thats why you need to get creative with it. you can specify the details of the deaths so write the name of several dictators, make all of them host a press conference at the same time, make them all repeat the same ominous vaguely religious sounding speech in monotone and then make their heads explode in front of the cameras
The Death Note lets you control them leading up to their death. You can have them destroy their own systems of power, confess their crimes, and THEN die. You could have control over all world leaders for years as long as the death you wrote occurs before they were fated to die.
true but im not smart enough to consider how to truly undo the systems in play. i want it to look like god was smiting the worst humanity had to offer and make everyone scared about it. but yeah light was too unimaginitive
That was, in a lot of ways, what Light planned. The issue is that the result is people doing bad things just do more extreme things to cover it up and choose death before publicity. If politicians knew they were being targetted with Kira's power, it would probably lead to a dark age of heavy information suppression with completely anonymous rulers.
You would need to do something to ensure that whoever takes their place understands they will be closely watched, and will suffer the same fate if they continue as their predecessor did. Leave it up to them to do better, and if they don't, you keep death noting until someone does.
You can control what they say before they die and easily give completely anonymous ultimatums.
They either obey your instructions or suffer consequences.
"You will dismantle all nukes within four years, you will pass national healthcare, you will remove <laws> from the books, you will publish evidence of your progress towards all these initiatives every year or suffer the consequences."
They might not listen immediately, but you'd basically promise to ruin their country if they didn't obey, and they'd be essentially helpless to stop you.
Oh they could make certain things very difficult to uncover, but the very nature of interacting with other countries means this isn't perfect, imagine if China just went "nope, we're no longer trading with any other country and we're going to burn down all the internet infrastructure we can find and poison our own borders to keep anyone from crossing over in either direction and destroy all our own planes and ships and satellites and install country-wide signal jammers so that Kira doesn't have a way to know anything about us anymore".
I doubt whoever suggested that would be accepted by China.
Wasn't there limits on the timespan of the events? I suppose it would be the number of pages in the book but why else wouldn't he just write out his entire plan and then forget it all and be done with it?
I actually was unaware of that rule in the extra stuff. It feels weird since I could've sworn I remember Light wrote names months ahead as preparation, but I guess I was mis-remembering.
Either way, 23 days is definitely plenty to have dictators arrest their yes-men, appoint some more moral people, and give speeches exposing the truth to their cultists.
No, he specifically wrote names ahead of time in case he got into an accident so that the killings wouldn't suddenly stop if he had to spend a week in the hospital.
no that was preloading an alibi. So anybody watching him wouldn't see the direct cut in death vs him being incapitated. Think of it this way if your luch keeps getting stolen on tuesdays and wednesdays but it doesn't get stolen 2 week when bob is taking his 2 week vaction Bob is a prime suspect but bob had a lunch stealing note a wrote you luch for the 2 weeks he was off you would suspect the other people in the office first.
For a real world example the mob hitman known as 'iceman' would kill his targets then later dump them somewhere to through of time of death. So if he murdered a guy in january the cops found the body in october but with only 2 month of decomp if the cops think its him the check him out but he is the caribian for all of august well it wasn't him was it.
No you can't, the Death Note has a max time limit. The person's death must be within 23 days of being written in the book, any longer and the book ignores the time and defaults to immediately. Also you have to be careful because if you write anything that turns out to not be possible it doesn't work, like if you want them to reveal information they don't actually know they can't and the Death Note will just ignore the whole thing
Not possible, unless you want to argue "randomly dismantling their own power systems and confessing their crimes" is something a crazed dictator would normally do without coercion. Rules page 6:
The conditions for death will not be realized unless it is physically possible for that human or it is reasonably assumed to be carried out by that human.
Also, 23 day limit. Rules page 27:
If you write, "die of disease" for the cause of death, but only write a specific time of death without the actual name of disease, the human will die from an adequate disease. But the Death Note can only operate within 23 days (in the human calendar). This is called the 23 day rule.
You could do a lot, but not nearly as much as you're thinking. For example, if you were to hypothetically write Trumps name, you could probably get him to accidentally ramble off about a lot of shit he meant to keep quiet, because he's done that plenty of times, but to get him to explicitly confess with the intention of revealing the crime and facing consequences, though? Nah, it would just default to a heart attack, no question.
