I wish I had one of those nifty books.

When it comes to anime, I am pretty much clueless. I’ve pretended to have a lot of knowledge about it in the past, but I always get called out whenever I run into otakus. Apparently my love of Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball doesn’t earn me any points among the anime nerds, but who cares about them anyway right? The only time any of those guys get any action is if they’re beating off to Bible Black or something.

I have enjoyed a few series in the past and I wanted to get into a new series. I’ve been bored after coming home from being in the office for 13 hours a day, and I asked a few of my online friends what series I should get into with a few caveats, which were:

+ No tentacle rape.
+ Nothing too “cutesy.”
+ Hot animated honeys are necessary. (Not really.)
+ Okay maybe a little tentacle rape is fine.

Without fail, my online buddies all recommended that I give Death Note a shot. Oh, and the fact that I am able to type up the phrase “online friend” made me cringe a little. I hope none of my IRL friends read this. IRL is “in real life” for you n00bs.

I’m going to try to do the quickest synopsis of episode 1 that I can. We have Ryuuku, who’s a Shinigami. According to wikipedia, shinigamis are like Grim Reapers, only more fashionable. I mean, take a look at Ryuuku… doesn’t he look like he’s ready to work it?

You go girl.

At any rate, Ryuuku is bored in shinigamiland and decides to have a little bit of fun. He drops his notebook to Earth just to see what happens.

Oh there was a guy playing a DS in this episode. It’s not relevant to the story in any way, but I thought I’d mention it.

Our hero (hero?) Light, who like many other leads in anime films, is a depressed high school student. Can you really blame him? His mother named him “Light.” I bet he got a lot of shit for that growing up. But yeah, Light is an exceptionally bright student, usually finishing at the head of the class. He seems to be somewhat of a loner though.

Light finds the Death Note on the ground and is at first skeptical of its power, but he takes it anyway. He reads the instructions in the book, which are as follows: you write down the name of the person you want dead and imagine their face. That way, two people who share the same name won’t die. Also, you have 6 minutes and 40 seconds to write down the cause of death. If you don’t, they’ll just drop dead of a heart attack. Pretty simple stuff.

Light first uses the Death Note disbelievingly (which is a real word disbelievingly…) to kill a man who took a bunch of kids in a nursery hostage. He then uses it to kill the guy pictured above. I don’t know why, but I bet it has to do with the fact that he looks like a horse.

Hmmm… this Death Note thing is pretty cool. I wonder what would happen if…

Ho ho ho! Oh man I am so funny.

What? Too soon?

At the end of the episode, Light meets Ryuuku and the two have a lengthy talk. Light decides that it’s up to him to cleanse the world and he’s going to do it by killing all of the major criminals. Light seemed normal at the beginning of this episode, but by the end, we can see that he’s utterly batshit insane. Good for him. Ryuuku is pleased with his decision to drop the Death Note… because it looks like he’s found a way to cure his boredom.

And fortunately for me, so have I.