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I thought I’d write an entry on this book after having read it, but I’m in one of those writing moods right now, and since I’ve been in a dry-spell for so long, this opportunity simply can’t pass me by.

I’m a bit more than half-way done with the book and have been since day one of reading the book…so why haven’t I progressed? Actually, I wanted to finish the book the day I bought it but wasn’t able to because 1. I’m a slow reader and 2. I keep getting distracted while I’m reading. The two are somewhat intertwined really. I’d like to say I have too much going on to find time to finish the book, but I should be able to find time for something even if I am really very busy. Perhaps I’m not motivated. I shall finish before the end of June though.

Yes the word Alchemist was a huge determining factor for becoming interested in this book. Me and my Fullmetal Alchemist obsession…>.> I did read the inside jacket before choosing it however and was on the verge of picking a book about Jane Austen before seeing this one.

What’s so unique about The Alchemist is that the main character’s name is only mentioned once, at the very first sentence of the very first page of Part One: “The boy’s name was Santiago.” For the remainder of the book, he is known as “the boy”. I actually forgot his name was ever mentioned until a few days after reading the book and glancing at the first page. It’s written by a Brazilian author by the name of Paulo Coelho and the main character is from Spain. Most of the adventures take place in the northern deserts of Africa.

It’s a book about finding one’s destiny and how pursuing it is one’s own responsibility. Some people choose not to because they haven’t realized it, or they feel that it is merely a fantasy too far away to reach. Some people would rather have the fantasy and dream about their destiny than actually pursuing and fulfilling their destiny. The main character is confronted with many obstacles both internal and external and at times he almost gives up his dream. But he has courage, a determination to listen to his heart, a belief in omens, and creative optimism to guide him through his journey.

There’s something magical and enchanting about this adventure book. It has fantasy, adventure, romance, and other genres that I like. I also like how the main character starts by living a common life of travel through his trade of shepherding and fantasizes marrying a merchant’s daughter. Then one day he has a dream telling him to go to the Egyptian pyramids, a destination pointed out to him by a child in his dream and apparently leading to treasure. That one dream and the words of a gypsy and King Salem push him towards a great adventure.

Warning: may contain spoilers in process of analysis though nothing major

I haven’t finished watching this anime yet. I’m not sure if I will since I’ve already read the manga. I was fully engrossed in the manga while I was reading it and the anime seems to follow it pretty well. There are parts cut out, but for the most part it stays true to the manga. I could be wrong later in the anime, but thus far, everything is predictable - so much so that it’s at times tedious to watch. It’s only tedious because I’d read everything before, but if this is your first time watching it, I can almost guarantee you won’t want to stop.

I love the art for the manga as well as the anime. The symbolic use of colors such as red and blue and the continuous use of apples is pretty nice. Light’s evil laugh is something I hadn’t imagined while reading the manga and I think Mamoru Miyano did a remarkable job of that as well as the change in Light’s voice from cheerful innocence to cunning evil.

If you like mystery, psychology, the supernatural, drama as well as amazing art, then I would recommend this to you - that is if you haven’t already read or watched it. I didn’t like the ending much but that’s just me. Other than my disappointment with the ending and what happened to L, everything else was superb.

What interested me the most was that the protagonist is an anti-hero. Light/Raito Yagami is an honors student who is extremely smart yet bored out of his mind. When he finds the Death Note, unlike most people, he isn’t scared by its power to kill. Nor does he think of using the Death Note for personal gain. In fact, he vows to use the power of the Death Note to rid the world of evil. On the surface, this may seem like a noble deed, but to have one person judge the life of all others is unjust in itself. I’m one of those people who believes no one has the right to take the life of another, like Vash the Stampede. Ryuk/Ryuku the Death God/Shinigami even makes the comment that in the end Light would be the only one with a bad personality if he were to rid the world of evil. Light, himself, does not see it so. Instead he believes it’s his destiny to judge and change the world.