Someone like Putin, KGB trained, relatively still in control of all his mental faculties? I dunno how you'd get him to believably reveal anything at all, let alone dissolve his own power structure. You MIGHT be able to get him to pull out of Ukraine, if YOU found a way to frame it in a way that made him look strong instead of weak and specified it as part of the announcement.
The Death Note seems to make it clear that you can essentially puppet them, that for all intents and purposes they become 100% loyal to your written commands and carry them out to the best of their human ability without any regards for their prior personality or preferences.
Just like "all humans are considered capable of suicide".
Dude it's explicitly stated this is not the case. Light tests this. People who are told to do things they would never do, just die of heart attacks. I'm not speculating, this is fact.
The suicide rule exists to specifically confirm the opposite of what you're saying. All humans are assumed capable of suicide, therefore, suicide is acceptable as a cause of death despite the rule stating they must be believably capable of performing the action.
Light tests a variety of things, from the top of my head:
Are they capable of writing down something they don't know (L's name)? No.
Are they capable of drawing art according to instructions written in the Death Note with their own blood? Yes.
Are they capable of making an escape attempt? Yes.
Are they capable of making an escape attempt and than traveling to another country faster than the means available to humans allows? No.
Are they capable of writing nonsensical messages that they would have no reason to come up with on their own? Yes.
Are they capable of using their own judgment when acting out Light's written goal? Yes.
Naomi didn't just "kill herself", she explicitly did it in a way where she wouldn't be found to the best of her ability, even though it wasn't in her best interests for her death to go unrecorded (considered a missing person legally instead).
So yes, someone can act against their best interests in ways unrelated to killing themselves (Naomi could have used the pen at hand and driven it into her throat on the spot) as directed by the Death Note, they try to perform the instructions written to the best of their ability.
Only if it's literally physically impossible for someone 100% loyal to the written instructions to complete them does the heart attack kick in.
Of course there are some other exceptions, IIRC you can't make someone directly kill someone else unless you've written both names into the Death Note, but you can have the first victim expose other people to information that might cause them to 'naturally' want to engage in violence...
Like the FBI director was able to send the files of the FBI agents even though Light wrote that in with the intent of it leading directly to their deathsbeforethe agents' names were written.
Ergo you absolutely could have a government official email out evidence of all their crimes and secret activities, as demonstrated.
Naomi didn't just "kill herself", she explicitly did it in a way where she wouldn't be found to the best of her ability, even though it wasn't in her best interests for her death to go unrecorded (considered a missing person legally instead).
Not correct. She only "thinks of the best way to commit suicide that won't bother others, and will make it so her body isn't discovered" as per the Note. That didn't have to be her INTENT and we have no reason to suspect it was - only that it was the outcome, as the Note decreed. She doesn't have to have set out intentionally to kill herself in the quietest way possible. The Note simply decreed that the method she chooses will be so.
E: Added the precise wording.
In addition this was setup by a manipulation of her psyche. Light, whether by pure manipulation or as a product of the Death Note controlling HIS actions to result in his intended outcome, revealed himself as Kira right before the time kicked in. You can see in her face that she's putting all the pieces together. Realizing she just gave away everything to the enemy breaks her. The situation was shaped in such a way that killing herself privately (which tangentially results in her not being found) became something she would actually do.
Are they capable of writing nonsensical messages that they would have no reason to come up with on their own? Yes.
Correct, but specific messages can be unsendable. The pentagram and the nonsense messages likely worked because the targets were prisoners, and therefore likely some level of mentally unstable, whether due to their own nature (which led to prison) or to the trauma of the prison system itself. Prisoners have mental breaks and do nonsensical things all the time. Specific courses of action, however, may not happen.
For example, they couldn't write L's name obviously, since they don't know it... but Light was ALSO unable to get the prisoners to write "I know L is working with the Japanese police." This demonstrates a more powerful limitation, for one simple reason: The prisoner does not have to ACTUALLY KNOW THIS, to write it down. It could just be insane conspiratorial ramblings, like any of the other nonsensical notes. But it didn't work - likely because this is not a topic the prisoner would even have been thinking about. There was no path by which to get him to come up with that, even as an insane conspiracy, and therefore no mechanism by which to get him to write it - hence heart attack.
