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  • I've set things up so theories will continue to appear over the next three weeks. Just watch me theorists...

  • I'll make dinner with my right hand and write theories with my left. I'll take a potato chip and EAT IT.

  • I'll take my leftovers and REHEAT IT. I'll play Mario and BEAT IT.

  • I'll open the script for Doctor Who part three... *laughing*

  • -and COMPLETE IT. Well, maybe not that last one...

  • *Film Theory Intro* I love how you made this Mat.

  • Hello internet! Welcome to Film Theory.

  • So, here's a fun fact. When I'm at conventions, one of the most popular things

  • I'm asked to sign are people's recently purchased Death Notes.

  • It makes me wonder whether they're fans of the show or just haters who want to end the channel...

  • *ominous music* By any means necessary...

  • Either way, I'm totally in the clear since I don't take chances and sign with a misspelling of my name.

  • It's totally true! The paranoia is real!!

  • Seriously, if you have ever asked me to sign your Death Note, check it out.

  • Usually, what I do is I attach a little bit of extra text to the end where I'm like

  • "Ha, ha, This isn't how I actually spell my name."

  • Also, side note, apologies to any "Matt Pats" out there who spell their name with a double T.

  • Anyway, today we're talking about Death note since Netflix just released a live-action Death Note movie

  • and since I'm writing this episode before it comes out, let me just cover my bases here.

  • "Man, It was the worst! I mean, L in public, Light second-guessing himself,

  • I can't believe that they didn't stay true to the original anime!"

  • Or..

  • "Wow! It was so great, right? Ryuk was PERFECT and they nailed Misa's character."

  • Sorry, I hate to make you guys work like that

  • But I thank you for going the extra mile and inserting the appropriate of the two responses.

  • So let me just put this out there: I love, LOVE the original anime!

  • It's like 25 of the best written episodes ever put to a TV screen.

  • "But Matpat there are actually 37 episodes."

  • Like I said, 25 of the most tense, densely plotted episodes ever put to air.

  • For those of you unfamiliar, main character Light Yagami has it all;

  • the top grades in his class the attention of all his female

  • classmates and a magical notebook that has the ability to kill people when he writes their names in it. Okay.

  • So, one of those things is not quite like the others. Unlike most people who get kind of icky over the prospect of killing people

  • with the flick of a pen, Light sees this as his opportunity to

  • Purify the world of Evil. Taking out all the world's criminals and in the process becoming the vigilante known as Kira. And no,

  • That's not a racist way of saying killer. His name is actually Kira. Along the way,

  • He attracts copycat killers and plays an intense game of Cat-And-Mouse against the Brilliant deductive mind of a mysterious

  • Detective known only as L. It is without

  • Question my favorite anime. But as I get ready to watch the Netflix movie, it suddenly occurred to me

  • We spend so much time zoomed in on the personal conflicts between Light and L, that we as the audience

  • Lose sight the larger conflict here just how many killings are happening over the course of the series light has some epic montage

  • Sequences well about is that because you can get when the action consists of writing people's names down the entire point of these?

  • Montages is to illustrate the extent of these killing sprees

  • but when it comes to the question of how many

  • Names were actually written into the death note things kind of get blurry so today

  • I'm working to get the best estimate possible for how many lives like cut short during his reign as Kira now

  • I say estimate since most of his killing occurs off screen meaning we can never get a hundred percent accurate number that said though

  • We can get close if we know one the duration of time during which Kira's active and to the rate at which, Kira Kills

  • So number one how long does Kira kill for well?

  • It's a simple question that has a complicated answer you see for one thing

  • There are a total of four people who operate under the Kira alias at one point or another as light creates these

  • Complex Notebook handoffs and his attempt to evade capture making matters worse

  • Is that sometimes multiple Kira's are active at the same time with as many as three death notes at play?

