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*** The Japanese term (心臓麻痺) translates in the dictionary as "heart attack" or "heart failure". Interestingly this term's article on Japanese Wikipedia has no English translation, and it doesn't correspond to either the term for heart attack (myocardial infarction) (心筋梗塞) or the term for cardiac arrest (心停止), so from cursory research at least it's not clear what it's referring to. For what it's worth, according to Google Translate the introductory paragraph of the Wikipedia article says, "Heart attack is the sudden loss of the heart's pumping function. **This is not a medical term, but a term used in everyday life.** The medical term for heart attack seems to be Vf (ventricular fibrillation). Strictly speaking, this is a sudden death due to cardiovascular disease, so the meaning is broader." So, it might just be an umbrella term for the heart suddenly ceasing to function.
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*** Come to think of it, if a Kira-induced heart attack is different from a normal heart attack, this explains how the police can succesfully identify Kira's victims and tell them apart from people who just happened to suffer an entirely normal heart attack.
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*** Come to think of it, if a Kira-induced heart attack is different from a normal heart attack, this explains how the police can succesfully successfully identify Kira's victims and tell them apart from people who just happened to suffer an entirely normal heart attack.attack.
**** What are you talking about? That doesn't happen. There is no point where the police or coroners become able to distinguish a Death Note victim from a normal victim. That would've made the plot a lot simpler.
**** What are you talking about? That doesn't happen. There is no point where the police or coroners become able to distinguish a Death Note victim from a normal victim. That would've made the plot a lot simpler.
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**** The term used in Japanese (心臓麻痺) is not a medical term and could refer to either; and dictionaries translate it as "heart attack" or "heart failure". It might just be an umbrella term for the heart suddenly ceasing to function for any reason.
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** We don't know. We don't know how the Death Note decides what someone's real name is. One interesting theory I've seen is that the reason you can't kill someone who's less than 780 days old is because their name isn't set in stone yet. If that's true, then "Bob Johnson" becomes that kid's real name in the eyes of the Death Note. (That theory doesn't explain how someone whose only name is in an unwritten language comes to have a written name, but I've seen an interesting theory for that too, which is that such names can be written in the shinigami language.)
** More generally, it is certainly possible for someone's real name to be a secret, such that they are immune to anyone who doesn't have shinigami eyes. Whether it's possible for someone's real name to be unknown even to ''themselves'' is unknown.
** More generally, it is certainly possible for someone's real name to be a secret, such that they are immune to anyone who doesn't have shinigami eyes. Whether it's possible for someone's real name to be unknown even to ''themselves'' is unknown.
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*** Not all Death Note covers are black. Some are red, some are white. Your point still stands, though.
*** The pilot chapter isn't canon to the ''Death Note'' manga.
** As far as I can see, the rules don't say that it will work if you write on the covers. So I assume it wouldn't.
** As far as I can see, the rules don't say that it will work if you write on the covers. So I assume it wouldn't.
**** The movie isn't canon, it doesn't matter what it says about how the Death Note works. And to the person two places above: Doesn't work. The Death Note can't kill people you didn't write down, period. Either the demolition would fail to kill anyone, or it would somehow fail to happen at all. Either way, no one other than the person you wrote down would be killed; and if their ordering a demolition as specified would lead to other deaths, they would just die of a heart attack instead of whatever you wrote. And to the person above that: No, the rule isn't just that the person specified can't directly harm people. Their death as specified by you can't lead to other deaths, period. If it would lead to other deaths, they die of a heart attack instead.
**** The Japanese term (心臓麻痺) translates in the dictionary as "heart attack" or "heart failure". Interestingly this term's article on Japanese Wikipedia has no English translation, and it doesn't correspond to either the term for heart attack (myocardial infarction) (心筋梗塞) or the term for cardiac arrest (心停止), so from cursory research at least it's not clear what it's referring to. For what it's worth, according to Google Translate the introductory paragraph of the Wikipedia article says, "Heart attack is the sudden loss of the heart's pumping function. **This is not a medical term, but a term used in everyday life.** The medical term for heart attack seems to be Vf (ventricular fibrillation). Strictly speaking, this is a sudden death due to cardiovascular disease, so the meaning is broader." So, it might just be an umbrella term for the heart suddenly ceasing to function.
