Originally Posted by
Chris Lang
Ah, lots of good picks here.
Now, a number of people think that the Death Note manga/anime made a mistake in killing off L (the smartest opponent of the anti-hero protagonist Light Yagami) two thirds of the way through, and I can see why. A lot of the fun came from the battle of wits between Light and L. Seeing the bizarre and sometimes ethically questionable tactics L would use in investigating Light as a suspect in the Kira murders, and Light's clever ways of throwing him off and covering up his true actions made for a lot of amazing moments (including making an announcement that he's eating a potato chip sound epic - it makes sense in context). Of course, the battle couldn't last forever, and at a certain point it made perfect sense for L to die.
The problem was, the writer of the manga/anime was more or less making up the story as he went along. He got to a point where L's death made the most sense, and it would be hard to continue without L dying -- but the problem was, where does the story go from there? What does Light do once the biggest obstacle in his path to being 'the god of a new world' is out of the way? True, there were still members of the 'Kira Task Force' left, but as capable and well-meaning as they were, none of them were anywhere near as brilliant a detective as L.
The writer's solution to the corner he'd written himself into was to introduce Near and Mello, two rivals for L's successor, to be Light's new opponents. Near, as it turned out, was the closest to being a worthy successor to L, but he was still introduced too late in the series, and didn't quite have the same presence as L did.
Personally, I think the manga/anime lost something great when Light's father, Soichiro Yagami, died. He was the moral conscience of the show, with a strong sense of right and wrong. He would always be one of the first to voice objections to L's more ethically questionable tactics, and made it clear that no matter how justified the mysterious 'Kira' believes his actions to be, murder is still wrong. One definitely feels bad for him when his son comes under suspicion for being the killer, especially when we know that those suspicions are correct. When Soichiro dies, the show certainly loses something in its last few episodes.
Various adaptations seem to work to correct these problems. The 2015 Japanese live action drama series introduces Near (and Mello, sort of) early on in the show. This way, he doesn't come out of nowhere and his status as L's possible successor is established before L comes even close to dying.
The live-action Japanese movie adaptation keeps both L and Soichiro alive until the end (though in L's case, he's living on borrowed time due to a trick he pulled with a Death Note to delay the time of his death).
The Death Note musical has L die right in front of Light, but Ryuk state that if Light just goes back to what he was doing before L came along (write a name of some bad person in the Death Note, wait for a death, write another name, wait for a death, write, wait, write, wait, and so on) then things would be just as boring as they were back in the Shinigami realm before all this started, so he writes Light's name in the Death Note at that point to bring things to an end there.
(I haven't seen the 2017 Netflix series so I don't know how that series ends. All I know is that it's the least popular Death Note adaptation).
But yes, the original problem with L's death was of course that the writer was making things up as he went along, and not really sure just where the story would go and how it would end. My guess is a lot of the other character deaths in this thread are this way - some, like L's death, make sense within the story but still present problems for the show going forward.