That's because Light has some semblance of principles. Ryuk doesn't.
Ryuk is the one who dropped a loaded gun into an elementary school playground and sat around giggling with glee waiting for someone to die.
Light picked up that handgun and set about to try and use it for...questionable reasons to be sure but it still beats For the Evulz.
![]()
![]()
Rem and Gelus can be considered outside the normal for Shinigami. Yeah they make Ryuk look shitty, but they're not exactly the basis or regular Shinigami behavior.
The thing is the one who found said "gun" was old and smart enough to recognize it for what it was, but instead of getting rid of it decided to empty the clip then got more bullets.
edited 27th Apr '17 4:25:51 AM by Cross
I would agree that Ryuk is the greater evil of the two. Light, shitty as he was, believed he had principles. He convinced himself that he was creating a better world. He honestly thought a net positive would result from his murders.
Ryuk didn't. Ryuk didn't even care. He was in it for the lulz, and he was explicitly clear about that from the beginning. Ryuk was the guillotine blade hanging over Light's neck, swearing to kill him if he ever stops being amusing. Light lost sight of that at some point, but it never stopped being true. For all his ambitions and all his goals, Light was never anything more than Ryuk's jester, dancing for his amusement until such a time when Ryuk gets bored and casually murders him.
Ryuk explains this all right from the start and holds true to it all the way through the end where he does, in fact, casually murder Light to avoid being bored.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.By the way, do you think Light is the type of guy who'd Rage Quit ? You know, if the events of his defeat go differently and he gets cornered, would he pull a final dick move like making the POTUS nuke something?
Wake me up at your own risk.Yeah, the rules make it impossible to kill someone indirectly via the Death Note. The details surrounding the death will be carried out if within the realm of possibility, but if not, or if the scenario would directly cause another's death, it will just be the standard heart attack.
So no making POTUS go nuclear, no making people write down information they don't actually know, and no making somebody do something they aren't physically able to do.
Light could have forced his dad to reveal how to spell Mello's name though. It just would have been really tricky to pull off without anyone realizing what happened.
PSN ID: FateSeraph | Switch friendcode: SW-0145-8835-0610 Congratulations! She/TheyRegarding Ryuk and his morality, I am pretty much in the Blue-and-Orange Morality camp.
Yeah he intentionally dropped a notebook that can kill anyone in front of a school kid, expecting that kid to start some shit for his entertainment. What he did is by human standards the equivalent giving a little kid a gun. But that's the thing; by human standards what he did was evil.
Ryuk is a shinigami, which translates to "death god". His whole purpose of existing is to cause as much death as possible; it's essentially. And it can get boring after untold years of doing. And let's face it, the world the shinigami occupies in is pretty damn boring; like Namek times 9000.
So to spice things up in his dead in job, Ryuk decided to create an interesting work game that would not only kill more people but also amuse him: get a human to write names down in the Death Note. Preferably someone guillible and with a God complex. In this case Light.
Also I should mentioned how apples to them is essentially crack and if they developed empathy they would literally die.
So basically while by our standards, what Ryuk did is horrible and ruined many lives in process. But to him and all the other shinigami he just created a fun way to do their jobs.
Ryuk's a bit of a bastard by shinigami standards too. It's noted right off the bat that he tricked the shinigami king into giving him a second Death Note. That's why he's able to do all this in the first place: because he manipulated his own cosmic hierarchy to enable his bloody game.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.No, it's right in the first chapter. Ryuk has two Notes 'cause he tricked the Shinigami King into giving him two.
You're thinking of Midora, the shinigami for C-Kira, but he just straight-up bribed the Shinigami King with apples.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.![]()
I know in the Anime he tricked the king into giving him one (or at-least I think he did), but I haven't read the manga so I don't know what happened there.
Edit: Darn
edited 29th Apr '17 7:22:55 AM by Fourthspartan56
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangWhat happened is that Ryuk knew that Sidoh had dropped his Death Note somewhere, but Sidoh, being the standard lazy shinigami, didn't get around to reporting that right away. So Ryuk went to the Shinigami King to say that he had lost his Death Note, so when Sidoh's Death Note was found, it was given to Ryuk instead. And since this happened with the oversight and authorization of the Shinigami King, that made it officially Ryuk's Death Note now, rather than another shinigami's Death Note that Ryuk happened to be holding.
Sidoh dropped it and it was returned to the Shinigami King. Ryuk claimed it was his, effectively stealing it.
So, yeah. Even if you subscribe to the idea that he shouldn't be held to human standards, he's still a manipulative bastard.
EDIT: It should be noted that, because shinigami have to sustain themselves through the Death Note, doing this was effectively condemning Sidoh to death for the sake of his lulz.
edited 29th Apr '17 8:18:39 AM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.I think it's fair to say that shinigami really don't give much of a shit about life in general. Rem is willing to sacrifice her life to protect Misa's pretty readily, Sidoh's reaction to the loss of his Death Note and his dwindling lifespan is less "Oh shit! I'm gonna die!" and more "Oh man, this is such a pain," and Ryuk mentions that several shinigami have died because they went centuries without writing any names in their Death Notes, essentially dying from sheer apathy.
Probably has to do with the implication that they've been sitting around in the barren Shinigami World with almost nothing to do for a very, very long time.

Well, I might argue that Ryuk isn't as bad as Light. Not by much since that's already a really high bar, but Ryuk tends to run on much more of a 'I'm just going along with this' and never acts really involved except 'Wow. This Light kid is fucked up, but still keeping himself from getting caught'. He runs of Blue-Orange Morality and he never really has much of a stake in the game. He's more of a bystander and neutral. Not by MUCH, granted, but still.
Light activly does everything wrong. He's presented with every choice and choses evil pretty much every time. He's the one who dreams of this awful new world order and other nonsese. Not Ryuk.