Rinzai Did Nothing Wrong.

The second greatest mystery of *Death Note* is why anyone opposed the central character at first, whereas the greatest mystery of *Death Note* is why anyone opposed him by the end.   This mystery persists into the so-called “real world” of the Internet, wherein protagonist Light Yagami enjoys the privilege of sharing the “Pure Evil” label on the Fandom wiki with King Richard and with Adolf Hitler. What the rationale behind this placement is eludes me, since it seems to follow “wiki logic” and so reinforces the established understanding that a wiki is not knowledge but, at best, a means of reaching knowledge, and it’s only so if it is implemented well. The Crowd does not decide what’s right or wrong, as members of the Crowd are only righteous if their thoughts accord with fact and Reason, at which point they cease to be mere members of the Crowd. It is the Crowd that is responsible for most of the atrocities of history, with leaders such as Hitler acting merely as a figurehead, devoid o

Dilemma is the heart of narrative, as is established by Jeff Kitchen in his interviews. Yet what appears to be dilemma, a decision in between two evils, is quite often nothing more than a scenario wherein one course of action is defensible and others cannot be, but failure is a common risk. It’s in the aftermath of such a failure that excuses come, and often such excuses harden into orthodoxies which become a moral dogma. Yet a moral dogma, though it is dogmatic, is not moral. Though it’s paradoxical to say that something we describe as “moral” is not moral, that’s because to classify a thing as “moral” means to claim that it *aspires* to be moral, yet the possibility of failure leads us to conclude that it is not what it pretends to be, and contradictions in semantics cease to bother us when we remember what the nature of a moral act is truly.   Fans of anime who vilify Light Yagami may claim that it was Light’s *decision* to employ the Death Note which leads to his downfall. Yet