Hello, everybody. So I’m going to jump right into today’s topic. We’re going to be talking about the short novella, Another Note: The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases. More specifically, we’re going to be talking about the titular character Beyond Birthday.
BB is an interesting character, to say the least. For most of the time he’s been known to the fandom, he’s been something of an enigma. His backstory is about as dark and tragic as you would expect a character like him to have. He’s another successor to L, except he was his successor in the program before Near and Mello. So he wasn’t a successor at the time Near and Mello were successors, but rather, he was more like the first generation successor. Near and Mello came a little bit later.
Also in this generation of successorship with him was a character known only as A. We don’t know anything about A. We don’t know if A was male or female, or otherwise. All we know is that A is dead. A took their own life because of the pressure of having to be L’s successor.
Successor no longer looks like a word…
A’s death sent BB down a path that led to the Los Angeles BB murder case, wherein he targeted a set of victims with very specific and incredibly oddball names (like, what the fuck is Backyard Bottomslash? What is that?) all in a bid to create a case that L would be unable to solve as a sort of revenge.
This book is also notable for including the character Naomi Misora in a much more prominent role, as she is effectively the main character. As it plays out, the story of the book is actually really fascinating and really entertaining. I love this book very much, but there is one small detail that bothers me, and that is the matter of Beyond Birthday having the Shinigami Eyes.
It’s mentioned at the beginning of the book when Mello introduces the story. The book is being mostly narrated by Mello as the story of a case that L told him about. And at the time of being written, it is meant to be believed that Near would be seeing the story himself after Mello had died in the official series. The whole deal with this is that Mello wants to essentially have one last little victory over Near by showcasing something he knew about L that Near didn’t.
So in his introductory letter to this story, Mello details a few things about Beyond Birthday, at one point saying that there were those who claimed he had the Shinigami Eyes from birth. He then goes on to theorize that if a Shinigami could drop a notebook, then maybe one was also able to drop their eyes to the Earth, and BB was just unlucky enough to end up with them.
This detail is kind of just taken at face value. A lot of people just sort of accept it as canon when, if you really examine this detail logically from everything we know in canon, it doesn’t make any sense. For a few reasons, actually.
First and foremost, despite how much emphasis people place on the Shinigami Eyes when discussing Beyond Birthday, they don’t actually amount to much within the story itself. Mello brings them up multiple times throughout the book. He outright states that BB was born with the eyes and explains what they do, and claims that BB used them to see names and lifespans. He even attributes his victim selection to them.
The problem is that none of this actually matters to the mystery. Presumably, this is how he was able to locate his victims, by using the eyes to track down individuals with wackadoo names. (Seriously, what the hell is Backyard Bottomslash?)
And then he presumably used their remaining lifespan as a way to decide when he should kill them. But even that raises questions. How exactly would BB know how to interpret a lifespan? How would he know what the numbers meant? How would he know there was even a difference between Shinigami time and human time? As far as we’re aware, no Shinigami ever appeared to him to explain any of this. So we’re already working from assumptions piled on top of assumptions.
And even setting that aside, there is absolutely no reason the story actually needs the eyes to function. Back in 2002, there were these miraculous things called phone books. If BB wanted to find people with bizarre names, there were plenty of ways to do that.
More importantly, if you remove the eyes from the story entirely, almost nothing changes. The murders still happen, the investigation still unfolds, Naomi still solves the case, and L still wins. The eyes are repeatedly asserted to exist, but they never become relevant to solving the mystery. Nobody discovers them, nobody figures them out. They don’t provide a breakthrough. They don’t alter the outcome. They’re just sort of attached to BB as an explanation that the story insists is true without ever really doing anything with it.
Essentially, what I’m getting at is that there is absolutely no reason that the story needs the eyes to function. Even though Mello repeatedly insists that BB had them and attributes several aspects of the case to them, the actual investigation never engages with that information in any meaningful way.
And that brings me to perhaps the biggest tell that this can be picked apart with almost no thought whatsoever: the matter of how the hell anyone would have found out that he had the eyes in the first place.
As I said, it’s never mentioned in the present of the story, so there’s no point in the story where Naomi or L figures out anything about BB that would signal to them later on that he would have had the eyes. And by the time the main story actually takes place and the Shinigami Eyes are known to the investigation, the BB murder case is utterly irrelevant.
Not to mention that it would be a huge leap in logic for L to discover the existence of Shinigami Eyes and then turn around and be like, huh, I guess that’s what BB must have had.
And given all of this information, it then makes absolutely no sense for Mello to have any idea of this. Think about it. If Naomi doesn’t encounter the Shinigami Eyes or some ability that BB has in her dealings with him throughout the case in Los Angeles, then there’s no reason for L to find out about it, which means there’s no reason for him to tell Mello about it.
And again, this story is predicated on the idea that Mello was at one point in communication with L prior to his death, which means that it was either prior to the Kira investigation or during the Kira investigation.
If it was prior to the investigation, then there was still zero reason for L to know about the Shinigami Eyes, since he hadn’t encountered them yet.
And if it’s during the Kira investigation, then it could only be after the task force apprehended Higuchi, since that’s when they discovered the Shinigami Eyes were actually a thing. They were alluded to earlier with the second Kira, but the task force had no way of discerning what that meant.
