Who's the character on the 3rd spot?
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2025
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Should be Johan Liebert from the anime/manga "Monster". Its an old classic for psychological horror/thriller, so if youre into that, you could give it a try.
He also decided to kill thousands of low-level criminals instead of like ten rich people.
Imagine one day a mega-billionaire has a fatal heart attack. Found in his possession is the name of another mega-billionaire, scrawled onto whatever was near them in their own blood.
The next day, that billionaire drops dead. Another heart attack, another name found near the body. Rinse and repeat.
Eventually, one gets smart. Publicly pledges to give away their entire fortune and take an oath of poverty the day their name is found. The reaper skips him, and the message is sent: if you're ultra wealthy and want to live, stop being ultra wealthy.
Sure, it may not be foolproof: there's probably a lot of super rich people whose identities are more or less private. Maybe one of them can pull a fast one & hide their wealth rather than give it away. But still, it'd probably be more effective than what Light did with less killing to boot.
I agree. Another smart move would be to rapidly write their names down all in one go. Make it look like the act of an angry god (because it kinda/sorta is), then sit back and watch the world's elite panic.
I mean, it wouldn't make much of a show, but still.
Yeah but that's kind of the point. Light is a hyper libertarian big brain asshole who thinks he can decide right and wrong while getting his kicks killing people who he thinks "deserve it". He doesn't actually care about making anyone's lives better or righting actual societal injustice, he only cares that he is god among men.
I don't think it was even anything to do with being 'libertarian.' His dad was a cop. He had likely been indoctrinated since birth into thinking that criminals do crime because they're bad, and would stop doing crime if the punishments were bad enough / a certainty. He's obviously self-masturbating by telling himself how much good he's doing for society, much like a very certain type of government worker we all deride tells themself...
You're not wrong about that interpretation, that's definitely a solid one. I was taking it a little bit more "individualistic" hence my use of the word libertarian. I was seeing it more as him going "these people made their choice they deserve what they get" with no concern for the societal structures that may have put those people into prison. It's also just how much he sees himself as righteous and better than others. However your interpretation of him basically just being the police taken to their logical extreme is definitely a true one, though I do find it somewhat undercut by the people stopping the "bad cop" are the "good cops"
i thought the consensus answer for "is aizen the smartest character in anime?" was "aizen isn't even the smartest character in bleach"
Disclaimer because I’m about to start defending his intelligence: Light is a horrible person regardless.
Light’s first slip up is his temper, causing him to act without thinking to kill Lind L Taylor on live TV. In all fairness, until that point he had killed hundreds of people already with zero resistance and if you want people to “know of my existence” what better way to do so than to kill someone on live TV and get away with it.
The next “mistakes” he makes are in focusing on killing L instead of hiding from him. But really he would rather play a deadly game with L than anything else, and he does play that game intelligently and win despite many unforeseen obstacles.
Point is, light doesn’t get caught because he isn’t intelligent, he gets caught because he’s more obsessed with power and domination than not getting caught or actually saving the world.
I mean that’s literally why he’s evil: he’s not trying to fix the world.
He himself mentions that society just tends to decay and—knowing that he won’t live forever—he must know that killing evil people and trying to keep people in line with fear will not work and will not last. However, he does it anyway because fixing the world is just the excuse he uses to justify his god complex.
He’s not stupid, he’s just more entertained playing with death than he is doing anything else.
he’s not trying to fix the world
It was probably on my second watch of the anime that I figured this out. When he was killing FBI agents who were clearly good people.
One other interesting thing is that he's not interested in elevating himself in the traditional way.
If he wanted to fix the world, and become super rich, he could easily do it at the same time. Because the people who are actually ruining the world aren't the murderers that he killed in the story. The people ruining the world are actually the same people who have all the money. And he has the ability to control them. He can alter their wills if he wants to.
With the Death Note, it would be trivial to become the richest person in the world, but that would attract a lot of attention, so it would also be trivial to become a much less rich, but still incredibly wealthy person. And Light could have done that in a way that would be very hard to trace, if he wanted to. But he didn't want to.
