Dream-A Better Netflix Death Note
Oct. 14th, 2021 08:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madimpossibledreamerNote that this doesn't make the movie a better representation of the original manga/anime. If it were going to be that, it would be the Japanese movies, which already exist. This is gonna be its own deal, doing its own thing, but I hope it would still be more interesting and thoughtful than the Netflix movie.
you could call it Kira's Legacy
some spoilers, if light (ha) ones
warnings: just like the original briefly mentions sexual assault
There's a whole different philosophy between the two. The original asks the question 'what is justice?' It basically leaves it as a question and doesn't definitively answer the question, because there's more than just the two camps of Light or L is Justice. The Netflix movie's message seems to be 'anyone can be evil'. A statement, not a question, which makes leaving it a bit more ambiguous mostly just sequel-bait and not anything meaningful. Personally, I find the first one more interesting, but say we have to go for the first one.
Let's not name him Light. Light Turner does not roll off the tongue and sound natural. (Light Yagami is also a little weird, but it's more established.) In the original, it was Raito anyway. (And no, this isn't because I hate the dub; I love it. It's just one of those odd changes.) Instead, let's be clever with naming--Lucian, Aaron, Albert, something that has a meaning of Light but doesn't come off like naming your child Apple. Not Lucifer, though. That's just a little too on the nose. His dad does not seem like the type of person who would name his child Apple, so he shouldn't be naming him Light except for a reference. As someone who loves references, don't do that. You can make a subtle, clever reference with the naming without outright stealing things. I like Lucian, but I'll go with Aaron because Death Note has a lot of Biblical references and the spokesperson for Moses ('bad people, stop hurting my good people') is thematically appropriate.
Instead of advertising this as a retelling of Death Note or whatever, let's say it's another story set in the Death Note world. That would have helped so much. (I did take a screenwriting class, but I'm not going to write it in screenplay format because that would take days. But I still remember a lot of the principles to keep it tight, so here goes. Main things: Be snappy, have each scene and thing said serve a purpose or multiple, don't overstay your welcome. The formatting takes up most of the room, and you don't have a lot of pages to work with. Gotta make everything count.) It's not perfectly canon compliant, but you could easily think of it as an AU like the movies or ReLight were AUs to the original. We're choosing all names besides Turner's via generator, partly because I can't be bothered to go rewatch bits or look up names...wait, IMDB. If IMDB doesn't have it, that'll stay generator-based. Okay, it does, so the names generator-based get a (g) beside them. IMDB doesn't have descriptions of the characters so if I mix up minor characters, too bad. The parts that were a dream were pretty much just the new Rules and their consequences. Buckle in; this is gonna get long. It's also incomplete, sadly.
Now, let's go off the character of Aaron Turner already established in the first draft, sorta. Except let's definitely have a different opening scene. Let's have something that kind of darkly mirrors the original. Turner isn't paying attention in class and gets in trouble for not having his homework ready. We assume this kid is a slacker and kind of unintelligent. Then we see the cheating scene, and add a line about "That handwriting trick of yours is the real genius" or something. You'd never get caught." So already we have established a few things. a) Aaron is really intelligent, but doesn't like to come off that way. He likes being underestimated. b) He can mimic handwriting perfectly, given a sample. c) He's probably also mastered different writing styles, too. That gets papers in trouble in the big leagues; it'd certainly present a problem in English essays. Also, let's switch something else up.
"Hey, you dropped your notebook!"
"That's not mine, man!"
And Turner turns it over. Death Note.
Then, the scene with the bullies. Aaron pulls the bully over so other people can't overhear and reminds him that if he wants that final project to not get him a zero and a plagiarism inquiry, he better walk away and not pick this fight. It doesn't matter that the principal likes him, Mrs. Durham (g) doesn't tolerate that kind of thing. We learn something new about Aaron. c) At least part of his motivation for cheating is for blackmail material. At this point, we can't tell if he needs that kind of leverage, or just enjoys it.
The scene with Ryuk. It can still be over the top, with everything flying around, but let's turn it into a bit of a visual metaphor, with chaos all around Aaron as he's the calm eye of the storm. And then when it's done, he can just go "Huh. Maybe I do need meds after all."
Aaron is unnaturally calm. Even Yagami yelped, the first time he saw a Shinigami, but not Aaron. We start to get an indication that maybe Aaron's depressed and that's why he's having issues with keeping up with his own grades. Ryuk tries to be the same unsettling presence as in the Netflix movie, but even he's a little weirded out by a kid who doesn't react at all to the presence of a Shinigami.