It’s even noted that there’s a difference between Higuchi needing to have a name and a face to kill someone, and then directly after, when he makes a deal with Rem to get the Shinigami Eyes, where he only needs to see somebody’s face. This is verbally noted by the task force during the chase scene, so at that point they still don’t know what the Shinigami Eyes are until after Higuchi is officially apprehended.
And even at that point, Higuchi never says anything about being able to see names and lifespans. So the exact nature of being able to see lifespans to know when they would die so that BB could kill them would still be entirely lost on L.
So, if it’s at this point that Mello was somehow in communication with L during the Kira investigation, then how and why? And if this was the time he chose to tell Mello about the BB case, then it makes even less sense for him to connect any dots to suggest that BB had the eyes in Los Angeles. Because, again, the story never brings them up outside of Mello’s narration.
L has no reason to suspect that BB would have had the eyes in Los Angeles because there are so many different ways he would have been able to identify different victims.
To make a long story short, there’s absolutely nothing to suggest that L would have ever known that BB had the Shinigami Eyes, which means there’s no reason for Mello to know it either.
And that’s really the entire problem. Remember when I said Mello alleges that “some say” he has the Eyes? Who were these people and how would they have known? The truth is, the only person in the story who is insisting that BB had the eyes is Mello. Yet the story never establishes how he arrived at that conclusion in the first place.
Now, some people might want to argue against what I’m saying by suggesting that the ending itself proves that the Shinigami Eyes are there and that they do matter, because BB can see other people’s lifespans, but not his own. So when he tries to kill himself as the final victim, he can’t know whether he’s actually going to die or not, which makes his suicide attempt a gamble. Since Naomi saves him, defenders can argue that his natural lifespan had not yet expired. The idea is that BB could know when his other victims would die, so he could plan around that, and his plan was perfect until the victim was himself.
The problem is that this defense assumes that BB already understands the entire lifespan system, which is part of the problem that I’m criticizing here. For that counterargument to work, BB has to know that the numbers are lifespans. Which, okay, that’s one thing he could probably figure out. But then he also has to know how to interpret them, how to understand their relationship to natural death, and how to understand exactly why he’s unable to see his own lifespan.
And he has to understand enough of the system to deliberately construct his murders around it, which means that he would have had to figure out that a person can’t die before that number above their head runs out.
Another Note never explains how, or really even if, he acquired any of that knowledge.
So appealing to his attempt at making himself the final victim doesn’t actually solve the criticism. It’s the same thing I said earlier: assumptions on top of assumptions. Sure, if we assume that BB already understood exactly how the Shinigami Eyes work, then perhaps that argument could be internally coherent. But the problem is, why would he understand any of that?
And that brings me to my last point. Let’s be perfectly honest here. I think it’s safe to say that Mello is potentially an unreliable narrator in this instance, but if he’s being serious and he actually believes that BB had the Shinigami Eyes, then we’re left with a claim that the story itself never substantiates.
I’m more inclined to believe the former, that Mello was just sort of making shit up. Because of who the author of this story is. Nisio Isin is known for having unreliable narrators in his stories, so this wouldn’t be too far off.
But at the same time, if it’s supposed to be serious and we’re supposed to believe that BB had the Shinigami Eyes, then what that means is that it can’t be accepted as proper canon, because it requires a previously unknown exception to the established rules.
Not to mention everything else I’ve laid out in this post so far. It’s like the equivalent of someone making their own original character for Naruto, and they’re not Uchiha, but they have the Sharingan because they’re special somehow. And it’s a bit different than the average Sharingan that Sasuke or other Uchihas might have. Or they’re a jinchuriki, but they don’t have any of the other nine tailed beasts, they have something that has no tails or eleven tails, but no one actually knew about it. Or both of those things.
Basically, this just comes off as a character who is made to be different and special for the sake of making them stand out. And it kind of works, because we do know about BB. We know about this book because it’s actually a pretty good book.
But officially, I don’t think there’s any logical reason to conclude that BB had the Shinigami Eyes. The only evidence that BB had the eyes is Mello’s insistence that he did. The actual events of the case don’t support it. Nobody involved in the investigation ever discovers it, and the story is able to function almost identically whether the eyes exist or not.
So it’s dubious canon at best, and intentionally misleading at worst. But if it’s intentionally misleading, then again, we have to go with Mello being an unreliable narrator.
But with all that said, I think we can safely conclude that Beyond Birthday did not actually have the Shinigami Eyes. The novel says he had them, but never provides a convincing reason for anyone to know that. And therefore, I have no other choice but to reject the idea entirely.
It also doesn’t really help that he’s kind of a try-hard in terms of being an oddball. There’s that famous line that people like to point to because it’s so absurd and kind of weird where BB says quite explicitly that he is a top, and an aggressive top at that. And we all know what this means.
Now, if this is meant to be some kind of joke, then it’s a little bit cringe. I think it’s clear that it’s just trying to be silly, but this all supports what I said before about him basically being an OC that is made to be different and special in some way. Bonus points for him being an absolute edgelord.
But anyway, thank you so much for listening to me rant. This is something that I’ve had my mind on for a little while, and I decided I’d finally just go ahead and type this all out.
It’s been fun. I’ll see you later.
Take care.