anime

Like multiple times it has characters have a turn to the camera moment where they say some shit like "Kira is absolutely right about everything, but oh woe, oh calamity, for he is breaking the law and doing the violence that only the state is permitted to do, oh but what a tragedy for the legal system is too soft and permissive, and the police state too friendly and lenient towards the underclasses and so Kira is a necessary evil!" and the narrator keeps having bits about how Kira's policy of extrajudicially murdering everyone the state accuses of a crime is working and creating a gentler, safer world and it's just so fucking bad.

Light is a monstrous little fascist dipshit with the dumbest plan anyone has ever had, and his ideology is fundamentally deranged and abhorrent. Like how the fuck does "so he's changing the world, by just killing everyone accused of a crime after they've already been arrested and locked up!" even fit into anything but the most unhinged boomer brain as a solution to anything? His targets are almost exclusively people who are either innocent or who have already been neutralized and contained as a further threat, what does purging them accomplish? It's just turbo fash dipshit stuff.

Light is just a dumber rehash of Batman's League of Shadows foil that's used to show that Batman, who agrees 100% with the League of Shadows' entire ideology except for its inevitable logical conclusion, is actually Good and Pure and doesn't do bad violence stuff because that's the job of the police who get special good boy passes to do violence for the state.

Even the narrative itself doesn't offer any criticism other than showing Light to personally be a vile, abusive piece of shit behind the mask he puts on around other people, and it emphasizes him fighting back against the cops who are after him as being this moral event horizon moment more than all the literal mass murder because the TV man told him to shit he did. So far as the story has a moral it's this fundamentally reactionary liberal take about how the police state should be more repressive but it also shouldn't go too far, and that violence is the job of state-sanctioned actors and not the public.

It was pretty entertaining as a suspenseful horror thriller though, and the "cerebral back and forth" shit with Light and L was incredibly funny because it was all just Light being a self-defeating dipshit digging himself deeper and deeper by being a bloodthirsty egomaniac and L running in circles around himself trying the rhetorical equivalent of a Wil E Coyote gag as bait.