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Scrawl this one in your magic killer notebook if you’ve heard it before: A popular, beloved Japanese manga and anime catches the attention of an American studio desperate for that sweet trans-global box office. The American studio then opts to Anglicize the property, casting largely white actors and leaving intact only the exotic qualities of a vaguely Asian aesthetic. “The name is an intentional misdirection,” some astute viewer might observe. “He wants us to believe he’s Japanese.”

Friends, such a sentiment was not a studio note for this spring’s Ghost in the Shell remake, but rather a line of dialogue in the new Netflix offering Death Note — as self-incriminating a thing for an investigator character to say as ever there was.

Death Note was first a manga created by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrator Takeshi Obata, then an anime series (currently available on Netflix as well), and then a live-action film series in Japan. In those earlier incarnations it made sense that a teen with supernatural murder-ability would want to style himself with the name “Kira,” which is derived from the Japanese pronunciation of the English killer. But once the book changes hands to some white kid in Seattle, and that kid is using “Kira” just to throw the feds off his scent, that’s little more than an “intentional misdirection” aimed at fans of the original Death Note.

Netflix’s ‘Death Note’ Should Be Returned To Sender

Photo: James Dittiger/Netflix

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I realized the uselessness of this academic language when, at 21, I met a farmer from my father’s village in northern Pakistan who was more Marxist than most Marxists including myself without knowing who Marx or Engels was and who was far more aware of how true love is achieved without rummaging through the letters of Rilke, Kierkegaard, Barthes, Derrida, Kafka, Carson, Atwood, more combined; who knew the difference between good and bad and the grey area in between without having read Jung or Nietzsche; who could tell you why the laborer feels lonely without picking up a manifesto from Europe, and when he was done shaming me into self-reflection (something I thank him for), he simply asked: “So what is new?”

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I hate my self awareness and flesh vessel!!!! Why do I exist!!!!!!!

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no fucking way

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I love it when people tell me about me because I have no idea who I am