Light begins the story with a very biased view of the world, due to his father being a police officer. He's quite authoritarian. He blames small time criminals and never really considers that there are societal and governmental reasons that they became criminals. Instead, he comes up with a very Machiavellian solution that people should follow the law because they're too afraid to commit crimes.
When he was killing FBI agents who were clearly good people.
Since when have cops been good people?
Since Light doesn't immediately write his police-chief father's name in the book. Since light planned to become a cop himself.
Since when have cops been good people?
Nobody is forcing you to mindlessly meme all the time. You possess a human brain that is capable of considering individual people based on your personal observation of their actions.
Action; became cop. Is bad. Yup, all lights green here.
You don't see cops as the enforcement of capital with a side gig of solving crime. He does. Just because the show doesn't bother to dive into that aspect doesn't mean it's an invalid point especially if we are just talking about "goodness".
Here's a better way to put it. Light would view the FBI agents as good guys due to his general views of law enforcement in general so targeting them is light showing that what he thinks is good in the world is irrelevant to his choices.
Instead now we are arguing ideology because you don't understand perspective in literature. Womp womp and acab
You spend too much time on this platform, I think.
Oink
Well said!
Do you know of any other shows where it is about the mind games like this?
Its been a long time but how about Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo. Although in that one its one person playing 3d chess with everyone else being unaware.
"Monster", which IMO is much more interesting and clever then Death Note. And if you like that, "Pluto" by the same creator.
Code Geass is basically the same premise, but I feel like Death Note does a better job pretending to be some 400 IQ mind games then actually being intriguing and clever. Way more telling us the protagonist/antagonist is smart then showing us in subtle, engaging ways.
Still both good shows, but I just didn't see them as 10/10 masterpieces.
Code Geass is Death Note with giant robots and magic powers.
Lelouch is fucking insufferable, so the comparison checks out
Unfortunately no, also I haven’t really watched much anime (I only know who three of the people on the chart are).
However, in the non-anime category, the tv show “Hannibal” has two very intelligent characters play this same kind of game of cat and mouse.
You know who the antagonist is, but the other characters… not so much. So you get the same kind of dynamic where people are talking with Light like he’s a normal person when you know he’s Kira.
You also get some seriously fucked up mind games between the antagonist and protagonist and get those same moments of “well how is he going to get out of this?” For both of them.
It’s also like a normal-ish crime TV show. Anyway, good stuff, idk if it’s what you’re looking for but you might like it regardless
Yeah, I'm not really into anime either but sometimes there is that nice mix between weird and clever that you can't get anywhere else.
Ajin: Demi-Human hit some of the notes if you are interested.
Oh Hannibal is one of my all time favorites. Great performances, great story and the images are beautiful despite the subject manner. Maybe I go watch it again if I don't find something new.
Deathnote was mid, also a product of the post 9-11 world.
I watched it recently
Yeah. Dude literally just had to sit in his apartment and watch TV to confirm his kills. How did he ever fuck that up? No literally how, i dont remember anymore its been so long.
I watched it for the first time recently. He just kept making the dumbest decisions every time. He's supposed to be a super genius, yet I would've chosen most of the decisions better.
The only explanation is that he's bored and wants to make things difficult, but that is not what's portrayed in the anime at all. It's just what I came up with to explain his horrible decisions.
Dude was cocky when fake L is on local TV provoking him. Killing him lead L pin point his location. Yes, dude was stupid.
Last time I watched it, back in high school, it always felt like “because, ‘plot’”.
Light did only one (big) stupid mistake: trusting someone else with his power.
Nah, he was an arrogant asshole, that was his biggest problem. "I'm too smart to be caught, so I'll do something even more likely to fail just to show how great I am!" - I mean, the whole "all according to keikaku" to take down L was super convoluted and he only had to make that shit up because he wanted to show off how much of a big deal he was by killing the fake L live on TV