Religion and art in the anime series Death Note

Tamta Shermazanashvili
4 min readAug 8, 2022

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[Warning: This post is entirely spoilers.]

1- Ryuk and light

Ryuk gives an apple to Light. the apple represents the original sin in a religious context but as a Metaphorically, scene represents the idea of giving a death note to light — i.e. giving the ability to kill.

When we look at the photo, probably even at first glance, we recapture Michelangelo’s fresco “Creation of Adam” which depicts the creation of Adam from the Old Testament. The purpose of the fresco is not only to depict the story on the wall, It has a deeper spiritual meaning , It must be said that that there are different versions of explanation . According to one of the versions, God gives Adam a brain.

the brain and not to the soul (which is how the fresco is most often interpreted), this theory is further supported by the fact that Adam is already alive here, and therefore God does give him the soul, rather than, at that moment he gives free, independent thinking to Light , which is more important than physical existence — So important that the name “creation” is used and so we can say thatt Adam is created at this time, not when he has a body and a soul.

I want to connect Light with this theory.

Ryuk gives Light an apple, as I mentioned, a symbol of an original sin. But at the same time he gives unlimited powers to him in circumstances of complete freedom, Just as God gave man the freedom of thought to depart from his ideas and do what he/she thought was right, Just like that Ryuk also gave Light a death note, allowing him to do what he thought was right, even if it was mass murder.

here’s one more thing ,Light is chained to what we can assume is his humanity. He received the powers of a god, but still could not become a god because his humanity never disappeared.

Also, it is his humanity that defined all his “fair crimes”.

2- L drying off light

L’s drying off Light’s feet is also a metaphor that represents Jesus’ washing of Judas’ feet.

Light finds this strange, but L says: “it’s the least I can do to atone for my sin”. it be said that L secretly worshiping Kira and slowly but surely understood the long-term perspective of Light’s actions And even though he could have gotten out of here, he sacrificed himself to Light as the god of the new world and let him kill him. Since Jesus is represented by L here, we can conclude that L not only forgave Light for all his sins, But he also understood the reasons for this and analyzed the complex but very beneficial basis of the idea and finally sacrificed himself to this .

3 raye penber and naomi misora

This scene reminds us of Michelangelo’s Pietà, where Mary holds the crucified Jesus in her lap, after the Crucifixion.

Pietà means compassion

Mariam, devastated by grief, seems to have apostatized from what happened, and to some extent the acceptance of the situation is reflected in her. His son doesn’t seem to be suffering at all and reminds us of a sleeping person.

Naomi also faced Ray’s death in the same way , she received the story with exactly the same rational acceptance, but in reality she was experiencing infinite sadness just like Mary.

Despite the suffering, which the main of these two figures These figures anyway somewhat idealized. It reflects the High Renaissance’s belief in Neoplatonic ideals — Beauty on earth reflects the beauty of Gog. Therefore, these beautiful figures can be said to embody divine beauty. The figures balance the ideals of classical beauty and naturalism in the Renaissance.

It is impossible to consider Ray and Naomi as an idealized couple, but however, from Naomi’s point of view, Ray was definitely an ideal and her relationship with him was defintely in Neoplatonic ideals and not true respectful relationship .

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Tamta Shermazanashvili

A big enthusiast of movies and TV series, dog lover and feminist. BA in Journalism and Mass Communication.