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Hellscape - A Yotsuba Light Analysis
I’m just finally getting around to editing and re-posting some of my old Death Note analyses so that they’re available for perusal again…. and needless to say, the leviathan of textwalls is back.
A while ago I was talking about Light’s personality during the Yotsuba arc, but I didn’t really elaborate on that point with as much detail as the subject honestly deserves. Basically I shortchanged my own favorite character and I think it’s about time that I remedied that state of affairs. You know what that means, right? Go grab some tea and biscuits because this post is long. And I’m not joking when I say this is long.
But why talk about Yotsuba-Light at all? Isn’t Light kind of straightforward during this point in canon since he isn’t hiding anything? The short answer to that is that this is Light we’re talking about here; he’s never that straightforward.
In my view, there’s a real paucity of analyses that examine Light’s personality and behavior during this stretch of canon and attempts to relate it back to the context of canon as a whole. Usually when Light’s personality in the Yotsuba-arc is brought up, it gets discussed in isolation from the rest of the story which is something that makes me headtilt.
It’s easy to nod along at the idea that Light is a genuinely good person when he’s not Kira, but in much the same way that pre-Kira Light isn’t really as virtuous as he thinks he is, Yotsuba-Light isn’t either. Why? Because at the end of the day, Light Yagami is Kira and Kira is Light Yagami. All of the things that make Light become Kira are intrinsic to his psychological make up, and all of those same flaws are still present in Yotsuba-Light.
As such, I don’t buy the argument that Yotsuba-Light and Kira-Light have wildly different personalities. That approach to the character is one that I disagree with as it then implies that the death note exerts some ~magical influence~ over Light’s mind and starts getting into apologist territory. Rather, the way I see it, Light is a victim of his own mind and this is a trend that is pervasive throughout canon.
If you haven’t read my analysis of Pre-Kira Light (here) please go and check out that post before reading this one because I established a framework for Light’s character at the beginning of canon there and I promise this post will make more sense if you read that first.
Additionally this analysis was written based on manga canon only. The reason being that I think the anime ought to be considered a separate iteration of canon. Light’s characterization in the manga and the anime are sufficiently different at baseline that I just don’t think all inferences drawn from the anime can necessarily carry over to the manga and vice versa. If you’re interested in reading a more detailed analysis on this specific topic, I talk about it in more depth here!
So! With all that preamble out of the way, let’s tackle this beast. As a fair warning, this analysis is just under 26k words, more than double the length of my Pre-Kira Light analysis and very image heavy because I am an incorrigibly wordy pedant. Just so y’all are aware of what exactly you’re getting into.
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