  • Fortunately we have access to the complete time-stamped list of all the major events that happen throughout the series

  • Thanks to the handy time line that was printed in the bonus thirteenth volume of the manga and it bears mentioning that yes

  • This is a timeline covering the manga however it tells the exact same story as the anime only time shifted three years earlier because it

  • Came out first. They kept the months and days consistent from Manga to anime only changing the year by three years

  • So really the absolute time that Kira is active remains the same so now spoiler alert

  • I'm about to show you a timeline mapping out the whole series so go binge watch it, and then come back here seriously

  • It'll be a great weekend activity for you everyone back great and here

  • It is yep

  • It is a lot six years of killing spread across four main Kira's using three separate notebooks and a partridge in a pear tree

  • Add to that the police the mafia and hoo boy it is more confusing than light playing musical notebooks in the woods

  • But at this point

  • we have a solid idea of how long each of the kira's was an operation as expected light was the longest at

  • 2030 three Total days Second Kira model and actress, Misa

  • Amane is only active for 60 seven days primarily because she was less interested in killing for justice and more interested in getting into lights

  • life Lights life Kyousuke-shi Gucci is Kira 3.0 active for

  • 136 days and finally Tear Tomica me a devoted disciple of Tierra holds the note for the shortest amount of time only 61 days

  • But he's also the most enthusiastic

  • about it

  • Well, ho backspace on up there buddy because now that we know who had a death note and for how long we can calculate how

  • Many people each of them killed based on their rates of killing man if this video doesn't get flagged by YouTube's as being an advertiser

  • Unfriendly, it will be a miracle

  • So the key to estimating lights rate of killing lies in this first encounter with Ryu late shinigami or god of death when Ryo first

  • Appears we learned that lights been writing the names of criminals in the death note for five days several death notes

  • Have made their way into the human world in the past

  • But you're the first to a britain has many names look at how many people you killed in only five days

  • The show gives us a glimpse of his open notebook where we can observe that he writes names divided into four Columns and 39 Rows

  • each that's a total of

  • 156 names per page that clip also shows us that lights already completed two full pages a total of three hundred and twelve names if

  • We take the lowball estimate and assume that light only has filled those two pages in the five days then the average

  • Comes out to sixty two point four names per day now realize that this is only an average light obviously isn't writing exactly

  • 62 names every single day for instance there's one day where he kills exactly 24 criminals one every hour to make a very specific point?

  • To L and then on the days where he's under surveillance he probably kills fewer criminals

  • But we also know that light likes to cue up criminals to die even on days when he's not

  • diligently writing names in his death note

  • So what matters here is the average not the exact he writes down on any given day so that?

  • 62.4 is a good baseline then comes the five year intermission after light defeats L, during which light is acting completely

  • Uncontested assuming the role of Kyra and knight and the role of the new L

  • During the day and as he can imagine since he's a serial killer leading a task force out to catch him

  • He's not too good at his day job during this period A narrator tells us that the Kira killings accelerate in the summer according to

  • his killings increased at an unprecedented rate its first five days as Kira are a pretty good representation of what an

  • Unimpeded Kira looks like he comes from from school does his homework and then spends the rest of his free time

  • Writing names in his notebook like a lovesick middle schooler when like two feet zell

  • He still has to perform his day job with the police task force and at night Misa is also distracting him wink wink

  • Don't you hate it when the blonde actress slash model who adores everything that you do pulls you away from your nightly killing spree

  • So let's assume that the rate of his killings during this period Doubles per day

  • It's nothing too extreme just an extra 60 or so names at night because he has misa helping him do research running those numbers across

  • This two thousand Thirty three days as Kira gives us two hundred and forty two

  • Thousand one hundred and Twelve names in the book hold up two hundred and forty two

  • thousand approximately sixty two names per day times 365 days

  • Doubling for when L is defeated and run back for five years yeah that number checks out

  • And that's a conservative estimate think about that two hundred thousand names

  • That's more than the populations of forty seven separate countries in fact near the end of the series near yeah

  • His name is actually near calls the death note the deadliest weapon of Mass murder in the history of Mankind

  • That's a pretty tall order, but when you actually look at the numbers. It's true the third death note alone