*** The above is all irrelevant because again, they're cardiac arrests, not heart attacks.
**** The term in Japanese (心臓麻痺) is a word that, according to the Japanese Wikipedia, is not a medical term. The article in question does not have a counterpart on English Wikipedia; and it does not correspond either to the article for heart attack/myocardial infarction (心筋梗塞) or cardiac arrest (心停止). And the introduction (according to Google Translate) says "Heart attack is the sudden loss of the heart's pumping function. **This is not a medical term, but a term used in everyday life.** The medical term for heart attack seems to be Vf (ventricular fibrillation). Strictly speaking, this is a sudden death due to cardiovascular disease, so the meaning is broader." So, it might just be an umbrella term for the heart suddenly ceasing to function.
**** To the person one place above this one: None of that is relevant to the main point of the person above you.
**** Presumably by degrees of separation. The less straightforward it is to trace how one death affected another, the more likely it is to be allowed. I doubt "reducing lifespan to 3 milliseconds" would be allowed no matter how otherwise indirect it appeared, though. (I'm not even sure ''how'' it could be indirect if the second person's lifespan was reduced that drastically.)
**** Which doesn't change the fact that it depends on how feasible it is for the prisoner to get to Paris in that time. I think we can assume that if he could escape prison and get to Paris at all, let alone in a span of three days, he would have escaped prison already. But it's up for the Death Note to decide. If he can do it, he does it, and if he can't, he can't. It depends on the person and their circumstances.
*** To the point four places above: Canonically? Where does ''canon'' establish that the name can only ever be written in front of the details and nowhere else? Indeed, as the point below this one mentions, the rules suggest that it doesn't matter, because there's a rule that says the cause and details can even be written in separate ''pages'', "as long as the person that writes in the Death Note keeps the specific victims name in mind when writing the cause and situation of death"; or even separate ''notebooks''. If the Death Note doesn't care which page or even which book you write the cause and details in, I think we can assume it doesn't care which side of a single page you write it in, either.
*** Indeed, there are! XXXII says this. LIV says they can also be separate pages of the same notebook.
** To the original question ("could he even be considered the owner since he can't use it, as he's unable to see peoples' faces"), where is this question even coming from? Where in the rules or the story is it stated or even implied that you have to be able to see in order to own a Death Note? If it doesn't have an owner and you pick it up, you own it, period.
*** I can see this going one of two ways: Either they die on schedule, because their name was written before they got immunity; or they don't die, because they're immune at the time the death is supposed to occur. I don't think the wording of the rule is clear enough to be sure which one it is.
** The rules go out of their way to specify that the front and back ''pages'' of the book count as one page (e.g. for th purposes of writing a victim's name), but are silent on whether writing on the covers works. I think we can tentatively assume that it wouldn't work.
*** Interpret? That rule does not even slightly touch the issue of what parts of a name you will see with the Eyes, so there's nothing to interpret. It ''only'' says that the Eyes show you the name you need. It is completely silent on ''which'' parts of a name are needed, or how the Eyes decide that.
*** What makes you think that's likely?
** "If you lose the Death Note or have it stolen, you will lose its ownership unless you retrieve it within 490 days." Presumably, "lose" is somewhat self-defining here: The Death Note is lost if you don't know where it is for a period of 490 days.
** Where is this question coming from? Why would she remember that ''after giving up the Death Note?'' It's quite the opposite; as the point above mentions, if you give up the Death Note your Death Note-related memories go with it. That was the crux of Light's MemoryGambit and thus the entire Yotsuba arc, it's kind of hard to miss.
*** It's debatable whether he found a way around it. The death he wrote for Raye didn't say anything about him writing anything down, or even doing a single thing Light says. That was all Raye. Thus the details Light wrote didn't naturally lead to other deaths; they simply put Raye in a situation where Light could ask him to do something that happened to kill people. It does create an interesting question about where the Death Note draws the line though, since it's true that Light was only able to find Raye and thus manipulate him in that fashion because of what he wrote in the Death Note. Maybe Rule X doesn't take effect as long as you only manipulate circumstances in a way that allows you to corner someone into doing something (e.g. by making sure someone's in a certain place at a certain time), and all the other Headscratchers asking "what if you wrote this situation that causes more deaths" would only fail because they're too direct? Or maybe Death Note deaths are a total exception to the rule, but that fact isn't exploitable enough for Light to make much use of it (given that he can't specify in advance which names the victim must write)?
** As mentioned by others, this wouldn't work for a few reasons. But even if the plan were modified so as not to violate any known rules, I doubt it would work. The rules we know about aren't the only rules that exist. If I had to bet money one way or another, I would bet there's a rule that doesn't allow someone to be controlled for years just because you wrote "dies from AIDS" without specifying a time. Probably you can still only control them for 23 days, and/or the whole thing just doesn't work and they die of a heart attack.
