One nice thing about having a really long commute is the insane amount of reading you can get done.

One nice thing about having a really long commute is the insane amount of reading you can get done. I finished all twelve volumes of Death Note in about five days (although the days were spread out over two weeks, because I had to wait for my requests ermahgerd to process at the library). Such a good read, such an effing good read. Why didn't I read this before!? To tell the truth, I'm not what you would consider a big animanga fan, especially when compared to my college roommates, who actually kept up with currently airing/published stuff. Up until high school, the only anime I had watched was whatever was showing on Kids! WB after school (i.e. the dubbed versions of Sailor Moon, Pokémon, and Yu-Gi-Oh!). Then I checked out Code Geass , which I ended up really liking, even though the genre and style is completely different from the series I watched as a kid. One of my roomies later discovered that I liked Code Geass and made an offhand comment about how I should check out Death Note. I didn't pay much attention at the time, but one day I saw the first volume at the library and decided, what the heck, might as well fill up my commute time with this. Aaand... the rest is history. Looking back, I can see why my roommate recommended it to me: the basic premise is very similar to that of Code Geass, and there are definitely similarities between Light/Kira and Lelouch/Zero, not to mention their friend-or-enemy relationship with L and Suzaku respectively. So I think that was a huge draw for me -- seeing something familiar but done in such a different way that I was still interested. Obviously, Suzaku is nowhere near as intelligent as L, but the character dynamics between Light and L were done just as superbly as between Lelouch and Suzaku. Unfortunately, the rest of the characters in Death Note I wasn't so keen about, for the most part. I have a looong list of characters I love from Code Geass, simply because almost all of the characters ermahgerd are interesting in some way. Death Note... not so much. I loved L, Light, and Ryuk, which I guess is good since they're the main players, but mostly ermahgerd everyone who was introduced starting from the Near/Mello ermahgerd arc seemed very meh to me. And the difficult, but brilliant, thing about reading Death Note was that I wanted both L and Light to win (similar to Lelouch and Suzaku), which made me much more invested in the story. I couldn't have cared less about Near and Mello, which makes the dynamic much less interesting. As for the sexism in the manga... yeahhhh... it was annoying, to put it lightly. I think I've tried to delete most of it from my memory, because usually the story would be going fine, and then some random sexist comment would come up and give everything a sour aftertaste. What annoyed me most was that the sexism ermahgerd was portrayed as perfectly natural -- which I guess is possible, seeing as it's Japan, but it reallllly put a damper on things at times. It also made me a lot less sympathetic toward Raye Penber, which I don't think was the intention. The general lack of interesting females was also a bit of a disappointment. It's nothing I'm not used to -- Code Geass was dominated by males (but at least had some cool females), and let's not even talk about YGO. But the only female I really connected with in Death Note was Naomi Misora, which means the scene in the gif above just about gutted me. (I'm watching the anime as well, even though it's more or less the same thing as the manga... just can't get enough of this story.) I thought Rem was cool as well, but she was definitely overshadowed by Ryuk, and well, look how she turned out. I at first thought Mello was a girl, which piqued my interest, but then he turned out to be a boring guy, so snore. ermahgerd But despite the blatant sexism and the dragginess of the Near/Mello arc, I did enjoy reading Death Note as a whole. The art was also amazing -- that scene in the gif above, when Light reveals that he's Kira to Naomi... I stared at that panel in the manga volume for so long and then came back and reread that scene after I finished the volume. The look in Light's ermahgerd eyes then (I really like his eyes, btw)... so chilling, and yet so fascinating... And the ending definitely made me tear up, when they showed a flashback to Light and Ryuk's first conversation -- "It just means there is no heaven or hell, right?" -- and oh my god Light's puppy-dog eyes and his naive arrogance and naive sense of justice... ermahgerd I was pretty much losing it already when Light started freaking out and begging Ryuk, but that one flashback just about killed me. Expect me to weep buckets when I reach the end of the anime. To end things on a happier note... here's L eating Hello Panda. ermahgerd
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!picspam !recaps !translations actor: baron chen 陳楚河 actor: chris wu 吳慷仁 actor: godfrey gao 高以翔 actor: hu ge 胡歌 actor: huang xiaoming 黃曉明 actor: jones xu/izz tsui 徐正曦/徐正希 actor: kingone wang 王傳一 actor: ermahgerd nicky wu 吳奇隆 actor: peter ho 何潤東 actor: rhydian vaughan 鳳小岳 actor: roy chiu 邱澤 a