The stuff with Turner's dad. "Are you doing better in school?"
"It's still hard to concentrate after--you know, Mom."
"Mmm."
"What?"
"Nothing."
"There's something you're not telling me."
"I didn't want to tell you, given how you're taking the rest of it, but you'll find out anyway. Skomal? He got off."
This is the first time we see Aaron not in complete control, calm and collected. He breaks his glass, and it takes them both a moment in shock before they start cleaning his wound.
"I hate this."
Reciprocated with confession, for the first time since the incident, given the slight surprise in Turner's reaction. "I hate it too, but even if he got convicted at most it'd be manslaughter. I have to believe in the system."
"I believe in you, Dad. You could be the best rogue cop ever."
James Turner laughs and ruffles his son's hair, and Turner laughs too, but given what we already know about him he probably wasn't actually joking.
There. No infodump. So much more natural. We get to see the distance, the fact that this is a broken house, but we also see that they love each other. Aaron is calm and collected, but like Raito he has a temper. We also get James Turner's pov on justice, his character quote. "I have to believe in the system." He might hate it. He might think it's not getting the justice it should be. But acknowledging that means his job is meaningless, that there's no worth in being a police officer, and especially after what happened with his wife, he can't afford that.
I was going to cut this, but nah. Leaving it in, because I thought of Aaron Turner's character quote.
I mentioned in the review how much I hated Ryuk's "Rules and warnings? Is that all we're going to do, Light?" But I'm keeping it, because Aaron's gonna respond.
"You have to know the rules to break them." This is a guy who cheats, and we see his account balance at some point. He's making quite a decent amount for a high school student--he's a hacker, too, because that's how he gets into the police database. He probably doesn't care about exact hacker hat color, though--blackmailing a company to get their servers back or doing to at a friend's request to check the security on their system, it's all the same to him.
"What's this one about?" We get to see one of the two new rules: The first human to use this note will leave their mark within.
"And don't bother trying to bullshit me. There's another rule here: A god of death has no obligation to completely explain how to use the note or rules which will apply to the human who owns it unless asked. I'm asking."
Ryuk laughs, but it's clear he's stalling. "Hmm, how do I put it. It has something to do with the fact that a human who has used the Note cannot go to Heaven or Hell."
"Are you saying there's a human soul trapped in this notebook?"
"The notebook can kill people, and you're squeamish about a soul?" Ryuk laughs harder.
"That's a very good point, Ryuk." He looks more animated, now.
If you wanted to have the 'he's not your pet' bit, you could add it in here, faster. "don't trust Ry--"
"What's with this entry?"
"Some joker thought he could write my name and kill me, saving me from writing his name when he's done."
"Can writing your name kill you?"
"What do you think?"
"That you're not going to give me a straight answer."
Ryuk cackles, eating an apple or two. "Smart kid."
And then Aaron sets out to test it. He uses different handwriting styles, and Ryuk asks him about it. "It's safer if I get caught."
This Rule is important for later and pretty ominous. You could add in more of the 'Ryuk pushing Turner, he's not sharing everything, he's definitely not to be trusted' bits in here, but at minimum you already have some in this exchange and the mysterious Rule. In fact, I'm going to add in a little more above.
A few days pass. Death montage, only all with heart attacks because the swap to more horror-movie cinematic deaths was just for drama, not for theme. We see clippings from newspapers proclaiming 'The Return of Kira?'
So, yeah, small bit confirming that a Kira did, in fact, exist, and that Aaron's been killing criminals. We can probably get the taskforce here, stuff about how they're trying to narrow down this particular Kira. There's more than just Turner, Watari, and L. Aaron and his dad learn that the existence of the Death Note was known to a select few, including L. However, it was believed that the Shinigami took the notebook back. It seems that one was dropped in the Human World again, and probably fell into the hands of a Kira follower. Possibly putting more suspicion on James Turner, as he fits the age of someone who would have been around at the time as the original, if as a young kid.
No infodump on Wammy's. Aaron does his snooping to try to find out who this L guy was and gets the idea that it's not the original L. Ryuk confirms it, pointing out L's name in the Note. "You'd think it'd help me track him down, but all adoption records have been erased. It's probably standard procedure for them to release a virus to eat it all. The website itself has a little more information about the internal training and the like, but everyone's only referred to as a single letter, and any papers about the identity of the orphans don't exist, are paper copy only, or are on standalone devices. I'm not getting anything from here." The internal training includes experts, but their names aren't listed either. He does manage to find a single email from a John Irvin (g)--seems like he messed up something in his security settings. (Aaron has a first and last name, and finds a picture based on that. Hopefully, the same guy. Irvin's the echo of Roger, here.)
