He also decided to kill thousands of low-level criminals instead of like ten rich people.
Imagine one day a mega-billionaire has a fatal heart attack. Found in his possession is the name of another mega-billionaire, scrawled onto whatever was near them in their own blood.
The next day, that billionaire drops dead. Another heart attack, another name found near the body. Rinse and repeat.
Eventually, one gets smart. Publicly pledges to give away their entire fortune and take an oath of poverty the day their name is found. The reaper skips him, and the message is sent: if you’re ultra wealthy and want to live, stop being ultra wealthy.
Sure, it may not be foolproof: there’s probably a lot of super rich people whose identities are more or less private. Maybe one of them can pull a fast one & hide their wealth rather than give it away. But still, it’d probably be more effective than what Light did with less killing to boot.
Disclaimer because I’m about to start defending his intelligence: Light is a horrible person regardless.
Light’s first slip up is his temper, causing him to act without thinking to kill Lind L Taylor on live TV. In all fairness, until that point he had killed hundreds of people already with zero resistance and if you want people to “know of my existence” what better way to do so than to kill someone on live TV and get away with it.
The next “mistakes” he makes are in focusing on killing L instead of hiding from him. But really he would rather play a deadly game with L than anything else, and he does play that game intelligently and win despite many unforeseen obstacles.
Point is, light doesn’t get caught because he isn’t intelligent, he gets caught because he’s more obsessed with power and domination than not getting caught or actually saving the world.
I mean that’s literally why he’s evil: he’s not trying to fix the world.
He himself mentions that society just tends to decay and—knowing that he won’t live forever—he must know that killing evil people and trying to keep people in line with fear will not work and will not last. However, he does it anyway because fixing the world is just the excuse he uses to justify his god complex.
He’s not stupid, he’s just more entertained playing with death than he is doing anything else.
he’s not trying to fix the world
It was probably on my second watch of the anime that I figured this out. When he was killing FBI agents who were clearly good people.
One other interesting thing is that he’s not interested in elevating himself in the traditional way.
If he wanted to fix the world, and become super rich, he could easily do it at the same time. Because the people who are actually ruining the world aren’t the murderers that he killed in the story. The people ruining the world are actually the same people who have all the money. And he has the ability to control them. He can alter their wills if he wants to.
With the Death Note, it would be trivial to become the richest person in the world, but that would attract a lot of attention, so it would also be trivial to become a much less rich, but still incredibly wealthy person. And Light could have done that in a way that would be very hard to trace, if he wanted to. But he didn’t want to.
Light begins the story with a very biased view of the world, due to his father being a police officer. He’s quite authoritarian. He blames small time criminals and never really considers that there are societal and governmental reasons that they became criminals. Instead, he comes up with a very Machiavellian solution that people should follow the law because they’re too afraid to commit crimes.
When he was killing FBI agents who were clearly good people.
Since when have cops been good people?
You spend too much time on this platform, I think.
