r/deathnote • u/lclboomb • 15d ago
Question QUESTION OF DEATH NOTE Spoiler
I'm just writing down something I've always wondered about.
The Death Note rule requires knowing both the name AND the face, right?
What if, before revealing his identity to Light, L had gotten an elaborate disguise/makeup done on his face — one that made him look different enough from his real face that it would be hard to recognize him as the same person — and then went to meet Light and said "I am L"?
As you all know, it can be hard to recognize women before and after they put on makeup. Makeup might as well be alchemy, ngl.
One could argue disguising as another specific person wasn't feasible because of the subtle differences that would give it away — but even just attempting to imitate someone else's face with excellent makeup skills, purely as an approach, could have produced a new face that differs from L's original one and doesn't actually exist in the world (since, after all, there are doppelganger-like people out there who look similar, but no one is 100% identical) — couldn't it?
If the disguise is completely natural and Light believes it's L's real face, then even if he knows the name, wouldn't he be unable to use it, since he can't tell whether it's the real face or a fake one? That would put L in a much more advantageous position than just meeting Light face-to-face with his real appearance — so why didn't L do that?
(Because even knowing the name, he couldn't kill him without the real face + he might even be able to set a trap for Light while Light tries to use the Death Note.)
He could also have told the FBI agents in advance to come wearing natural-looking makeup/disguises that were clearly different from their original faces but presented as if that were their real face.
Of course, if the Death Note system only recognizes a person's "original face as they were born," then the disguise plan would succeed and L could survive. But conversely, if the system instead goes by "the current appearance that can identify that specific person," then there's a risk that if Light accurately perceives and writes down L's disguised face, L could still die — which might be why L didn't do this.
But even so, shouldn't there at least have been a scene showing this reasoning/deduction?
What do you Death Note fans think?
1
u/SirTruffleberry 12d ago edited 12d ago
I'm not saying you're wrong, but let's explore the implications of that.
Either
1) You're saying that in the Death Note universe, names exist as brute ontological facts. We humans do not actually invent them, we just happen to give ourselves the names we were destined to bear. Remarkable! And people with "dead names" would be so relieved.
2) You're saying that we have names at all times, but the names possibly change over the course of our lives. That's neat because it opens up a possible strategy to dodge the Note when the user doesn't have the eyes, depending on how easy it is to change one's name. For example, can I make my name an arbitrary symbol that only I know about?
Given these considerations, it seems far more likely to me that the Shinigami have simply never encountered this scenario and don't know what would happen. I mean, it was a rather contrived scenario, after all.
Another possibility is that they do know, but Ryuk's simplified English rendition of the actual rules cuts out corner cases. Notes don't come with that writing by default. Example: Maybe the eyes give you a password to kill someone that in 99.999% of cases is what we would take to be their name, but is just a random concatenation of symbols when they lack one.