I will be spoiling the end of Death Note in this one.

In the beginning of Death Note, the shinigami (death god), Ryuk warns Light that any mortal who uses a Death Note will never go to heaven or hell, hinting at a unique punishment for such a transgression. At the very end it is revealed that this was a misdirection: Light will not go to heaven or hell because, in this universe, there is no heaven or hell. Only nothingness awaits mortals after death. “In death all are equal.”

I found this to be probably the biggest of several big disappointments for the second half of the series. I had lost most of my investment in the story after L’s death, and I found the later portions to drag badly. What made me want to finish was the promise of finally seeing Light get his comeuppance, and while it does come in an acceptable manner, the revelation about the afterlife undermined it for me.

By the way, I think L dying is perfectly acceptable, but his death should have been the end of the story; that he somehow arranged matters so that his death would also bring Light down. That, I think, would have been the most satisfying and thematically fitting conclusion to their battle: queen’s sacrifice to force a checkmate, to use chess analogies.

The problem is that the lack of an afterlife means that Light is ultimately no worse off than his victims. This means that there are, in fact, no consequences to Light’s use of the Death Note or his pretensions of godhood except that it eventually gets him killed. But he was going to die sooner or later and come to the same end regardless. In fact, one could say that the moral of the story is not that he was wrong to use the Death Note and paid the price, but that he was just too reckless in its use, and that if he had avoided killing hundreds of people at a sitting he might have gotten off without even being suspected.

“Everyone is equal in death” is, in truth, a repulsive idea. It means that an injustice that is not corrected in this life will never be corrected. It means that the only punishment available is to hasten a conclusion that would have happened regardless. It means that the successful sociopath, hedonist, or dictator is the one who has discovered the secret of life.

Light is such a vile character that his merely being brought to an ‘equal’ state as everyone else feels like an injustice. Light isn’t the equal of the characters he murders, and his receiving no worse than they is a disappointment. There is something palpably wrong in the situation which cries out for correction.

The mistake that is often made is to think of this in terms of wanting him to be punished. But that isn’t it. What is demanded is not so much for Light to be punished as for him to be made to see himself for what he is. Justice demands the true nature of his actions be made manifest. Near – L’s replacement – can tell him that he is nothing but a murderer, and he’s correct, but Near is only a man. Light can ignore him if he likes, or conclude that he is wrong. There needs to be some kind of absolute judgment, which Light can’t dismiss, which cannot be simply wrong, and which can force him to see and feel the truth of what he is.

Lest you think I am demanding a Christian context for a non-Christian story, I offer, as a counterexample, the conclusion of Fullmetal Alchemist (spoilers for that one as well). At the end of that story, the villainous Homunculus is confronted by the Truth – the embodiment of the universe in this story – who gives it a devastating dressing down before casting him back into the nothingness from which it came: “You called Truth ‘the arbiter of order that keeps men in their place’. That’s what you said, isn’t it? And so, just as you said…I’m going to show you your proper place.” The Truth then concludes with “The truth brings despair to those who dare to reach above their station.”

That’s what was needed in Death Note: Light being confronted with something or someone who could actually “show him his proper place:” who could force him to see the truth of what he really is before sending him to his final fate.

And this – I say it with trembling – is the reason for Hell. Justice demands that right be known to be right and wrong known to be wrong. Thus, those who have done wrong must be made to know that it is wrong. And if they are no longer able to change, then they must feel their own wrongness for all eternity. The eternal justice of God is that the Truth can only be hidden for as long as we are in the world of time and change. Beyond that, it meets us raw and unfiltered.

Hell is the nature of sin made manifest. It is not punishment in the sense of a retribution for a wrong already done, like a father spanking a disobedient child. It is the experience of being wrong absent any kind of disguise. As Fullmetal put it (with remarkable accuracy), “Truth is despair” for those on the wrong side of it.

This is the same reason why audiences want to see the villain punished. Any pain or suffering is beside the point; the point is that the wrongness of his chosen actions should be made manifest to him: that Truth and Right should not only triumph, but be vindicated. This is what Death Note was lacking in the end.

Of course, most stories don’t go into the question of an afterlife at all. But in those cases it can be assumed, or at least is not excluded. And good writers will try to make the villain’s defeat as fitting as possible. In any case, most stories are set entirely in this world and so it’s fitting that the villain’s punishment is limited to this world, so far as the story is concerned. The problem with Death Note is that it’s a story that is specifically about death and justice, and therefore the question is raised by the nature of the case.

And the really frustrating part is that it was a completely unforced error: nothing before the final chapters required the revelation that death means non-existence. There were an infinitude of possible payoffs to Light’s inevitable downfall, any one of which would have been more satisfying.