L learns of the hacking and tries to trace it back, only to run into dead ends. He gets a bit of a profile through his actions, though.
We see more of the back-and-forth tennis match. (I'm not sure what, exactly, to have here, only 100% have it better than the Netflix movie.)
Class scene. Aaron starts a debate in their philosophy class about Kira, pretending to take L's side, knowing that he'll be able to pick out a Kira follower by who gets the angriest about his stance. If we're gonna have Mia anywhere, it'd be here, probably pointing out that at the very least Kira's statistics on punishing sexual offenders are better than any justice system currently in play. He's impressed by her intelligence. Because I'm being lazy here, I'll just leave it as Mia.
L is closing in, but hasn't decided whether father or son is the culprit. Aaron executes his plan--he'll have Watari try to find the new L's name. He doesn't get it, but before Irvin will die, he breaks into the Kira follower's locker, places the Death Note inside, and forfeits the Death Note.
That's the other new Rule. If the User forfeits the Death Note before the date and time of death of an individual written in the Death Note, that human will not die. However, any actions written in the Death Note will still happen.
This might seem cheap, like the Death Eraser, but it has problems. The scene with the Agents jumping off the roof, for example. If it was written to happen after Aaron forfeited it, they'd still jump off a skyscraper, but would walk away unharmed. That could give even more clues as to the identity of Kira. It saves everyone equally, so if you write the Agents' names, they'll still be investigating, even if you wouldn't be Kira anymore. And Aaron has to be able to get the Note back if he wants to keep being Kira.
He planned for it, though. He chooses some of the students he'd blackmailed and wrote months in advance that they'd make fake Death Notes and meet in a cult-like fashion in the school, writing out names and dates shared in Discord. He also hacked into one of the school computers to create the Discord remotely, and with the Note included instructions on how to use the Discord server. It might implicate her. It's definitely going to implicate the fake Kiras.
But there's the moral question of the movie. It becomes clear, quickly, that the first new Rule is the theme of this movie. The first human to own this particular Death Note was Yagami Raito, or Kira. Any human who obtains and uses the Death Note afterward will essentially become possessed by the spirit of Kira, wanting to use the notebook to obtain that "perfect world". Anyone is capable of evil. But--does Aaron really want to get it back? The work's still being done, just not by him anymore. He got justice for his mom, and he still has a twisted sense of justice, where blackmail and threats are the only way to achieve 'good'. Is he a hurting kid? Or would he willingly choose that fate? And it's Ryuk who's bringing back the terror of Kira now and then, when he gets bored.
Mia probably would figure out Aaron was the original "new Kira", though. Because of the handwriting trick. She's fairly sure she would've noticed if Kira was a death cult at their school, and no one else is that good.
No idea where it ends. But Mia gets to actually be competent, Turner actually gets to be competent, L gets to be competent... And that Rule regarding the first human to own the notebook might seem, like the original Netflix movie, like I'm letting Aaron Turner off the hook here. "Not his fault." But while he's a troubled kid, like Yagami Raito, he's no innocent either. He's not going out of his way to implicate any one person, but he's definitely spreading the suspicion around. And see, we've circled back around to that question of 'how do you define justice?'
I might come back to it if I have more ideas on what to do with L. He's definitely not Near (who randomly died at the end of my dream; it was weird). I think he was probably a kid who fixated on L (...might even be an echo of Beyond Birthday, given the whole 'attempt to be a copy' thing). Ideally, he'd make some out of the blue moves of his own, ones that, like the Rules, are completely new but fit the feel. ...Maybe he announces that the Note exists, and suggests that people wear masks to try to avoid the Eyes? That definitely would be out of let field. Say it works, even. (Though according to the Rules, it'd have to be a full-face mask to avoid it, but that could easily be another changed Rule.)
You probably should include a few things like a few random kids swearing by Kira or fan-merch, just little reminders of a First Kira, even way back at the first scenes. Instead of Mia smoking, show other kids thinking she's edgy because she has a Kira keychain (probably the font used for the Sakura TV announcement).
The other thing? This makes it even more of a tragedy, if you believe the 'everyone can be evil' bit, because it makes trying to create Kira's perfect world a Sisyphean task.