The Death Note grants Light great powers, but with great power comes great responsibility. Absolute power, corrupts absolutely. The people of this world would not be happy if evil were rid through death as punishment. Instead they would live in fear and possibly even hate. Sure Light’s method of abolishing evil may be fast and efficient, and it has been proven in the manga that the crime rate dropped 70%, but in the long run this sort of judgment will create much controversy and revolts. Light not only kills criminals without hesitation, but he also kills those who are in the way of his grand scheme.

Ryuk, Light’s Shinigami, is pretty special in terms of Shinigami. Normally, Shinigami are lazy and don’t bother meddling with the human world. Unlike other Shinigami, Ryuk has an unusually large capacity for boredom and the need to stop his boredom. He’s actually interested in the human world and the way people use and respond to the Death Note. He makes no judgments however, and neither helps nor hinders Light’s plans and goals. He does, however, warn Light that he will be the one to write Light’s name in his notebook when it comes time for Light to die. Also, that those who use the Death Note can neither go to Heaven nor Hell, that humans who use the notebook will experience feelings of terror.

It’s true that Light becomes more corrupt as the story progresses, but looking back towards the beginning at the closure of the story, one can sympathize with Light. He wasn’t an evil person to begin with. He had good intentions and wanted to use the notebook for the benefit of society. It was the magnitude of power that the notebook possesses that inevitably corrupts him. Also, Light’s confident personality and his resolute mind after deciding his own destiny. When he lost memory of the notebook, he even said so himself, after realizing the similarity between himself and Kira, that he couldn’t possibly be Kira because he wouldn’t kill people even if they were criminals. I think in this way, the notebook itself may have an evil force about it that drives people towards evil and misfortune.

This anime doesn’t seem to have absolute themes (according to the author), but one I consider to be important is the concept of justice. The manga doesn’t state outright that the police represent justice and Light/Kira represents evil. Many people may argue that L is justice, and when L says “justice will prevail” with his cute little smile, you can’t help but believe it so. Yet L was also willing to sacrifice criminals such as Lind L. Taylor. Though Taylor’s death was indeed inevitable (he was scheduled to be put to death just at the moment that Kira killed him), L deliberately allowed the execution of criminals to fall out of the impersonal justice system, and this shows that he is in this aspect no different from Kira in his willingness to let the power of judgment fall out of the law’s hands. It is hypocritical, also, for L to insist that Kira must be stopped if L himself freely allows Kira to continue his actions, even if he does so out of pragmatism. Additionally, L lacks respect for human life, possibly to a higher extend than Light himself does; as demonstrated in the Yotsuba arc, L is willing to allow more criminals to die in order to assist in his winning the war against Kira; on the contrary, Light, having lost his Kira memories, wants to save as many lives - even those of criminals! - as possible. This further suggests that true evil lies in the Death Note itself.

After all this, I’m not saying I dislike L and that I’m on Light’s side, but I just wanted to throw this perspective out there. If anyone were to personify justice, it would most likely be Chief Yagami, Light’s father. He also wants to save as many lives as possible, never killing anyone, putting people’s lives above winning against Kira, and putting his own life on the line in the persute in catching Kira. Yet I believe the main message Death Note tries telling us is that people are all different, and they each have a different sense of justice. There is no good and evil in Death Note, just like Near said in the last chapter. There are just different sets of beliefs at war with each other, though I do believe Kira is evil and that Light’s form of justice is twisted and corrupt.

What do you think determines or defines justice?

For further discussion relating to Death Note, check out the forum. If there isn’t already a topic, feel free to start one.

This entry was originally posted on Livejournal on April 19th. I was inspired to post it here after reading a dream entry by Destiny. I also edited a bit of text here and there. I wasn’t sure if I should use past tense or present tense, so there might be a mixture of both XD. Usually I write dreams in present tense, but >_> dunno…
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I took a 2 hr nap and had the most interesting dream! Long time no write - dream wise - so yeah here goes.

