Lawlight But Its Yotsuba Arc And Light Is A Professional Boxer

lawlight but its yotsuba arc and light is a professional boxer

so an AU where this punch absolutely destroys L instead. an AU where it fucking kills him. you want L to die. I see how it is

Scheherezade

Here’s a short piece about Ryuk and Light and what it means to be a Greek chorus of one watching a tragedy in the making.

In truth, Ryuk isn’t sure if he could kill to save Light anymore, not without dying.

Ryuk loves him, in his own way — not as romance, and not as a parent loves a child, but as a precious thing to be witnessed and treasured. His moonlit pet, brilliant and hollow. He speaks with his eyes shut, thinking of distant things, and sleeps with his whole body beneath the blankets. When he pulls out his pen to kill, he twirls it twice, then falls silent as he scrolls through pages and pages of information, making his judgements.

He is seventeen years old. He is proud that he does his own laundry. Last week he spent thirty-seven minutes deciding whether or not to spare a triple-murderer for the sake of her pupal daughter, index finger pressed along the length of his lip, then wrote the name in a series of quick, deliberate strikes and turned the page with nothing more than a beat for the ink to dry.

Humans are filthy and depraved things, that’s what Ryuk has learned since he came down to their world, and Light is such a wonderful specimen of the species. He grows like a flower through shit.

Shinigami are not in the business of chronicling the lives of human beings, but Ryuk keeps a record of Light anyway. He stores it within the tunnels of his own mind. Perhaps one day he will repeat it to someone else and Light’s story will live on, but probably he’ll keep it just for himself.

Light doesn’t belong to the world. He’s made this very clear. He stands separate from it, declaring himself above and apart. He belongs, instead, to Ryuk. He doesn’t have friends anymore; he has only their talks at night, and the long walks to and from the school where Light learns about mathematics and emperors and kings.

Someday Ryuk will kill him. He’ll scrawl down his name and his heart will stop. He wasn’t there for the start, but he’ll be there to witness the end. This is how it should be. It is a promise and a mercy which Ryuk has designed: Light Yagami will not die alone.

jujutsu kaisen is about two men with such godawful personalities that they are literally the only people who can stand each other. and then they break up and decide to make it everyone else’s problem

here are my favourite recurring light yagami behaviours:

- *hysterical screaming tantrum* *sudden perfect calm* literally no transition between the two

- responding to a direct question by staring at his hands for five minutes while he thinks of the perfect non-suspicious response, then not actually saying the response out loud

- putting on a performance for the truman show

- alien emulating human behaviour by reading the wikipedia page, convinced he’s doing a bang-up job

- the sincere and unironic belief that adultery will make him look less suspicious

here is my hot take: any reading of death note that doesn’t take into account light’s queerness is shallow and incoherent.

here is my even hotter take: it doesn’t actually matter whether or not this was intentional or whether or not light, the person, is a member of the lgbt+ community; the important thing is that light, the character and the construct, is queer.

ohba and obata weren’t writing in a vacuum. knowingly or unknowingly, they used themes from queer literature and culture to create light. this is a character who is so adverse to sexual and romantic connections with women that he endangers his own life; whose sole request for genuine affection over twelve volumes is made towards a male friend (yamamoto); whose only reciprocal emotional relationship with anyone outside his family is with a man (L.)

more importantly, he’s a character whose entire personality is centred around the concealment and curated presentation of the self. he is always conscious of being perceived. his private life is continually invaded and observed with his knowledge but without his consent, and he navigates this via a careful but weak performance of heterosexuality that becomes more skilled (but never perfect) as he ages. his response to cameras being placed in his private space is to display straight pornography. he attempts to throw off an FBI tail by manufacturing a date with a female classmate, and a (failed) component of his plan involves not having to follow through with the date. he conceals his relationship with mikami by conducting a relationship with takada — and, in doing so, he creates circumstances which make it impossible to consummate that relationship and which give him an excuse to dodge sexual and romantic contact with misa. so much of death note is light orchestrating dispays of heterosexuality then rejecting it the moment his performance is complete. i think light genuinely puts as much effort into not having sexual or romantic relationships with women as he does into not dying.

thematically, without a queer reading, none of this makes any sense. there’s no logical thread between his emotions and his actions. his behaviour is incoherent, erratic and ultimately shallow. with a queer reading, however, everything snaps neatly into place. there is coherency and consistency. his behaviour flows logically from a central part of the way he experiences the world. there is a texture and a richness to it. i think this is true whether or not someone personally interprets light as queer, because any sensible thematic foundation of death note is built on queerness; it’s possible not to notice this, but it’s extremely difficult not to engage with it.

[edit: follow-up in regards to light as a transgender figure]

honestly i think the idea that light’s classmates liked him because he was cool is basically untrue. there is no possible universe where light yagami is cool. he is a weird dorky kid who studies english too much to play tennis and kind of wants a magic notebook to be real. i think they liked him because he was nice, and a little odd, and because he’d help you with your homework even if you didn’t know him all that well. pre-death note light isn’t enigmatic and aloof, he’s the kid you go to when literally no one else understood the class well enough to take notes and who’ll get genuinely excited for you when you suddenly understand a concept. he wants to go to spaceland and have someone tell him how cool it is that he mends his own clothes. he’s a sweet kid and that’s why it’s so heartbreaking when he lets that seed of coldness in him become his core and then his whole being.