Death Note: How to Read 13
Nice pics of the collectors edition here
Spoilers abound, but you won’t be able to read it if you can’t read Japanese. Plus, L’s name revealed.
You’re gonna get spoilers here too, from Death Note: How to Read 13, so look away now if you don’t want them…
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Ok anyway,
So Misa commits suicide a year after Light’s Death.
Near becomes the new L (obviously), this is shown in the last manga.
The ownership of Death Note’s: Near owned Jealous’ deathnote, Light owned Rem’s Deathnote, but couldn’t use it for obvious reasons, Shidou (one of the shinigami) got his note back, the one Ryuk had tricked the king into giving him.
The Kira supporter with the candle at the end of the manga is not Misa. (Which means she is just an anonymous member of the Kira worshipping cult, to my best knowledge, no other background detail has been given).
Whose’s name is in which note:
Ryuk’s notebook : Yagami Light
Shidous notebook: (Mostly everyone that Light killed)
Jealous’ notebook: Mello, Rod Ross, Mafia, and some others.
Rem’s: L, Watari , and one other.
For a reader request,
Mello’s blood type is A,
Height: 171cm
Weight: 52kg
Near’s blood type is B
Height: 155cm Weight 40kg
Aw, Near is really little.
Though here is something unbelievable: Misa is 36kg. Cmon, Near is like so short and he’s 40kg and he’s not fat or anything, Misa is taller and not like anorexic. So I don’t think she’s 36kg ;p.
Misa- Blood Type A
Height: 152cm Weight 36kg
Death Note 33: Notes
The sub groups don’t seem to check their grammer.
03:20 Near:I am in Japan now
(not, ‘I’m going to come to Japan’). Note: this is really obv cos he just boarded the plane, so next time he would be in Japan right? Pay attention to what they are saying and what’s happening, translators!
Woohoo, I love Near’s Lego figurines 
To explain the message passed to Takada from Light:
“About T: He can have a different task. For the sake of creating the perfect Kira world, I would like you to pass judgement in the role of Kira.”
lit. he can have different work/job
Death Note 27 – Huh
Yeah, so what Light describes at 17:00 or so, is that Kira is infiltrating the police/has access to the police, and so they should split up and investigate. And noone reacted. Wtf. Are they stupid or something, noone can come up with that theory unless it was *cough killer, since Light was describing exactly what he did. Anyway, there’s only a few of them on the team, even the Yotsuda company managed to figure out who the killer was by deduction, but these guys can’t.
Death Note 17: kinda sucked
Ack, what a downer.
Was pretty splochy I think
Death Note 14: Notes
Random numbers?
Misa Amane
15 42 30 6
Yagami Light
9 3 30 26 31
“Justice”
What is Justice here?
Both L and Light have their own conception of “Justice”. Justice for Light is that criminals should die, and Justice for L is that people shouldn’t be killed and that Kira must be stopped. It’s a very different justice. Light’s ‘justice’ is idealistic, not realistic. Even if everyone feared a Kira, there would still be people doing bad things, and crimes. There are so many people out there, and people make mistakes. He himself becomes a hypocrite anyway, because he’s killing people for being murderers and criminals, while he himself is a mass-killer. L doesn’t want anyone to die, he values life. Just like the police chief (Light’s dad), etc, and other people in society, they all think Kira’s actions are evil… no matter if his motive was for his ideal of justice.
To the supporters of ‘Kira’:
You have to realise that we human beings, living in a society that has a sense of morality. We have already created a system to deal with criminals and catch crime (police etc). No matter how bad we think criminals are there is justice taking place everyday, under the judical system. Whatever system is put in place there are bound to be errors sometimes (guilty person let free under the judicial system, or ‘Kira’ killing innocent people, if for example, someone who was wrongly convicted).
Also, killing people is like letting them off their sentencing. Languishing in prison should be worse than death anyway, they have no freedom there, its boring, and they have basically no life. Letting them die is like not letting them learn a lesson or be truly punished for their crimes. Prison should be the right sentence for criminals, to keep the public safe, and to punish them.
