#autopsy but there’s no way every single cardiac arrest victim is actually getting autopsied

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Is there any "Good Boys Deserve Fun" secret lore?

thank you for asking!! there’s a lot of secret lore, actually. i took this out of the final draft but light’s spreadsheets initially had actual content & i yanked that from two different drafts i’m working on. (in which said content is actually relevant.) SO here are some facts about what our boy was doing: light is trying to amalgamate time-of-death information from across multiple countries/districts. this is an extremely difficult and time-consuming process for a number of reasons:

there isn’t an international forensics database — there isn’t even a national one, in a lot of cases — and not all countries are collaborating with the kira investigation. because of this, they’re pulling data from a whole bunch of different sources

death note takes place in 2003, so not all of the data they’re using is digitized. digitization technology still requires a lot of manual labour, but it was even worse back in 2003. they also have to deal with different alphabets, some of which 0% of people on the task force have familiarity with (and several of which only L understands.) they can’t just ignore literally every single country which doesn’t use a familiar character set, but i imagine they’re being quite selective for practical reasons (ex. maybe they’re ignoring all non-digitized data from specific countries)

related: light complains that he’s doing L’s work, but you can’t have multiple people working on the same spreadsheet so this isn’t actually true. L is probably supposed to be translating cyrillic documents or something like that. light’s wider point still stands, though

different countries/districts use different language to name causes of death, so even if you have the data you can’t just plug it into a database. it needs to be cleaned up and standardized

many countries aren’t actually differentiating ordinary cardiac arrests/heart attacks from kira’s killings. i’ve decided japan doesn’t differentiate them. this means someone ALSO has to go through the data and verify whether they’re picking up actual killings or just random noise

anyway, this is just to say that a) light is basically doing glorified data entry, which is one of the reasons he and L are both mind-numbingly bored, and b) they’re alone because the rest of the task force is off digitizing, cleaning and analyzing data. they have to be in a different room bc light and L were both losing their minds at having to hear the scanner going off one billion times an hour also, as a bonus: light is modifying these spreadsheets, but matsuda is the one who actually created them