But, unfinished as this is, this is a movie I would enjoy. It's not a pitch-perfect Death Note, but it definitely does interesting, thought-provoking things with the concept, and has an interesting villain-protag like the original.
you could call it Kira's Legacy
some spoilers, if light (ha) ones
warnings: just like the original briefly mentions sexual assault
There's a whole different philosophy between the two. The original asks the question 'what is justice?' It basically leaves it as a question and doesn't definitively answer the question, because there's more than just the two camps of Light or L is Justice. The Netflix movie's message seems to be 'anyone can be evil'. A statement, not a question, which makes leaving it a bit more ambiguous mostly just sequel-bait and not anything meaningful. Personally, I find the first one more interesting, but say we have to go for the first one.
Let's not name him Light. Light Turner does not roll off the tongue and sound natural. (Light Yagami is also a little weird, but it's more established.) In the original, it was Raito anyway. (And no, this isn't because I hate the dub; I love it. It's just one of those odd changes.) Instead, let's be clever with naming--Lucian, Aaron, Albert, something that has a meaning of Light but doesn't come off like naming your child Apple. Not Lucifer, though. That's just a little too on the nose. His dad does not seem like the type of person who would name his child Apple, so he shouldn't be naming him Light except for a reference. As someone who loves references, don't do that. You can make a subtle, clever reference with the naming without outright stealing things. I like Lucian, but I'll go with Aaron because Death Note has a lot of Biblical references and the spokesperson for Moses ('bad people, stop hurting my good people') is thematically appropriate.
Instead of advertising this as a retelling of Death Note or whatever, let's say it's another story set in the Death Note world. That would have helped so much. (I did take a screenwriting class, but I'm not going to write it in screenplay format because that would take days. But I still remember a lot of the principles to keep it tight, so here goes. Main things: Be snappy, have each scene and thing said serve a purpose or multiple, don't overstay your welcome. The formatting takes up most of the room, and you don't have a lot of pages to work with. Gotta make everything count.) It's not perfectly canon compliant, but you could easily think of it as an AU like the movies or ReLight were AUs to the original. We're choosing all names besides Turner's via generator, partly because I can't be bothered to go rewatch bits or look up names...wait, IMDB. If IMDB doesn't have it, that'll stay generator-based. Okay, it does, so the names generator-based get a (g) beside them. IMDB doesn't have descriptions of the characters so if I mix up minor characters, too bad. The parts that were a dream were pretty much just the new Rules and their consequences. Buckle in; this is gonna get long. It's also incomplete, sadly.
Now, let's go off the character of Aaron Turner already established in the first draft, sorta. Except let's definitely have a different opening scene. Let's have something that kind of darkly mirrors the original. Turner isn't paying attention in class and gets in trouble for not having his homework ready. We assume this kid is a slacker and kind of unintelligent. Then we see the cheating scene, and add a line about "That handwriting trick of yours is the real genius" or something. You'd never get caught." So already we have established a few things. a) Aaron is really intelligent, but doesn't like to come off that way. He likes being underestimated. b) He can mimic handwriting perfectly, given a sample. c) He's probably also mastered different writing styles, too. That gets papers in trouble in the big leagues; it'd certainly present a problem in English essays. Also, let's switch something else up.
"Hey, you dropped your notebook!"
"That's not mine, man!"
And Turner turns it over. Death Note.
Then, the scene with the bullies. Aaron pulls the bully over so other people can't overhear and reminds him that if he wants that final project to not get him a zero and a plagiarism inquiry, he better walk away and not pick this fight. It doesn't matter that the principal likes him, Mrs. Durham (g) doesn't tolerate that kind of thing. We learn something new about Aaron. c) At least part of his motivation for cheating is for blackmail material. At this point, we can't tell if he needs that kind of leverage, or just enjoys it.
The scene with Ryuk. It can still be over the top, with everything flying around, but let's turn it into a bit of a visual metaphor, with chaos all around Aaron as he's the calm eye of the storm. And then when it's done, he can just go "Huh. Maybe I do need meds after all."
Aaron is unnaturally calm. Even Yagami yelped, the first time he saw a Shinigami, but not Aaron. We start to get an indication that maybe Aaron's depressed and that's why he's having issues with keeping up with his own grades. Ryuk tries to be the same unsettling presence as in the Netflix movie, but even he's a little weirded out by a kid who doesn't react at all to the presence of a Shinigami.
The stuff with Turner's dad. "Are you doing better in school?"
"It's still hard to concentrate after--you know, Mom."