Death Note Comic: OT notes
Ch.20 pg 6 – It should say Kira doesn’t like to lose right? Not doesn’t lose?
pg. 10 – What does this mean:
“Relax, Yagami, thought it’s true that Kira isn’t someone willing to take a loss in a competition, the will to win does not belong to him alone” <L says
Um, sorry? He’s talking in his head, to Light ? That doesn’t make sense. It should be something like “Relax, though it’s true Kira doesn’t like losing in any/a competition, it not just him that doesnt like losing. “
pg 16 they could have seperated the text in some way to be more readable instead of lining L’s text with Lights.
Chap25 pg 09 : “Someone used by Kira”
It’s not someone used by kira. It’s ‘fake’ kira.
Death Note 10: Spoilers, Notes
L: he’s very thorough when he thinks of everything.
Light still thinks he’s better than everyone else, and that the deathnote wont bring him misfortune in any way. Everyone else already suggest that it something bad will happen, even ryuk suggests so 
.Light thinks he’s perfect and in control. he wont believe that anything bad can happen, and he wont consider any situations where he will put himself into danger or the bad possibilities, he thinks he can get out of anything and that his plan will succeed.
In anycase, i think that Light is just 17 and he’s very optimistic about things. Like where other people would fear and think about the consequences of the death note, he immediately thinks of doing something ‘constructive’ with it, he’s very idealistic
and whenever he hears someones ‘name’ he’s kinda always like heh heh e verythings going to plan, i can kill them now with the note as if everyone were suckers. L wasnt
L is just as smart as Light is, but they reason differently
Light goes for the most obvious way, like kill the bad guys, world will be a better place, he doesnt think of it in other ways. Also wheneve rthere are ‘obstructions’ to his plan, he only plans killing them. I think L is wiser and more intelligent, because he can think of why killer wants to do this, and then reasons that its immature, etc, and that he thinks of really interesting ways to investigate Light, almost like some chess moves or something that makes him look vulnerable, when he’s being backed up by alot of things
and then Light realises this
cos when L reveals himself to Light, it makes him much harder to kill actually, to kill without consequences, which is what Light has to work out
but he was initially surprised that this guy in his university was L and that he suddenly introduced himself this way
L is very good in gathering information psychologically etc
L becomes the aggressor in this situation as Light tries to avoid any traps and work out how to play it so that hes not the killer
Light only thinks of this in a positive way, like that the world would be a better place.
like basically everyone’s telling him he’s ‘evil’ for doing this u know
From L’s tv broadcast, to his father
to Ryuk saying he’ll be the only one with a ‘bad personality’ left
Nearly everyone else is saying a similar message but he doesnt get it. There are other people that support his actions, but mostly school kids and stuff . ‘kira is killing the bad guys etc’ i mean, if u kill murderers, and u are a murderer, doesnt that make u bad also
but what everyone else is saying that by doing so he is the one who is evil
its saying hes a hypocrite
He kills killers, but he himself is a killer
Because to kill someone takes another person
His defense is always that its for ‘justice’ but its a justice with no morality or not the same morality that the police, and people like L have one that cares about other people, and their lives, no matter if they are criminals or not.
His morality is that he acts like god so that these criminals will be too scared to do anything, yeah it somehow works, but he ended up killing alot more than criminals, innocent people also.
I know the big difference between L and Light now. L tries to, and succeeds in finding win-win situations. Light on the other hand, finds win-lose situations, for example, to realise his ideal, he has to kill ‘bad guys’, people obstructing him, and people who might find him. L sets up situations where no matter how Light tries to act or get out of, will give L clues towards a lead.
Secondly, Light kills to cover his steps, which L tries to use damage control, like to stop as many deaths as possible
Death Note 9: Notes
Somewhere near 19:07, Ryuk is suggesting the eye deal, and then Light bursts out and says what if this is a trap and its not the real L, and that he would then be the prime suspect and
Ryuk says: “Uhh… would be bad” or “uh my bad” Kinda like sorry, but u know he’s not really ’sorry’ he’s just reacting to super-control freak Light, who makes Ryuk feel stupid cos Ryuk’s not gonna think as far ahead as Light does.
