Death Note (spoilers-a-plenty!)

[LumRanmaYasha]

You'd think if any anime or manga could get an actually good Hollywood adaption, Death Note would be it. So much for that.

[Daikun]

You'd think if any anime or manga could get an actually good Hollywood adaption, Death Note would be it.

Under the Hollywood system? Eheh... No.

I'm glad Netflix picked up the slack. They've shown they have the talent. I think it's in more capable hands now.

They can also probably get it done faster. It's been in Development Hell for nearly a decade.

[gunswordfist]

A few minutes ago I completed Death Note. I started the series due to the Greatest Anime Episode Ever contest. I could already tell it was a series you do not want to watch a late episode of without seeing the rest...because spoilers. I had a great to pretty good time watching it 

Misa's cancer. The show wasn't the same once she got introduced. Right before she did I was like, "This show is a sausage fest." Be careful what you ask for because you might get an annoying loli.

So my favorite arc is everything before she came. I loved seeing Light kill out of his bedroom and Ryuk had much more screen time. My favorite episodes are probably the two when Light fucked up that married FBI couple and episode 36. My favorite characters are Light, Ryuk, L, Rem, Mikami and maybe Matsuda. Sucks that Rem got paired with such a bore. He deserved better.

I liked how L was always suspicious of Light, even up to the end when he asked if Light has even told the truth in his life.

I did not care for Near. He has no personality and got too many lucky breaks, like when he found out who Mikami was...by watching tv. Wish he did more detective work like when he figured out that Chief Yagami faked a parent-son murder suicide. Speaking of the Chief, it sucks that he didn't get as much as a funeral scene. He died and everyone acted like nothing happened the next episode. He was the biggest hero in the show, he deserved better. Also, the rest of Light's family just disappeared.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

The anime actually cuts out quite a bit from the second half of the manga, which is why the last 11 episodes feel rather rushed in nature.

[gunswordfist]

Makes sense.

[Spark Of Spirit]

It was also that the second half of the manga is not favored well to most fans.

But as much as the second half is not as good as the first half, I still think the ending is brilliant. What did you think of it?

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Also, now that you finished Death Note, read Bakuman. And I specifically mean read. Don't watch. Fuck the anime.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Also, now that you finished Death Note, read Bakuman. And I specifically mean read. Don't watch. Fuck the anime.

I concur with this.

You also won't like the anime because they change the focal point of the story. They make it about the romance subplot instead of the main storytelling plot. The pacing is also glacial.

It's still one of the most disappointing anime I've ever watched. There was so much potential to do tribute to manga and anime of all eras and ages like in the manga, and they completely skim it all over to focus and add filler to a romance plot that only comes into focus every now and then. It turns a shonen into a shoujo.

Oh, and the OP is complete miss. Bakuman is a series about two teenagers striving to be manga superstars. So, why is the first opening this? Let's open G Gundam with a dubstep track about eating fried chicken on the toilet while we're at it.

That's a long way to say skip the anime. But seriously, skip it. It's not worth it.

[gunswordfist]

Well jeez, I had strict orders to ignore the Bakuman anime after hearing y'all in the past and I've been interested and thinking about the manga, especially while watching this but the anime sounds worse than I thought.

Run on sentences beside, I thought it was passable and while I am in the camp that really likes Light and wanted him to win, I liked the ending. Also, not to say I wanted him to win despite everything, like say those people who whine about Spike's "death". But anyway, I thought everything was worse but seeing how things would wrap up was interesting. The last 10 or so minutes of 36 was well worth it too.

[Daikun]

Live-action Netflix movie teaser.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

The real question on everyone's mind: Will this live up to how hilariously bad the live-action Japanese movies were, or will it just be generic bad like the live-action TV adaptation?

Either way, it'll be fun to watch the anime community rage to hell and back over this.

[Dr. Insomniac]

How do you make an American Death Note movie work when people who look average on the surface but are depraved serial killers deep down and super detectives with tons of odd quirks have been so overdone? The idea of a high school student obtaining a god complex and actually murdering countless people is something shocking in Japan, but all too familiar in the United States. Plus, Light's supposed to look like a handsome upstanding teen genius, not sleep-deprived Nat Wolff from the Naked Brothers Band with badly bleached hair. I guess they're taking a few liberties with this, like how that J-Drama from a couple years back made L younger than Light and gave him his own L-Cave.

[LumRanmaYasha]

None of that stopped Death Note from being popular over here before, so regardless of familiarity the concept is still enticing and fertile ground. We should hope they take a few liberties with it to make it work as an adaptation set in the U.S. and a western mindset. That said, if they stray from the fact that Light is the clear-cut villain of the story and try to make him some sort of tragic hero instead, they'll have completely missed the point and it'll all fall apart. Which is what I'm expecting. Lots of people love Death Note, but so many of them laughably don't understand why it's good. And a version of Death Note that aims to show lots of sex and violence and totally not be for kids is probably not going to either.

[Dr. Insomniac]

None of that stopped Death Note from being popular over here before,

I meant in terms of all the media that's come since Death Note finished its run in manga and anime form. I'm sure the American movie will be very popular (the youtube trailer is already at 4 million views), I'm just wondering how you make it stand out and work as a good story in 2017 after a long run of adaptations and other detective stories like Sherlock or Dexter being familiar in the casual viewers' eyes.

[LumRanmaYasha]

I think a lot of the appeal of Death Note lies in the fantasy of having a book in which you can magically kill someone by writing their name in, contemplating whether you would use it the way Light does, whether you'd use it for good or evil or if you could even use it for good in the first place. That, and the battle of wits between Light and L as they constantly try to one-up and outsmart each other and discover each other's true identities. There have been a lot of crime dramas and detective stories in tv and film since Death Note first came out, but few have those two elements that make it stand out as a concept, especially not presented in the over-the-top, simultaneously ridiculous and awesome way that it was executed in the manga and anime. For the Netflix film to stand out against the manga and other crime/detective stuff, it needs to embrace what's interesting and fun about the original while changing the relevancy of it's message to better fit it's audience, in this case adapting it to be relevant to the political and social climate of the U.S. in 2017. Not that I think it should be an overly political film, but just changing the environment and mindset of the original work to a western social climate will fundamentally influence how it's presented, and if they can still retain the elements that make Death Note inherently what it is, then they might have something that's still unique and relevant within the context of the franchise as well as other media.