Max – Supplemental Post 3

 A couple things to note:

Amusing update from my last post: very cursory research suggests that the live action adaptation of Death Note was immediately panned and received extremely low ratings before being promptly cancelled, suggesting that the industrial logics of adaptation I speculated about in my last post turned out to be, in fact, way off. 

Also, apparently when the original manga began circulating in China (pirated), stores began selling notebooks that look like the notebook in the manga. (Short version: in the manga/show, writing someone’s name in this notebook causes them to die.) This became controversial and the apparent subject of a government effort to prohibit selling such notebooks. Students were apparently writing the names of disliked classmates or teachers in these notebooks. This is interesting on a lot of fronts: opportunistically capitalizing on the popularity of a manga by selling a prop from within the manga, children subsequently using the prop as used in the manga causes panic as adults feel threatened. But also, more basically, this practice of youth listing names being read as ominous, frightening, dangerous, worthy of disciplinary action reminds me very much of my own childhood. After Columbine, such lists were made and discovered and students were disciplined. Are such adolescent practices the fuel for the fantasies that produced the original story of Death Note the manga?