i said he was a bad dad, but he's actually a great policeman. the problem is when he prioritises work over family. we romanticise and forgive that to some extent, which I think is totally wrong. having a family is a commitment that's so much more important than your work. when you have a family, you take on the responsibility of providing emotional support for those you call "family". to neglect actual humans for work is especially cold and ignorant and all kinds of dickish that i don't even have words for.
i know the work of a policeman is work that helps the whole of humanity. that some people shoulder the responsibility of helping all people, as a human being. in that case souichirou should have reconsidered starting a family. these kind of people, since they love humanity so much, tend to overlook individual pain and suffering. they make for terrible close companions.
his other major fault is being too bland. wait up, let me explain. all we see is yagami souichirou bending to what other people dictate. to what is "right", the concept created by humanity. he makes some minor objections when L goes particularly far, but mostly it's either matsuda or the other detectives who show any kind of personality in their decisions.
okay, maybe this is yagami souichirou's kind of "emotion". but he literally allowed society to make him work so hard that he neglected his children and failed to see his wife before she died. it's not like they needed the money from his work. he allowed L to invade the privacy of his family and so many other people with nary a protest. he let the pc definition of "right" kill him, literally. all i saw in the whole drama was yagami souichirou bending to stronger wills.
plus him being an absent dad was a part of light's motivation to become kira.
pLUS he tried to commit double suicide with his own son. so.
so tl;dr: the basic sin of the older yagami is
- being a shit dad
on the death note drama as a whole:
- tedious
- changes minor things but has the same overall plot. those changes make no sense. i got a bit excited when i heard about an "original plot". haha. ha. no such luck.
- humanises light a little. at the same time, diminishes his "light" so that the overall plot and characterisation suffer and the light/L pull, however you read their relationship, is absent.
- fails to address the larger ideology until essentially the last half hour. even then, it's lacking.
- deus ex machinas the fuck out of L.
- deus ex machinas the fuck out of light's death (because having a killer notebook and two henchmen with shinigami eyes makes him basically invulnerable and there's no way he would've lost in the real world).
- oddly enough, only three actual characters are swayed by light's concept of justice. everyone else are nameless, faceless, anonymous. i am very convinced by it, though. in the right hands, the death note would be a much better system than the current shitty one. so it's incredibly odd that no other character is even slightly swayed. other than L, but even that's questionable.
- on the same note (haha), it's getting boring that they keep making light die an ignominous death, as if humiliating him equals refuting his ideology and ratifying the current system. so pc. why bother setting up two conflicting "correct" ideologies when you're going to deny the the basis of the whole conflict at the end? the conflict is entirely based on the premise that the two ideologies are equally correct. light shouldn't have to die as a "villain".
- disappointing. i expected to like 70% of the drama, but ended up liking about 30-40%, if i'm honest about it.
- pulled up to a bit less than 60% because kubota masataka's light is anime!light come to life. well, the best he could, anyway, given that the writers ruined the original premise and connections.
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