My family were I are staying at a massive hotel. The strange thing is we stayed in separate rooms. The room I stayed in had four beds. They were all queen sized beds at that. The room was pretty spacious with a balcony to the left. Another weird part is there were mannequins laying on the beds. on the far right there was one mannequin. four on the next, and I think two on the third bed. The fourth bed, closest to the balcony was the only one left open.

So I slept there but in the middle of the night, I woke to the change in brightness of the room. I remembered turning off the light, but the light was obviously on now so I walk all the way across the room to turn off the light but it wouldn’t turn off. Sure enough the switch was at off before I switched it. This creeped me out - to think that the mannequins didn’t. So I leave the room to find my mom and dad to see if they noticed anything strange about the place.

Apparently they stayed in separate rooms from each other. The corridors were like a labyrinth sprinkled with hundreds of rooms throughout its meandering pathways. When I finally found my mom, she was awake with the light dimmed, sitting in bed. She told me to go find Dad in the computer room. So I find him and decide to work on a school project. This school project had a lot to do with Chinese history and such. As I was saving my document, I realized I forgot to pay attention to which folder I was saving it under. I was unable to find it after that. Also, apparently my old mp3 player was like a USB drive that stored documents and images. I was scrolling through that to find documents from the computer….which makes no sense now since it wasn’t hooked up to the computer, but perfect sense then. My dad volunteered fervently to help write my paper and guessed at the topic I may be writing on yet none of what he said came through to me as my mind was still on the paper I wrote.

I decide it was getting late, that the light must have turned off by now so I head back to my room. On the way I stop by Mom’s room and find she’s still awake with some strange blue light on in her room.

As I pause in front of my door, I sense this ominous aura as the light was still on and the mannequins start looking strangely knowledgeable on the situation and the hotel’s happenings in general. I try to casually walk back to my bed and as I do so, I realize the sky is getting brighter outside. The curtains are translucent so the light from outside is glowing through them and the silhouette of the window / door frame can be seen clearly. I ponder on whether or not to sleep with the curtains closed or opened and decide on just leaving it closed. Neither way mattered really.

As I lay in bed with the light on, a mannequins walks over to me and says not to worry, that I shouldn’t feel lonely in a room full of companions. (Lonely?!) She was pretty friendly and we introduced each other. Then she told me of her previous life in Nevada I think. I can’t remember where she or any of the other mannequins were from but I was fascinated by the fact that they each had their own life outside of the hotel. I told them about dorm life at college. We shook hands, though some of them were really weird about it and had their hands in weird positions while shaking mine.

Later, I’m on campus again and I think I’m in a geek club of some sort founded by a freshman. Yeah a freshman. But she was actually a sophomore because of the amount of credits she had and she had pretty good leadership skills. She looked strangely like Mrs. S my fifth grade social studies teacher, which meant she looked very old. We were gathered there to plan who was going to write what for the college newspaper. I volunteered first to write a paper on a play I couldn’t even remember but I took notes on it while I was attending the play. I told the “freshman” that it was by Macbeth. She said “who cares and why would it matter who it was by?” Yeah apparently Macbeth was a well-known playwright and …. didn’t I mean Shakespeare?! Clearly Macbeth is the creation of Shakespeare…but whatever.

Now I’m in front of the Union or so I think and an evil villain whom I’ve met before is hosting a wedding ceremony there. He was evil in tricking people with the amount of money he was willing to pay for the food and other expenses. Instead of paying full price, he was paying one fourth that. I know, wicked right? I knew of his sham and warned the suppliers but they wouldn’t listen to me. I think I saw Envy and other sins from FMA there and they were part of the “evil family”. I think the villain behind everything was Wrath (from the manga) aka Pride (from the anime). I knew of their other schemes but now I’ve forgotten them since I was interrupted twice by my mother who yelled at me to go downstairs to drink milk shake and then again because my brother wanted me for something before I could write anything.