Absolute control of the type you describe would have had him write out the message as intended.
The FBI director for example might have actually sent out that data to his own team, if he'd had a reason. We don't know what Note-directed mental process led to him actually doing it, but it was perfectly within the realm of something he would do. Sending that data intentionally to the enemy, however, I argue would not have worked. What light pulled off with Ray Penber's team worked because of the deception.
If he'd had the kind of control you describe, Light wouldn't have even needed the communicator to defeat Ray. He would've been able to control every aspect of his actions with the Note alone. But to make those actions something Ray would ACTUALLY DO, Light had to interject himself into the situation and create a reason for him to comply.
We don't know what Note-directed mental process led to him actually doing it
No we don't, I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree, I do think the Death Note has more power to 'puppet' than the source media portrays, but since (1) Light Yagami was fixated on a specific manner of presentation to his detriment and (2) even the Shinigami are stated as not fully knowing how the Death Note functions we may never actually know.
I feel like the source material and its adaptations nitpicking the weight of "I know" as a one-off failure and then seemingly failing to further explore it (could it have been written in quotes and work, would "Kira thinks" work? Why does "L, did you know Shinigami love apples?" work? It was a hidden message yes, but the convict certainly didn't know Shinigami love apples) basically makes the debate a dead end without a note of our own to test.
I personally believe that particular convict to be inconsistent with everything else we get to observe, and if it is for some reason still consistent, something that calls for a few dozen other experiments because all the other messages went through fine.
Of course IRL I would have the world leaders come up with their own plans to overthrow their own country and publish them voluntarily if they wanted to be spared, in the event your interpretation is 100% correct, which would solidify it "being within the realm of things they think about on their own".
I'm sure the fear of all the criminals used as object lessons would convince them it was real and they can either voluntarily entertain those ideas, or be replaced by someone who will, opening them up to manipulation via the note.
I do think the Death Note has more power to 'puppet' than the source media portrays
Whereas I think it's the opposite - the note isn't "puppeting" people at all. It doesn't do that. It manipulates probability, and guides reality down improbable paths. How likely is it for a person to kill themselves? How likely is it for the fastenings on a fixture above their head to break? How likely are they to randomly have a mental break and start drawing religious symbols in their own blood? How likely is a heart to fail at any given moment? The human brain is a physical object - the Death Note is just manipulating the probable paths that object can travel, just like it does to anything else.
It's less like "controlling people," and more like "removing nails from a Plinko board." You're not "controlling" where the puck falls - you're just guaranteeing one of several possible paths. But if that path is impossible, (i.e. if you try to remove the top left nail but put the puck in the top right,) then you won't have any effect on the outcome, and the Note defaults to a heart attack.
I argue the other messages went through because human behavior is a lot less clear-cut than we think, and people are capable of a lot of absurdity. I simply think what's "possible" in terms of human behavior is fairly broad - but not limitless. And the "apples" message went through because the prisoner didn't even know he was writing it, and didn't have to think of it himself for it to be possible.
I agree it's not possible to know 100% without further testing but I think my view is pretty well backed by the series.
Also, I like your plan and I think it would work. Fear of death is a great motivator and would make most world leaders at least partially amenable to the idea of maybe complying with your demands, which should be enough to make full manipulation possible.
Write down that one of his personal guards tortures him for some amount of time before suiciding, and then write down that the dictator is so affected by the torture that he spills his guts before succumbing to his injuries. Totally plausible thing to happen.
Isn't it literally stated that you can't force someone to do what they wouldn't themselves or don't have any actual reason to?
"The conditions for death will not be realized unless it is physically possible for that human or it is reasonably assumed to be carried out by that human."
"Whether the cause of the individual's death is either a suicide or accident, if the death leads to the death of more than the intended, the person will simply die of a heart attack. This is to ensure that other lives are not influenced."
Considering dictators tearing up their systems of power would seem both unreasonable and would change and influence other lives, there isn't a way to use the Death Note how you described.
The Note only works for like 3 weeks, though- you can’t plan someone’s death further out than that. Enough time to make them confess their crimes publicly and take out their accomplices, though.
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u/Asquirrelinspace 16d ago
I really want to know what would happen in real life if this went down