Iirc, you can write how the person behaves before death on the death note. You can easily write your own life fanfic and peaceful death there to ensure you don’t get Raito’d or L’d in the meantime
Heh. L’d. Funni. Because in the show there’s a guy named –
I think there was a pretty short limit on how far in the future you could write someone’s death.
I think there was a pretty short limit on how far in the future you could write someone’s death.
23 days. You had 40 seconds to write a cause of death and 6:40 to write the details, and could even pre-write the details and add the name(s) afterward but the Death Note could not effect anything that occurred more than 23 days in the future, with the exception of dying by a disease that would take longer than that to progress and not writing a time (in which case they develop the disease but die when/how the disease would take them). The real problem is that you also can’t use the Death Note to directly extend someone’s life by writing that they die after they normally would - if you try they just die however they would have died if you hadn’t used the note. You can however use the Death Note to kill someone who is a threat to another, indirectly saving their life.
Anything you make them do also has to be something they might plausibly do on their own, or it just hits them with a heart attack. You also can’t make them kill someone else, though I think you might be able to fudge that by writing that person A will be shot by person B, and then that person B will shoot person A. I could be misremembering, but I think that trick was used at one point.
Also, if the circumstances described are impossible, it will default to a heart attack.
That’s a very painful version of play stupid games, win stupid prices.
No but the longer the time is that you describe the mor reasonable the actions have to be for the person to be.
So you can make a police officer shoot some random people but you can’t make him save a black child /s
So you can make a police officer shoot some random people but you can’t make him save a black child /s
Oh, now, you could make him accidentally save a black child. Or get blinded immediately beforehand so he doesn’t know the child is black.
Aren’t all children black if you’re blind?
“What a cool notebook! I’m going to make this my new personal phone book and spend all afternoon putting all my contacts in it.”
Well, you can always erase it IIRC
I think you have to scratch a line through the name. Don’t quote me on that I’m far too lazy to look up the rules.
Remember, when someone unexpectedly kicks the bucket. That leads to a power vaccuum. Instead, you got to go after the middle managers. The people who carry out a politican’s agenda. In theory, another faction would be able to capitalize on the situation. While taking out some politicans would be a net beneft, the fallout would be terrible. A civil war in nuclear armed Russia? Another Middle East war?
Now when it comes to billionaries and the other parasites. Take those fuckers out. The World doesn’t have to worry about a corporate power vaccuum taking everyone down like a civil war in a country.
I mean think about how many thousands of middle managers you would have to kill to disrupt a large bureaucracy.
For a fraction of the same amount of deaths you could kill existing leaders, anyone that tries to replace them, and their rivals.
Maybe middle managers was the wrong word. To better explain myself, let’s have a look at the leadership team of DHS.
Would removing Meth Gnome Kristi Noem cause chaos? Sure however DHS would continue to more or less function. However, the Chief of Staff Greyson McGill or Deputy Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Madison D. Sheahan being removed would have a far more impact on the daily workings of DHS.
Or how about any of these chucklefucks?
While the powerful will fight over who gets to be in charge, the minions will continue to make sure that the system grinds on.
I wonder if you could feed the paper into a printer and have some LLM without guardrails print out the names and likenesses of all the wealthy people on earth so they all die at once…
The rules don’t say you can’t do that, you just need to write the name and have the image of the person in mind, and this might just fulfill those requirements, if just looking at someone while writing would do it. It’s not like you are capable of a perfect representation in your mind anyway, so ai might be close enough…
I feel like that’s morally fairly clean since you didn’t do anything but fill a paper tray and write a prompt…
I think I have to disagree on this one. Whether or not you believed it would work is irrelevant. The malicious intent is what matters here. You happened to find a supernaturally accursed notebook titled “Death Note” and you decide to write someone’s name in it? That already crosses the moral line imo, independent of any actual effects.
Counterarguments welcome.