  • The one light yagami used during his five years

  • uncontested killed more people than the atomic bomb dropped on hiroshima at the end of world war two which was itself the

  • Single deadliest attack in recorded history in the end. You're nothing more than a crazy serial killer

  • No, light is much more dangerous the term serial killer specifically excludes war crimes and government sanctioned killings and by that definition

  • Kira comes out on top by A

  • huge Margin some of the deadliest serial killers in recorded history Luis Guerra Beto and pedro Lopez have fewer than

  • 200 known victims while Kira's number in the hundreds of thousands even the deadliest conventional serial killers are around only

  • One-tenth of one percent as deadly as Kira, and that is just light

  • We still have three other kilos uh Kira's

  • To discuss mises number is just a drop in the bucket compared to lights killing spree only around

  • 400 she had a short run and only killed for attention any killings that she does do during that five year intermission period Are more

  • For helping out lights total because he's the type of person who wouldn't allow that power to anyone else

  • He probably wants to save her all that writing to himself and as we see during the montage for that segment

  • They're both on computers together researching

  • But he's the only one that we ever see writing names when the audience learns that Gucci is the third Kira

  • We see his notebook laid out on the table

  • And it shows that he's written a total of 64 names 16 rows across four columns if that's what's in a day's work for

  • Higuchi

  • Then that would make his daily body count almost

  • Exactly the same as what we calculated for light earlier an average of 64 names per day times

  • 136 Days works out to eight thousand seven hundred and four people dead at a Higuchi's hands. And lastly taro Myka me out of all

  • The Kira's Mikami holds his death note for the fewest number of days

  • But he fills in one page per day. That might not sound like much,

  • but one page for Mikami is serious business. With over six columns and

  • Seventy-six Rows per page Mikami is executing a whopping

  • 456 people every Single Day

  • I'm not sure what's more Impressive?

  • the number of names that mikami manages to write every day or that he manages to squeeze them all in there?

  • Maybe might not be the brightest when it comes to executing light's strategy,

  • but you've got to give this guy points for penmanship! With a total of 61 active days mikami's total kill count tallies in at

  • 27,816!

  • 27,000 people in two months! So to recap our tallies are Light Yagami, 242,112

  • Misa Amane, 392

  • Kyosuke Higuchi, 8704

  • And Teru Mikami, 27,816

  • adding up to just under 280,000

  • total victims

  • 280,000 people dead!

  • To give you a point of comparison, that is just shy of the

  • 300,000 Americans who died during World War one.

  • The only wars to kill more U.S soldiers were world war one, two, and the Civil war

  • And remember, this estimate is a conservative number we don't see proof of it

  • but misa could absolutely be more active during that five year intermission if light allowed her to be

  • And light himself could definitely be more aggressive in his writing

  • if he wanted to be. For an even better comparison of the vastness of the number of people these guys are killing, consider this.

  • When we see lights notebook open, Yes

  • We see some western names

  • But there's also a few names written in

  • Japanese. This makes total sense since the series is set in Japan and lights first language is Japanese

  • So it would just be an easier place for him to Target

  • In 2009 Japan's Prison population was seventy five thousand two hundred fifty.

  • Just a fourth of Kira's Total kill count in other words during his six years

  • He could have exterminated Japan's entire prison population and still had time to deal with the rest of the world's criminals

  • that said the U.S has a

  • Few more people in prison. Two million two hundred seventy thousand to be exact so even if Kira's efforts were entirely

  • Concentrated on the U.S, It would have only been around thirteen percent of the total us prison population

  • Furthermore worldwide there are eight hundred and seventy four thousand one hundred people murdered last year

  • Holy Jeez that's a huge number

  • So even if Kira only targeted murders his total number of killings over six years

  • Would only be thirty two percent of the total number of murders in one year. Ho Boy

  • Hide your kids, hide your wives. Hide your kids, hide your wives.

  • The world is kind of a scary place sometimes.

  • And I gotta be honest. Light, for all his purging the world talk, made it a bit

  • Scarier. You see, even though he sees himself as the embodiment of justice..