*** That's actually not clear one way or the other.
** When it says "free from being killed by the Death Note", I've always interpreted that to mean killed in the ordinary fashion of having their name written down. I don't think it would protect the victim from dying if they intentionally misspell a name four times. (I don't know what the original Japanese says though, maybe it would be more enlightening.)
** When it says "free from being killed by the Death Note", I've always interpreted that to mean killed in the ordinary fashion of having their name written down. I don't think it would protect the victim from dying if they intentionally misspell a name four times. (I don't know what the original Japanese says though, maybe it would be more enlightening.)
**** More like it's not clear, because the wording is ambiguous. This has actually already been asked elsewhere on this page. I can see this going one of two ways: Either they die on schedule, because their name was written before they got immunity; or they don't die, because they're immune at the time the death is supposed to occur. I don't think the wording of the rule is clear enough to be sure which one it is. Maybe the Japanese is less ambiguous about it, but I don't know what it says.
**** That's not certain, the wording is ambiguous, or at least it is in translation. Maybe it's clearer in Japanese.
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*** Yes.
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*** Yes.Yes, at least probabilistically, in the sense that the person might be guessing how to spell their name or might copy it wrong. Not everyone is going to do that though.
**** No, you have to spell the name correctly. If the name according to the Eyes has an umlaut, you have to include the umlaut. It doesn't matter if you can tell what it's "supposed" to say.
** Just to clarify something from the original question: It's the ''victim'' who becomes immune if you (accidentally) misspell their name four times, not the ''user''.
**** What makes you say it's a deadline and not a countdown? The word used is 寿命, which means "lifespan". Every Japanese-English dictionary example sentence I can find clearly refers to a length of time, and not a deadline or final date. Japanese Wikipedia (according to Google Translate) likewise defines it as "the length of life … the time from birth to death". So unless you think the author consistently used a word completely contrary to what they meant (not impossible, but shouldn't be assumed without good reason), it is a countdown. (Perhaps a slow one, since we never see the numbers changing in real time, but it's not like we ever see a person's lifespan for very long, and there's nothing that says the time units have to be short.)
** We only know what happens if a shinigami "uses the Death Note to kill the assassin of an individual he favors". We don't know what happens if they use the Death Note to extend a human's lifespan in another way. If there are rules about that, they would probably depend on whether it was intentional and on whether the shinigami "favored" that human, which your question doesn't specify.
*** Where is this coming from? We don't know what the criminal was thinking when he wrote "dessert is always apples". He could have been thinking any number of things. Besides, from the wording of the message it sounds more like he's saying that he wants to die because his life is miserable, not because he realizes he's evil and needs to be killed.
**** It failed because it was dependent on knowledge the prisoner didn't have, not because the prisoner "wouldn't think it". A person can think just about anything. They can't ''know'' any arbitrary thing, though.
** The message doesn't have to be literally true, as long as it's something the person might write. That statement could mean anything from the prisoner's perspective, including something metaphorical.
*** You would only "eventually die of aging" when you got to the end of your lifespan, which has been extended beyond normal as per the question.
** Related note: It seems unlikely that gaining, say, a thousand years from a shinigami sacrifice would result in you just magically aging that much slower. Aside from the obvious supernatural element of killing people ''remotely'', the Death Note generally seems to operate in ways that are physically explicable. Probably something would happen to explain your extended lifespan, such as: Humanity unlocking the secrets to anti-aging (such that almost everyone your age will live a long time, presuming they don't succumb to accident or illness or murder); you turning out to have a genetic anomaly that causes extremely slow aging; you going into cryonic storage.
**** It's actually not clear that L was a middle initial. His name was not written as "Lind L. Tailor" (with a period), it was written as "Lind・L・Tailor" (with interpuncts, which normally separate elements of Western names in Japanese). "L" might have been his full middle name.
*** Expanding on the above, someone elsewhere pointed out that shinigami have their own writing system, and put forth the idea that people who were never named, or were only named in an unwritten language, might have their name represented to the Eyes in the shinigami writing system. An interesting idea.
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*** One of the rules explicitly states that if the cause of death is written as a disease the 23 day rule doesn't apply.
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*** One of the rules explicitly states that if the cause of death is written as a lengthy disease (e.g. cancer, AIDS), and no time of death is written, the 23 day rule doesn't apply.
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**** Don't split hairs. It's hard to imagine you didn't know what they meant.
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**** This is speculation, but I think the difference here is that Kal Snydar didn't need to know whose address it was, he just needed to write it. If Light had specified that he writes "I know that Misa Amane's address is [address]", he wouldn't have been able to write it, because he ''doesn't'' know that. But an address isn't a proposition; it doesn't have a truth value. From his perspective, he was just writing a random address, with no internal knowledge of what it meant.
