he's afraid, but he does say them at one point.) If you were to ask me if I'd like living in a world where Kira ruled, I'd feel pretty mixed myself. On the one hand, I'm not likely to commit willful crimes and be at risk. And I'd like it if I felt safer with a lot of the serious criminal element out of the way, and the petty criminal element afraid to act. What you have to say about Kira being a vigilante is true, and if I felt he had good judgment in his vigilanteism, I might be very much on the Kira bandwagon myself.
Except. Except even with perfect judgment, what happens in such a society. It becomes a witch hunt. We saw it happening in Kira's world, where people arrested begged their names to be concealed. We saw it among Kira supporters, who were eager to expose criminals. I may be right in thinking Kira even encouraged this, though I can't cite a quote from memory. At any rate, Kira never told people to mind their own business when it did occur, so Kira is guilty of perpetuating the witch hunt. Tell me I don't need to explain why that's a bad thing.
And Kira the vigilante relied upon a flawed, as you say, law enforcement system. Very dangerous, when you're dealing death. Too much risk to punish those incorrectly accused and/or imprisoned, if you have any perspective of how final death is as a judgment.
Which leads to your discussion that Kira might have used lesser powers if he'd had them (such as imprisonment). Yes, he might have--but he had the power of death and chose to use it. I don't think one can argue "that's all he had, so he had to use it." If someone gave me the power to give criminals a teensy electrical shock whenever they did something illegal, and I chose to use it, I might be doing a good thing with very little grey, in trying to warn them "I know what you're doing, so stop it." Give me the power to point out criminals to the police, so that the police can take their own legal action, and I might use that too. Give me the power to freeze people in place until I let them go--maybe so they have to wait until the police get there--now we're getting into a scarier area. I don't know that I would accept such a power. Give me the power to kill, and I am not allowed to argue, "But that's all the power you gave me to work with, you didn't give me a lesser power, so, I had to use it." I must still take responsibility for accepting it at all! And with it I have to accept the consequences.
And ultimately, no, I don't think Light showed himself to be a good vigilante. As soon as he started to kill the innocent to keep them from criticising him or catching him, using that Death Note, he violated the line of justice. So a Kira who was a good vigilante, I could support. But this Kira, no.