If I say, “Damn him!” about someone, and it turns out that Hell is real and that saying that actually causes people to be sent to Hell, am I morally culpable for that? Let’s say I attempt to hex someone, knowing full well that it doesn’t work, but just using it as a way to express my frustrations - but then it turns out hexes are real and I actually hexed them?
You can’t read in a significant malicious intent if a person takes an action that they have every reason to believe is harmless.
I’d recommend reading some of The Illustrated Guide to Law which covers relevant concepts, albeit from a legal perspective rather than a moral one
spoiler
The intent is the important part, I think. When you say “damn him!” you (I imagine) aren’t actually thinking of damning that person to hell, and seeing if it works.
It’s more like pointing a gun you’re pretty sure isn’t loaded at someone’s head and pulling the trigger. Even if you thought it wasn’t loaded, you know exactly what you’re doing if it happens to be.
No, that’s completely different. Pointing an unloaded gun at someone is 1) a threat, because they might not know it’s unloaded, 2) a violation of established rules and norms about firearm safety, which exist because 3) the gun may be loaded even if you believe it isn’t, this is a fairly common cause of accidents.
What we’re talking about with a Death Note is something so implausible that it could cause harm that no reasonable person would expect it to work. There’s an enormous difference between “I thought the gun wasn’t loaded but it was,” and, "I thought magic wasn’t real but it was.
I agree with someone in this thread who said you don’t just get one freebie, but at least three. If I were on a jury and the prosecutor wanted to convince me that the defense knowingly killed people by writing names in a notebook, I imagine there is some finite number that would convince me, not only that it works, but that a reasonable person would expect it to work at the time they wrote the name - but that number might be like a dozen. It certainly wouldn’t be one.
Is it malicious intent of you write your own name in it?
Step one to claiming ownership of a notebook, TBF.
I recently saw a sticker recently that said, “If at first you don’t succeed, try a few more times to establish a baseline.”
Ahhh, but if you attempt to kill someone and the fact that it could be a freebie is part of your decision process then it isn’t a freebie. So having read this you no longer get a freebie.
the first thing I would do is write my name in it so no one steals it
Thank you! The first thing I do with every notebook is write my name on the first page (or inside cover)
If you think about it, ALL of my uses would be freebies
Not sure I really buy this. You have two choices: use it or don’t. If you use it, it will either kill somebody or it won’t; if you don’t use it, it surely won’t kill anybody. The probability of the former case is obviously extraordinarily low, but the probability of the latter causing a death is surely many times lower. The only thing that matters for morality IMO is the ratio of these probabilities, not the absolute difference.
Every time someone steps behind the wheel of the car, the (apparent) chances of them causing a death is so many times higher than writing a name in a Death Note that the latter is completely negligible.
true, but using a car has its own utility.
Would it be immoral to drive a car without utility? Maybe so, but only a little immoral, surely. You don’t deserve to go to jail for taking a joyride around the block.
I can think of reasons to write a name in a Death Note, like trying to prove to someone that it doesn’t work.
A joyride has its own value. If there were literally no utility – you’re driving a car for no reason, not even to have fun – then yeah it’s immoral, as it just puts people in danger and pollutes the planet.
As for uses for an impotent death note, fair enough, you’re right.
It could be 101: the first a surprise, the next 100 to establish a meaningful statistical correlation.
can you be my lawyer please
Second one is also free cause we all would use it on Musk the moment the first one worked with Trump.
Moving on to kill all of the owning class because they are the source of all our problems tbh
Nah, they all have wills to keep their wealth from reaching anyone who needs it.
“Three days after signing, notarizing and registering all required documents necessary to collectively devote their entire fortunes, stocks and options to an irrevocable trust in support of renewable energy implementation, social welfare systems, sustainable development in the global south, returning resources leased to foreign companies to local citizens, and solving wealth inequality (with trustees selected from currently-living Nobel laureates in chemistry, medicine and economics, the IPCC, and the WHO), Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, <list all current members of the boards of Nestlé, Google, Apple, Sinclair Broadcasting, United Health, and other insurance conglomerates by name here> all make the collective mistake of riding cybertrucks to the second trust meeting and perish in the resulting inferno, which miraculously leaves no lasting damage on infrastructure, nor causes collateral injuries.”