  • I am..

  • I am..

  • Justice!

  • He kills innocents along the way in order to stay out of prison

  • Raye Penber, Raye's fiancee, 11 FBI agents that were sent to investigate him,

  • L, Watari, then of course the killings that were done by the other Kiras!

  • Light justifies these deaths as

  • Necessary in his quest to bring peace to the world,

  • And in truth, those people make up only 1/10 of 1% of Kira's total death toll

  • But is he right in this assessment?When we say that Kira killed

  • 279,024 criminals, that's under the assumption that all of those people were guilty!

  • But what light doesn't take into account, are false convictions. Which happen more frequently than you might think. According to the national registry of exonerations,

  • The number of Prisoners being released as their crimes are disproven has been increasing since

  • 2011 a rate of 3 exonerations per week. Other criminal Justice studies have shown that in the U.S.

  • specifically as many as 4 point 1 percent of death row inmates in the us might be innocent. And that's only in the U.S, and

  • Only for people who've been convicted. We know that in some cases, Kira

  • Simply Targets suspects. If four percent of the people Kira sends to death would have later been exonerated that means Kira has killed over

  • 11,000 innocent victims. Not quite the drop in the bucket that light seems to think it is there's also plenty of other issues that exist

  • In the criminal justice system. For example in the U.S,

  • 94 percent of all cases are decided by Plea bargains. Where people confess guilt to a lesser crime to avoid the risk of being convicted

  • Of something more serious, even if they're not guilty at all!

  • They just don't want to run the risk or waste the time in trial

  • Some estimates put the number of Innocents who are currently serving prison time due to plea bargains at around

  • 20,000 and Japan has a BIG problem with wrongful convictions. Suspects arrested for questioning can be held up to

  • 23 days during which the suspect isn't allowed to have contact with an attorney

  • There's even one case where a prosecutor threatened to kill a suspect during his interrogation

  • Japan's conviction Rate is, get this...

  • 99.8%!!!

  • Let me make this easy for you. If you're in court in a japanese courtroom,

  • You are going to prison.

  • Just stop wasting your time get started on your prison sentence and get it over with faster

  • It's a system where guilty until proven innocent really prevails. And in Kira's eyes,

  • They're all guilty, regardless of the evidence! By the end of the series people and governments

  • just send him names! With light killing hundreds of thousands of people, you think he's got time to check each and every one?

  • So whats the upshot here? Is Kira Truly justice?

  • well

  • Let me give you the numbers and you can go debate it in the comments. Near the end of the anime we find out that

  • By the end of Kira's six year reign the world's violent crime rate has fallen by 70%

  • Since Kiras appearance six years ago, wars have stopped. And global crime rates have been reduced by over 70 percent

  • A 70% decrease in the number of Worldwide Murders would Decrease the number of killings in a given year

  • By 611,870. So by killing an average of

  • 46,500 people per year, around two thousand of those being innocent, Kira prevented over six hundred thousand murders

  • Every single year, and that's not even mentioning all the other violent crime that went down

  • This is the Dilemma of Death Note.

  • Light is clearly, clearly a villain saying he's driven by a better world when in actuality his ego and lust for power are his true driving

  • Motivations and yet, you can't deny, He got results

  • So was he right all along? The show provides No clear answers and remember, it's all just fiction

  • But it raises a great debate a debate that hopefully I was able to help you out with by providing more accurate numbers

  • So you can assess the situation and although I can't answer any of those questions definitively for you

  • I can at least present you with one final and slightly lighter question related to death note

  • Could Kira kill Goku?

  • Spoiler alert the answer is obviously yes

  • but go ahead! Debate it in the comments 'cuz remember it's all just a theory! A film theory! aanndd

  • cut

  • Pretty good video, huh?

  • I really enjoyed it

  • So.... umm....

  • You could check out some more of his videos right there...

  • Or subscribe..

  • Well the videos ending now so ill see you later.

I've set things up so theories will continue to appear over the next three weeks. Just watch me theorists...

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