Reply to Death Note: Offical vs Fan Translations, FIGHT!
Read the Viz vs Fan translation Fight here.
There’s also a wonderful reply from native Japanese speaker
1. Just … I wonder why it is that in both
translations, Light talks about how the Death Note is in English, and that
its hard/a pain to read – when in ep 1 we see him
get questioned by the teacher on some complex
english and he can translate it without flinching
or really trying at all. You would think his English
is pretty good, and that the Death Note “how-to”
wasn’t that hard to read either.
2. Like you said, assurance is both
advantage and confidence. Assurance is even more
like confidence, in the sense of the word. The
‘advantage’ part only comes from having something
to his advantage, which isn’t translated by the
word assurance?
3a. No, its obvious they were referring to
‘existence and return’ as one phrase. It sounds
familiar right? Kind of like referring to the return of Jesus after his death. Maybe OT’s use of punctuation is a bit ambigious, but it wasn’t really that bad at all.
3b. Other than the terrible: ‘I took this out of the dictionary’ usage of the word “terminate”, there wasn’t much difference between the two, other than the awkward usage of “evildoers”; which makes it sound like Batman or something.
4. Humans are a riot vs “humans are interesting” by OT probably came from the misdirected translation of the Japanese word ‘omoshiroi’, which means either interesting or amusing. It’s not as if OT deliberately tried to change the words all the time, it just happened that they would translate words to one of several meanings in a dictionary.
It’s hard to tell whether Sayu said her brother was smart, or that he was a maths whiz. I don’t see much of a difference, though, or why that would matter, as it means something similar to be smart or a maths whiz, as smart people are probably good at maths if they studied. It seems perfectly normal to express either one, as a phrase to show awe for her brothers talents.
The ‘L’ and ‘Watari’ parts are where manga_talk have caught some errors. The biggest one being OT’s:
“Even Watari doesn’t know who L is.”
Ofcourse he knows who L is, we see that in the series. There are other mistakes – obviously some mistranslation that are blatant errors.
5.
Viz vs OT in the ‘dirty magazine with Sayu scene’:
I think the poor part of the translation was the word ‘any’. I don’t think a 13 year old girl is gonna say it like she’s looking for dirty pictures.
Maybe it was a typo on OT’s part.
I enjoyed the essay, but I think OT’s translation shouldn’t be OVER-analysed to what ‘this and that’ might mean.
a) There are mistakes.
b) We shouldn’t assume that everything they wrote there was trying to portray Light in a certain way. Basically, some of the English in the OT is a bit unnatural anyway, and I’m sure that’s not deliberate. So we shouldn’t assume they were trying to paint Light in one way or another, when they were only translating to the best of their capabilities, what was written on the pages. If they make mistakes, its human. There’s not much to debate about, except to call for more fluent Japanese translators to devote their time to scanlations (of which there are not many, because you need people with a lot of time who are extremely fluent in both English and Japanese).
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~onyabear/deathnotecompare/0005.jpg
This is a good example of a better translation from Viz, simply because the English is smoother.
“there’re so many people who would make the world a better place by dying” isn’t exactly a natural sentence. It’s too clunky. but u basicaly know what they tried to mean. Basically, OT is a very direct translation that sometimes can’t put sentences into better-sounding English. Viz provides both a cultural and smooth translation, because they have several editors, and people very fluent in japanese and english and who can translate and cross-check. Not the same in a scanlation team… no budget, less professional staff.
On the god topic:
At least Viz did mention god then. Even if they
said ‘like’. Like is close enough. It seemed
that Viz was not trying to avoid using the word
god, it was more than OT had mistranslated some
stuff AS God, instead of for example, superhero.
6. Hands
Why would you write something about killing people
‘with your own two hands’ if u didnt literally
touch them, for example, because you killed them
through a proxy? Just because you stare at your
hands doesnt mean you killed someone with two
hands. Maybe you could plausibly go for one hand
cos he used it to write in the death note. It’s
not necessary to go for cliches, in fact, its best
avoided. killing people or doing anything ‘with
your own 2 hands ‘ is said WAY too much.
I agree that “I am… JUSTICE!” sounds better.
In conclusion