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*** Just because it was never mentioned in the series doesn't mean Light doesn't know about it.
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*** Lucky how? He would only die from misspelling a victim's name if he did it four times intentionally with the same person.
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*** It's actually not clear if the immunity rule only applies to the notebook used or to all Death Notes. Unless the Japanese version is less ambiguous about it.
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*** Surely there's a level of smallness below which a piece of a page is no longer a fragment. You can't write on an atom. If the recycled paper was made of ''nothing but'' Death Note paper, then sure, I guess that would have to work. (We know the Death Note is made of elements not found on Earth, so I don't think we have to worry about somehow disturbing the mystical essence of the paper by reducing it to.) But that doesn't really have anything to do with the rule you cite, because the paper is no longer fragmented at that point.
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*** You say that like those are contradictory. Science isn't a lack of magic, and magic doesn't preclude science.
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** We don't know. The rules don't say, and no one in the story was far enough away for it to make a practical difference.
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**** Curse? What are you talking about? Invalid writing? What are you talking about?
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** To actually answer the question: No, they wouldn't still be immune. "The Death Note will not affect those under 780 days old" is pretty straightforward about who it applies to. It applies to people who are under 780 days old. If you are not under 780 days old, you don't fall under that rule. Same with the 12-minute rule.
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**** This keeps coming up in Headscratchers. Is it really that hard to understand that a person is perfectly capable of unwittingly writing something that contains a hidden alternate interpretation? It isn't even relevant that the messages were broken up. I bet at some point in your life you've accidentally written an acrostic, without meaning to or noticing. The fact that you didn't know about or intend the acrostic message didn't prevent you from writing it.
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**** Unclear. There's a certain point at which a name is wrong enough to simply be not-their-name rather than a misspelling. It might even matter whether the writer knows which name is correct; you can hardly be said to be misspelling a name if you don't have at least a close idea of how it's actually spelled.
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**** That's irrelevant to the situation under discussion.
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*** Even if you write it while the plane is in flight, thus causing the pilot to unavoidably die of a heart attack 40 seconds later, I imagine that the Death Note will at least try to nudge things so that the subsequent crash or landing causes no further casualties. But, yeah, there's no (known) rule that the death won't happen at all if it leads to other deaths, just that it will default to a heart attack if the specified details lead to other deaths. If even the heart attack unavoidably leads to other deaths, that probably falls under the "use of the Death Note in the human world sometimes affects other human’s lives" rule.
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** We don't know, but I'm guessing no. Heck, I think specifying multiple distinct causes of death for one person just wouldn't work at all, regardless of whether there were conditional statements involved. Besides, if he knows how long his lifespan is, and he knows how fast a disease can kill a person, there's no need for conditionals. He can just write a disease whose fastest known time for killing someone was a bit less than his remaining lifespan, and use that, and it will find a way to kill him that fast but probably not much faster. Aiber died of liver cancer in about 5 months.
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** No. First of all, the whole point of requiring a face and not just a name is so that people with the same name ''won't be affected''. In other words, what picturing a face achieves is allowing the Death Note to narrow down who you're trying to kill. Picturing two faces at the same time does the opposite of that. If you genuinely managed to picture two faces simultaneously for the entire duration of writing, the Death Note would not be able to narrow down who you're trying to kill, and thus would have no effect at all. (If you ended up picturing one face for slightly longer, or closer to the end of writing, maybe it would only affect that person; it's not clear.) Second of all, each person requires their own entry.
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*** To be more precise, the rules say it never runs out of pages. How it achieves this I'm not sure. But I don't think this rule precludes burning the notebook to cinders.
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*** The question is probably trying to test the limits of this rule: "If the Death Note is stolen and the owner is killed by the thief, its ownership will automatically be transferred to the thief." I think the point of the question is whether stealing a desk that contains the Death Note counts as stealing the Death Note. Intuitively I think it doesn't (my gut feeling says the thief would have to at ''least'' know the notebook is there before it counts), but that's just a hunch; there's no reason it ''couldn't'' count.
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**** I think you mean ''don't'' take them into account.
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**** It's not unclear whether they have to mention it. "A god of death has no obligation to completely explain how to use the note or rules which will apply to the human who owns it unless asked." So, either Misa asked, or Rem chose to mention it on her own. Why Rem mentioned it is anyone's guess; perhaps she just felt like knowledge is power.
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*** And you came to this conclusion how? The rules are completely silent about multiple personalities; and if you have to assume whether it would or wouldn't acknowledge them, it makes way more sense to assume it ''wouldn't'' acknowledge them.