Still a chance of splitting up the money with the descendants cannibalizing each other and fighting over the owning classes corpse.
Generally you don’t need a will to keep wealth in the family, anyway.
Are the family not also part of the owning class?
Where did you get the idea that I disagree with that?
you can probably fill the whole thing with morally acceptable people to disappear
I can think of like 5 within a second of thinking about it
Wikipedia is full of pages like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_United_States_senators with names, photos, and biographies. The scum bags that are destroying our world are not all a secret cult. They’re just assholes in suits.
Im killing Putin first. Hes the core problem, and the most evil of the richest billionaire club.
Gonna need 2 freebies mate.
Now see, that’s what friends are for.
You get your freebie and take out one billionaire, then you hand it to your bestie, he takes out one billionaire, they hand it to their bestie, they take out one billionaire, and you know, twenty-five, forty-five people down the line, or one relatively moderate-sized college campus, and the world is a better place and nobody has to suffer in between heaven and hell for the rest of eternity because of it.
Freebies? Those are mandatory and required. No shame if they are evil.
Shit man, I would pull up a picture index of the entire Republican party leadership as well as everyone funds and backs them and just start scribbling names down until my hand hurt and then I would just keep going powering through the pain.
Does your freebie have to be one person or can it be, like, a population? Can you deathnote every conservative politician in a go? That’d be one fuck of a freebie.
The method of death can be specified, and it never says that you can’t summon a moderately sized bomb, or a virus that only kills under very specific circumstances. We’re dealing with the supernatural, let’s go a little wild.
…honestly, it never said you can’t make the deaths wicked cool, man, so why don’t we have a pile of gold fall from the sky onto our hated enemy that just by happenstance happened to be near me. Strange how the gold is mostly gone, officer, but I swear, it was like a dragon’s hoard or something.
“AFRICA!”
“Uh Light that’s not how it-”
“MEXICO!”
“PATRIOTS FANS!”
“THE BLOGOSPHERE!”
You’d need like 20 names, minimum, to reduce the bloodshed in the coming succession war and post-war regime.
And all the backers.
I think that’s one thing I couldn’t connect with with Death Note. Why bother going after criminals when there are tinpot dictators out there?
Yes. Also, most criminals are not evil, they were forced to do crime due to socioeconomic factors. Factors influenced by billionaires and politicians.
I wonder if the Sarin Gas Attacks were an influence. At the time, the perpetrator’s executions still hadn’t happened yet and even discarding moral absolutism, they weren’t exactly motivated by needs or profits.
Because Light isn’t a good person who’s corrupted by power, he’s a teen with a superiority complex who suddenly gets the power to kill a bunch of people. He is the tinpot dictator.
Yeah, pretty much. He’s supposedly well educated, but has such a narrow world view.
This is very, very true.
He’s mostly perceived as the good guy, because he’s the protagonist. And protagonists can get away with quite a bit of f’d up stuff.
Nah, you’d probably want to do some research into who is the one actually funding people like trump and who in the U.S. government is fomenting these forever wars that are funding the war lobby.
Trump and Elon are the mouthpieces and distractions for where the real money is coming from.
I’ve thought about this an unhealthy amount. Trump would shit himself to death on live TV. He would cry like a bitch and narrate his experience in great detail.
The use of it as a mildly lethal control device is underplayed.
So-and-so does XYZ, then dies of general body breakdown at 94"
Are you me? It’s was a good while ago but that was literally what I posted in response to the Death Note question last I saw it!
