Did the death note corrupt him or was he always a psychopath?

Did the death note corrupt him or was he always a psychopath?

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A little bit of both

Think he was a sociopath that evolved into a psycopath because of it.

Neither, he did nothing wrong.

He's the average smart teen who didn't grow out of the egotistical 'why can't everyone just x' judgement.

meh the average joe doesnt develop a god complex in 5 days.

He is an edgelord though

The average joe doesn't get a magic heart-attack book.

what would life be like for Light if he didn't discover the notebook. Would he be a fair member of the justice system?

Probably a moderately successful prosecutor

"Absolute power corrupts absolutely" seems to be the motto of Death Note.

Followed his father, maybe got a little higher. If we're to believe the intelligence distribution of the show (Light is as god as L) then he may have got a lot of fame.

>Oh shit, I killed someone!
>I must keep doing it for the greater good.
You tell me.

Didn't Ohba say he would've become a famous detective and eventually work on a case with L or something like that

Light was a pure boy until he was corrupted by junk food.

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His personality did a 180 after losing his memory so yeah, using it clearly affected his personality. Light being a natural psychopath would have undermined the message that anyone can be tempted and corrupted by great power.

Light wasn't normal though. He was more intelligent, more driven, had a stronger sense of justice than most around him. The implication is that he was too "pure" or "great" or whatever an individual and using the DN tainted him. But even so he was an exceptional case for an DN holder because he was an exceptional person. Even Light without memory can't help feeling an affinity with Kira.

He was already a psychopath, the Death Note was just a very useful tool.

Yes, mangaka claimed it and can be garnered from the series itself.

This.

He was always one; he just finally found the perfect tool/toy for him self.

Japan society is built in such a way that depending on your school results you can literally consider yourself as "superior" or "above everyone else".

So not that he was a psychopath all but he certainly had the right mindset to flip in that whole "I AM GOD" thing.

He was just narcissist. When he had the Death Note, all he could think is how he could improve the world killing those who are unworthy, when he lost the memories of using the Death Note, his only possible conclussion is that a there was a psycho out there killing people in the name of justice, but since that psycho wasn't him, he had to conclude Kira was a flawed and dangerous individual who couldn't possibly fix the world through mass murder because he wasn't Light, and who probably didn't even have the heart in the right place, unlike Light.

Why would you think you are the mass murderer? You have no recollection of anything that would suggest you being a mass murderer and don't even know the means with which the crime is being committed.

Light did see the sense in Kira's methods and was beginning to entertain the plausibility of a connection between himself and Kira, but brushed it aside because murder is still wrong and especially didn't want to tell L about it.

He really didn't do anything wrong in the natural sense of what people have done historically without a Death Note. The only innocent people he killed were those that stood in his way, other than that he only (or at least thought) killed the worst of humankind.

Now it's been a while since I've watched the show, but the only thing I can find fault in him is killing those who were currently in prison, without doing some sort of check on the individual's progress to learning the error of their ways/discrepancy on whether or not the individual actually committed the crime they were accused of .

The author said he got corrupted, and would become a respected detective had he never found the Death Note.

2edgy4me

>Think he was a sociopath that evolved into a psycopath because of it.
Wut?

That's the thing, he knew that Kira was real, he also knew he wasn't Kira (or at least, from his memory, he couldn't deduce it), so he had to conclude that Kira was someone else. Someone else being Kira was unacceptable, because they didn't have his intelligence and sense of justice, but when he got his memories back, being Kira was fine. In other words, being Kira is wrong if someone else does it.

I liked the 2015 drama Light and L better.

>Think he was a guy with no empathy that evolved into a manic killer because of it
Do you not know the definitions of words, user?

He clearly had some screws loose from the beginning.

>The only innocent people he killed were those that stood in his way
He didn't always kill them for practical reasons, though. He killed Lind L. Tailor simply for calling him evil.

Psych major here.

Psychopath isn't found in the DSM - it's an antiquated term. Sociopath is the preferred term.

how is this from the beginning if he's talking to ryuk?

Ryuk was the one doing the corrupting, the death note was more than like a sword or a rifle. Each decision he makes, even when he's convinced he's in absolute control, he's just playing along with a script that's already been written down.

That's chapter one, like five days after finding the Death Note. I can't really see that quick a transition happening unless you're pretty off internally to begin with.

Kira was unacceptable period because Light was such a moralfag that he makes L look like a criminal. Being Kira became "fine" because he returned to the state he was before he lost his memory: someone who knows he's Kira and has long rationalized being Kira after actually committing murder, which happened only after finding out he was really in possession of a supernatural killing book.

It wasn't "it's okay when I do it", it was the character entertaining the plausibility of himself being the murderer, helped by the fact that, unbeknownst to him, he was the murderer.

>The only innocent people he killed were those that stood in his way

Did he have to rub it in Raye and Naomi's faces when he did it, though?

It's the same, my point is that he doesn't hold himself to the same standards he holds everybody else. Otherwise, his experiences during his memory loss would have affected him.

I'd think a good portion of humanity would be corrupted just by gaining that power, let alone hanging out talking with a death god for several days, or having already used it to kill someone.

Sloth and being beta would prevent most people from doing anything useful with it, one way or another. Reason why Ryuk chose Light in the first place is because there was potential.

Ryuk chose light? Didn't he say he just dropped it and waited for whoever picked it up first?

It was random. He only picked Light in, I believe, the Netflix version of it. In the actual manga and anime too, it was randomly dropped for Ryuk's amusement. He just happened to hit the jackpot by having Light get it.

Didbyou only watch the shitty Netflix movie? Ryuk didn't manipulate Light to kill anyone, he showed up five days later after Light picked up the Death Note, and by then, he had already killed a lot of people.
Ryuk just wanted to have fun and Light just happened to be the perfect guy for it, he wasn't an evil mastermind or anything like that.

The latter

He was bored and wanted to do something great, so when an opportunity presented itself, he latched onto it and from there it was pretty much a slippery slope. I guess had the series featured a more benevolent artifact, things would've turned out very differently