Understanding Disaster, Part 1: Death Note and the Cyclical Apocalypse

Originally published May 2016

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I foreshadowed this on Twitter. The key word is 'tenuous'
I'm using the term language pretty loosely here, so WATCH OUT
Theoretical, non-prescriptive, I am a hack, reader-response criticism, yeah, yeah, same old song and dance routine
Massive shoutout to Reaper_V / Momon_IV for pointing me in the direction of some very useful eschatological summaries, I hugely apprecite it buddy!
I'm aware Obha and Obata tend not to really mean that much more into their work than surface-level, but Death Note does bear a lot of merit in understanding and studying because it is heavily studied, if at least because of how ridiculously famous it is in terms of general media, and understanding why or how is pretty important. Whether you agree or disagree with me is really the point where we can have some really interesting discussion. It's also really important to remember that even if they aren't intending it, they are drawing upon SOMETHING, and that interstitiality can tell us a lot of interesting things.
If the structure of this video is a bit strange from my other videos, it's because it's a bit longer holistically - I'm still doing arthouse
it's just gonna happen a little later
Eschatology is a really strange topic, and I don't major in religion or anything, so please do not hesitate to correct me if I'm wrong

Broderick, Michael. "Superflat Eschatology", Animation Studies
Animated Dialogues, 2007.
Cohn, Norman. "The Pursuit of the Millenium: Revoluationary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages", Pimlico, London, 1993.
Frohlich, Dennis Owen. "Evil Must Be Punished: Apocalyptic Religion in the Television Series Death Note", Journal of Media and Religion 11: 2012, 141-155
Goderie, Peter and Brian Yecies. "Cultural Flows Beneath Death Note: Catching the Wave of Popular Japanese Culture in China", The Asia-Pacific Journal 8 (35): 2010.
Napier, Susan. "Death Note: The Killer in Me Is the Killer in You", Mechademia 5: 2010, 356-360.
Obha, Tsugumi and Takeshi Obata. "Death Note 13: How to Read", VIZ MEdia, San Francisco, 2008.
Tanaka, Motoko. Apocalypticism in Postwar Japanese Fiction, University of British Columbia, Thesis, 2011.
"The Abrahamic Eschatological Root," Reason and Religion, accessed May 14, 2016, http://bit.ly/1OTpCLF
Thomas, Jolyon Baraka. "Horrific 'Cults' and Comic Religion: Manga after Aum", Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 39 (1): 2012, 127-151.
Ylinen, Alice. "I Am Justice! Moral Relativity and Antiheroes in Death Note", Thesis, 2010.

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