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*** If those existed alongside Death Notes, we'd be looking at a different world that isn't the Death Note world. It is not possible to know what would happen in this other, unrelated world.
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** Your question assumes that the Death Note would consider each personality a distinct person in the first place, let alone assign each one a different name. We have no reason at all to think it would behave that way.
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*** That only happens in the anime, so you should be careful about deriving the world's metaphysics from it. That said, you are correct, you cannot see a shinigami without meeting the prerequisites.
** You can definitely see a shinigami on live TV if you can see that shinigami in general, as confirmed in the a-Kira chapter. It's not clear whether you'd see it on pre-recorded footage or in photographs, but it seems sensible to assume that you would.
** Why would the ''camera'' touching the Death Note make a difference one way or the other?
** You can definitely see a shinigami on live TV if you can see that shinigami in general, as confirmed in the a-Kira chapter. It's not clear whether you'd see it on pre-recorded footage or in photographs, but it seems sensible to assume that you would.
** Why would the ''camera'' touching the Death Note make a difference one way or the other?
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*** Why do you assume Ohba never understood it, rather than simply ignoring it? Non-Japanese Death Note characters very deliberately have completely absurd names that no one has in real life; using diminutives as full names could be one method of achieving this. Furthermore, as mentioned below, some people do have diminutives as full first names.
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*** I think you mean she didn't picture the face while writing?
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*** Where are you getting 23 days from? If you're referring to the 23-day rule, that's, well, 23 days. If you're referring to something else I have no idea what.
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* [[IncrediblyLamePun On that note]], can you program a robot (with facial recognition software) to use the notebook? And if the robot is using the notebook does that mean the robot is the Owner and the human who programmed the robot is free from any supernatural penalty?
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* [[IncrediblyLamePun [[{{Pun}} On that note]], can you program a robot (with facial recognition software) to use the notebook? And if the robot is using the notebook does that mean the robot is the Owner and the human who programmed the robot is free from any supernatural penalty?
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*** I'd like to add something that ties into the writing systems problem brought up before. There's ''something'' written on the cover of Misa and Rem's notebooks (maybe "death note" in shinigami language, maybe not), which clearly tells us that shinigami have their own writing system. I believe we can reasonably assume that when a human is born, they have some time during which they can be given a name[[note]]possibly 780 days, as people under that age are immune to the Death Note[[/note]]. If they're given a name by society during that span, that will become their Death Note name; if they aren't, they'll be given a placeholder name in the shinigami writing system.
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** Totally unrelated to the conversation, but this troper is having a difficult time not making a [[LightNovel/HaruhiSuzumiya Haruhi]] reference. If "John Smith" was killed before he met Haruhi three years ago, would she never have awakened her powers? If she created the world in the first place, would it even exist?
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** Totally unrelated to the conversation, but this troper is having a difficult time not making a [[LightNovel/HaruhiSuzumiya [[Literature/HaruhiSuzumiya Haruhi]] reference. If "John Smith" was killed before he met Haruhi three years ago, would she never have awakened her powers? If she created the world in the first place, would it even exist?
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*** But Manga/DeathNote and LightNovel/HaruhiSuzumiya can't take place in the same universe, because the art is so different.
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*** But Manga/DeathNote and LightNovel/HaruhiSuzumiya Literature/HaruhiSuzumiya can't take place in the same universe, because the art is so different.
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*** I checked, and, at least in the chapter rules, the term in Japanese was the one for a heart attack. Not sure if they ever show him having written that the cause of death was a "heart attack" and if it used the same term or not.
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*** What if somebody was hooked up to a deathtrap that was set to kill another person if the person whose name was written flatlines like in Film/SawIII?
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Fixing a typo.
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*** Light found a way around that when he got Raye to kill the entire FBI team. He manipulated Raye to follow his orders, causing the deaths of other peope by using the Death Note. OP still does'nt work, because the time of dath cannt be change,d just the details.
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*** Light found a way around that when he got Raye to kill the entire FBI team. He manipulated Raye to follow his orders, causing the deaths of other peope by using the Death Note. OP still does'nt doesn't work, because the time of dath cannt be change,d just the details.
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Shouldn't HAVE, not shouldn't OF.
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*** However, it's established that the Death Note can read the user's mind (i.e. it knows who's face the user is thinking of) so it should have been able to realize Light's intention and thus shouldn't of caused the victim to write the message.
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*** However, it's established that the Death Note can read the user's mind (i.e. it knows who's face the user is thinking of) so it should have been able to realize Light's intention and thus shouldn't of have caused the victim to write the message.
