#I am going to go read up on cartesian dualism asap!!!!!!!!

[skyborneveggie]

@shydroid3000 your addition & @dancing-lex's tags!!!!!

#you're so right that he devalues everyone else except for L#i like that you compared light to descartes' views on vivisection#because to light theres something inherent to the people he kills especially#he doesnt think of them as rational beings#its in their nature maybe

And it's okay to not feel bad about the screams, really, because... well, he's God of the New World, and this is what a god does, and he's still *good* deep down, because it's all for a greater good. After all, humans are to a God kind of like what other animals are to a human, right?

It almost seems like to Light, he and L are the only two people he truly, truly conceives of as thinking beings in a way that really 'counts'... Like, other people walk around in their bodies having thoughts and feelings.

...This is reminding me of a post I have been trying to draft up about a very subtle Calvinist theme in Death Note, and how Light uses his own Shinto-esque version of the doctrine of reprobation vs. election to dehumanize & categorize people into boxes without feeling guilty about it.

The difference is that in Calvinism, humanity is seen as naturally evil so the original dichotomy is "people who exist in their natural evil state & cannot escape it of their own free will" vs "people whom God chooses to save".

Whereas in Shinto, humanity is seen as naturally pure, so the dichotomy for Light becomes "people who Kira must sacrifice for natural good to emerge" vs "people who did not need to be sacrificed."

Both Kira & the Calvinist god dehumanize people by removing their agency. It doesn't matter if you're a good person trying to do the right thing; if you're against them or stand in the way, you're taken out regardless.

I think this explains also why Light, even though he feels awful about killing his first two "bad" victims, feels absolutely no guilt about killing innocent people who get in his way after committing to his goal; even the very first time when you would think he might. At the core it's not about "good" vs. "bad" for him. It's about sacrifice, and he views the sacrifice of both good and bad people as morally equal.

Like you said, he doesn't see people as people. He sees them as agency-less pawns that are less alive than he is. And like you said, the one exception to this is L, who started out as someone who needed to be sacrificed, but in the end exceeds the two dehumanized boxes in Light's mind. He becomes a real person; a living, thinking being that Light needs to incapacitate for personal & emotional reasons, and not just in the name of impersonal sacrifice.

Light is someone who perceives a very strong separation between the body and the mind, and is very disconnected from his own body. And I do wonder if, by nature of them being so similar, this is something he projects onto L as well; & helps him divorce the thought of the death of L's body (ie. his shell) from the death of L's mind (ie. his true self). So Light kills the body, the part of L that isn't really him, to incapacitate his mind, not kill it. He's compartmentalized it in such a way where he doesn't have to think of death as being true death.

It isn't until Light is about to die himself that he is able to mentally bridge the connection between his body & his own conscious existence, and realize what it really means to die.