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narcasseI picked this book up about two months ago having been quite impressed with the Death Note live action films, especially L: Change the World. The actor playing L managed to sell the character to me and I was interested in learning more about the whole Wammy’s House background so this novel definitely seemed like a good idea, and overall it was.
Another Note did what it said on the box: it was a light novel with an interesting premise and a reasonable conclusion. The premise was overtly complicated but that served to highlight exactly where the character of B went wrong. Everything rode on the idea that nobody could possibly figure out or even consider the most obvious missing detail. Though B did a remarkable job of bogging the investigation down with fussy nonsense, like Light, most of his plan hinged on his own ability for misdirection and a hands-on approach. The minute he wasn’t on hand to attempt to confuse Naomi Misora with more elaborate theatrics she immediately came back to the issue in hand and figured it out readily enough. In that respect B was interesting as a flawed and superficial copy of L. He dressed similarly, behaved similarly and played some very elaborate games with backwards Romanised pronunciations of ‘L’ but at the end of the day in an attempt to create a case that L could never solve he overcomplicated the matter heavily, almost ridiculously so.
It would almost be interesting to consider how B vs. Light would have played out considering that they both tend towards the overcomplicated topped off with a driving need to not just win but to prove that they’re smarter than everybody else in the process. Light obviously does that better than B, at least in the first half of the manga, but once left to his own devices with a huge arena to manage he rapidly loses control so perhaps under those circumstances they’d be more or less even. B also suffers from the disadvantage that he’s been primed to be a replacement L so there’s a rather inflated sense of insecurity and a manic drive to outsmart the ideal which can’t have helped him either. At least Light got to choose to try to outsmart L: B just had the role thrust upon him, possibly from infancy.
B does have shinigami eyes which gave him both an advantage and a disadvantage in warping his view of the world, and I was considering making an argument for how surely he could have found a way to live with that without becoming a homicidal nutcase but then my counter-example was Raistlin who wasn’t particularly pleasant to start with and then wound up wanting to become a god/succeeding/destroying the world/changing the timeline/coming back from the grave/generally breaking all the laws of magic because nobody could stop him. Granted, Raistlin probably isn’t a good example since his constant visions of decay were just the icing on the megalomaniac cake. B’s shinigami eyes then may also be part of the problem because all around him he sees just how long everyone else has to live and since he was born with them that must have had quite a isolating effect. Shiki of Tsukihime has a similar problem and certainly the anime illustrates his confusion and alienation as a result of his unique perception.
B’s natural advantage most likely is the root cause of his disenfranchisement which allows him to simply kill without remorse. His aspiration to defeat L in a game of his own devising is a product of his training as L’s successor and considering that the pressure is enough to prompt A’s suicide it’s not surprising that B is particularly unhinged. This most likely will have been exacerbated even further by the responses of the orphanage staff to A’s suicide and perhaps even Quillsh Wammy’s personal response as well since this is most likely the juncture at which B realised that he’d been expected to fail or at least that his failure wasn’t unforeseen.
Naomi Misora’s backstory reminded me somewhat of Rachel Walling in The Scarecrow since there seems to be something of a theme of female FBI agents being suspended for reasons that are deliberately set up to be seen as unjust by the reader. It was nice to see that she was the reason that L decided to learn capoeira and the reasons she gave for it being a good combat style at least.
Overall, the finicky puzzles were over the top but perfectly suitable for the characters involved. The narrative hints that the detective accompanying Naomi Misora was L were entertaining and certainly added to the impact of the revelation that B had always been attempting to become L. In fact B was everything that could be wanted in a replacement L save for the only necessary part. As for the names of the victims, I’m quite convinced that they were deliberately a combination of random words rather than actual English language names and were in fact a humorous, logical end result of naming in a world where ‘Quillsh’ is a valid first name. Another Note then wasn’t a bad hour’s read: damnably short, filled with entertaining puzzles in their own fiddly, fussy way and with that slight hint of insight when it came to L and the rest of the Wammy’s House residents.
Another Note did what it said on the box: it was a light novel with an interesting premise and a reasonable conclusion. The premise was overtly complicated but that served to highlight exactly where the character of B went wrong. Everything rode on the idea that nobody could possibly figure out or even consider the most obvious missing detail. Though B did a remarkable job of bogging the investigation down with fussy nonsense, like Light, most of his plan hinged on his own ability for misdirection and a hands-on approach. The minute he wasn’t on hand to attempt to confuse Naomi Misora with more elaborate theatrics she immediately came back to the issue in hand and figured it out readily enough. In that respect B was interesting as a flawed and superficial copy of L. He dressed similarly, behaved similarly and played some very elaborate games with backwards Romanised pronunciations of ‘L’ but at the end of the day in an attempt to create a case that L could never solve he overcomplicated the matter heavily, almost ridiculously so.
It would almost be interesting to consider how B vs. Light would have played out considering that they both tend towards the overcomplicated topped off with a driving need to not just win but to prove that they’re smarter than everybody else in the process. Light obviously does that better than B, at least in the first half of the manga, but once left to his own devices with a huge arena to manage he rapidly loses control so perhaps under those circumstances they’d be more or less even. B also suffers from the disadvantage that he’s been primed to be a replacement L so there’s a rather inflated sense of insecurity and a manic drive to outsmart the ideal which can’t have helped him either. At least Light got to choose to try to outsmart L: B just had the role thrust upon him, possibly from infancy.
B does have shinigami eyes which gave him both an advantage and a disadvantage in warping his view of the world, and I was considering making an argument for how surely he could have found a way to live with that without becoming a homicidal nutcase but then my counter-example was Raistlin who wasn’t particularly pleasant to start with and then wound up wanting to become a god/succeeding/destroying the world/changing the timeline/coming back from the grave/generally breaking all the laws of magic because nobody could stop him. Granted, Raistlin probably isn’t a good example since his constant visions of decay were just the icing on the megalomaniac cake. B’s shinigami eyes then may also be part of the problem because all around him he sees just how long everyone else has to live and since he was born with them that must have had quite a isolating effect. Shiki of Tsukihime has a similar problem and certainly the anime illustrates his confusion and alienation as a result of his unique perception.
B’s natural advantage most likely is the root cause of his disenfranchisement which allows him to simply kill without remorse. His aspiration to defeat L in a game of his own devising is a product of his training as L’s successor and considering that the pressure is enough to prompt A’s suicide it’s not surprising that B is particularly unhinged. This most likely will have been exacerbated even further by the responses of the orphanage staff to A’s suicide and perhaps even Quillsh Wammy’s personal response as well since this is most likely the juncture at which B realised that he’d been expected to fail or at least that his failure wasn’t unforeseen.
Naomi Misora’s backstory reminded me somewhat of Rachel Walling in The Scarecrow since there seems to be something of a theme of female FBI agents being suspended for reasons that are deliberately set up to be seen as unjust by the reader. It was nice to see that she was the reason that L decided to learn capoeira and the reasons she gave for it being a good combat style at least.
Overall, the finicky puzzles were over the top but perfectly suitable for the characters involved. The narrative hints that the detective accompanying Naomi Misora was L were entertaining and certainly added to the impact of the revelation that B had always been attempting to become L. In fact B was everything that could be wanted in a replacement L save for the only necessary part. As for the names of the victims, I’m quite convinced that they were deliberately a combination of random words rather than actual English language names and were in fact a humorous, logical end result of naming in a world where ‘Quillsh’ is a valid first name. Another Note then wasn’t a bad hour’s read: damnably short, filled with entertaining puzzles in their own fiddly, fussy way and with that slight hint of insight when it came to L and the rest of the Wammy’s House residents.