Trump would shit himself to death on live Tv. 😂
Gotta have someone slipping on the shit and dying from head trauma right afterwards for maximum lol
J.D. Vance running, wildly masturbating and screaming: “Now I am the king, mommy!” and slipping in Trumps shit and splitting his head open on Hegseths whiskey bottle, ramming it down his throat suffocating him.
while accurately parrying any attempts to help him, and then have a seizure in the shit while still fending off any would be rescuers.
Perfection! 👌
Only way I can think of topping that would be make it a double kill with Musk eating himself to death on said shit.
Overdose, falls right into the pile of shit, people dont notice because they saw Trump go down first?
Lol! One should try to live their life in a way that multiple people don’t independently wish you a painful, embarrassing diarrhea death in front of the whole planet.
Said staring off in the middle distance with a small glimmer in my eye:
“I’d like to think there’s a little part in all of us that wants to see Trump shit himself to death on live Tv.”
Tips hat and walks off into the sunset.
It’s still pretty unrealistic that anyone actually figured out how the deaths were occurring. Even if you thought “maybe it’s magic” nobody else would take it seriously.
I’m not L
Consume nothing but sugar and become him.
On it!
I recently watched the series. Well, at least up to a certain point anyway. I’m convinced that L isn’t so much a genius detective as Light was just overwhelmingly fucking stupid
I watched the whole thing and I agree.
I kept seeing memes about Death Note a couple months ago and it was driving me insane. So, I watched a sort of recap/summary thing of the series. Thought “Well that’s dumb. I’ll never watch it.” Couple hours later I’m on episode 3 like “What the fuck happened.”
But what I did learn from the summary was the ending was so incredibly stupid that I just noped out entirely. Just said fuck it when L leaves the show and ending on that message being sent to the orphanage. Seems like more of a narratively satisfying conclusion
Good call. The show is fun in the way of them constantly one upping each other, like oh what are they gonna have him do!
But the ending is so… so bad. And in a sense I get it, if you write it how people would really act no one’s ever going to get caught, there’d be no drama, just a guy killing other guys with a book. But damn…
The entire of draw of the show is how much L and Light need to fuck. Some weirdos get into Near/Mello but the magic of the first half of the show is how desperately one needs them to have passionate hatesex. This is why everyone hates Misa, despite her doing no wrong - she interrupts the toxic yaoi with compulsory heterosexuality.
and especially its done by a spirit/god they cant even see.
Light fucks up early on by killing the fake L on live TV, making it pretty clear there’s a person behind it.
L has a mega freak out when he does realize it’s magic, because it doesn’t fit with his logical view of the world.
Tbf the fake L did say it was a worldwide broadcast and Light wanted to be “god of a new world”. It was a major fuck up no doubt, but if it was worldwide then L wouldn’t have been able to narrow him down to a specific region of Japan, and Light would have been able to announce himself to the world.
Light is childish and hates to lose… because he’s a high schooler. Idk his age but probably 17-18. Idk how many kids that age would have gotten as far as Light did.
But like it would be so unbelievable that you can’t just say, oh x died bc I wrote his name, that would be ludicrous. You need a decent sample size. I think I’d need 3 freebies. Before that i would not believe this notepad kills people.
What you do is have your first one be someone famous enough that you know when and how they die if it happens, and something that is specific as a cause and unlikely but not so implausible as to make the note resort to it’s default instead. Like, make Putin trip and break his neck during a live broadcast event or something. You could easily design something plausible enough but still highly unlikely to randomly happen in exactly that way at that time.
What if someone wrote “a moth”?
Then we kill the goddamn bastard who dares try it instead
Death Note should get a new series and it should be entirely about every evil billionaire currently alive in 2025
at the end of the series light becomes one of the god of deaths.
Death note would be impossible in current year. Like, your test use would have to be on a huge name otherwise your phone analytics would super rat you out. I can just imaging light starting to get ads for burner phones and VPNs.
just don’t Google them.
look
Ronald Reagan
It worked!
Just subscribe to a major newspaper and write down everyone who sucks.