"Mmm."
"What?"
"Nothing."
"There's something you're not telling me."
"I didn't want to tell you, given how you're taking the rest of it, but you'll find out anyway. Skomal? He got off."
This is the first time we see Aaron not in complete control, calm and collected. He breaks his glass, and it takes them both a moment in shock before they start cleaning his wound.
"I hate this."
Reciprocated with confession, for the first time since the incident, given the slight surprise in Turner's reaction. "I hate it too, but even if he got convicted at most it'd be manslaughter. I have to believe in the system."
"I believe in you, Dad. You could be the best rogue cop ever."
James Turner laughs and ruffles his son's hair, and Turner laughs too, but given what we already know about him he probably wasn't actually joking.
There. No infodump. So much more natural. We get to see the distance, the fact that this is a broken house, but we also see that they love each other. Aaron is calm and collected, but like Raito he has a temper. We also get James Turner's pov on justice, his character quote. "I have to believe in the system." He might hate it. He might think it's not getting the justice it should be. But acknowledging that means his job is meaningless, that there's no worth in being a police officer, and especially after what happened with his wife, he can't afford that.
I was going to cut this, but nah. Leaving it in, because I thought of Aaron Turner's character quote.
I mentioned in the review how much I hated Ryuk's "Rules and warnings? Is that all we're going to do, Light?" But I'm keeping it, because Aaron's gonna respond.
"You have to know the rules to break them." This is a guy who cheats, and we see his account balance at some point. He's making quite a decent amount for a high school student--he's a hacker, too, because that's how he gets into the police database. He probably doesn't care about exact hacker hat color, though--blackmailing a company to get their servers back or doing to at a friend's request to check the security on their system, it's all the same to him.
"What's this one about?" We get to see one of the two new rules: The first human to use this note will leave their mark within.
"And don't bother trying to bullshit me. There's another rule here: A god of death has no obligation to completely explain how to use the note or rules which will apply to the human who owns it unless asked. I'm asking."
Ryuk laughs, but it's clear he's stalling. "Hmm, how do I put it. It has something to do with the fact that a human who has used the Note cannot go to Heaven or Hell."
"Are you saying there's a human soul trapped in this notebook?"
"The notebook can kill people, and you're squeamish about a soul?" Ryuk laughs harder.
"That's a very good point, Ryuk." He looks more animated, now.
If you wanted to have the 'he's not your pet' bit, you could add it in here, faster. "don't trust Ry--"
"What's with this entry?"
"Some joker thought he could write my name and kill me, saving me from writing his name when he's done."
"Can writing your name kill you?"
"What do you think?"
"That you're not going to give me a straight answer."
Ryuk cackles, eating an apple or two. "Smart kid."
And then Aaron sets out to test it. He uses different handwriting styles, and Ryuk asks him about it. "It's safer if I get caught."
This Rule is important for later and pretty ominous. You could add in more of the 'Ryuk pushing Turner, he's not sharing everything, he's definitely not to be trusted' bits in here, but at minimum you already have some in this exchange and the mysterious Rule. In fact, I'm going to add in a little more above.
A few days pass. Death montage, only all with heart attacks because the swap to more horror-movie cinematic deaths was just for drama, not for theme. We see clippings from newspapers proclaiming 'The Return of Kira?'
So, yeah, small bit confirming that a Kira did, in fact, exist, and that Aaron's been killing criminals. We can probably get the taskforce here, stuff about how they're trying to narrow down this particular Kira. There's more than just Turner, Watari, and L. Aaron and his dad learn that the existence of the Death Note was known to a select few, including L. However, it was believed that the Shinigami took the notebook back. It seems that one was dropped in the Human World again, and probably fell into the hands of a Kira follower. Possibly putting more suspicion on James Turner, as he fits the age of someone who would have been around at the time as the original, if as a young kid.
No infodump on Wammy's. Aaron does his snooping to try to find out who this L guy was and gets the idea that it's not the original L. Ryuk confirms it, pointing out L's name in the Note. "You'd think it'd help me track him down, but all adoption records have been erased. It's probably standard procedure for them to release a virus to eat it all. The website itself has a little more information about the internal training and the like, but everyone's only referred to as a single letter, and any papers about the identity of the orphans don't exist, are paper copy only, or are on standalone devices. I'm not getting anything from here." The internal training includes experts, but their names aren't listed either. He does manage to find a single email from a John Irvin (g)--seems like he messed up something in his security settings. (Aaron has a first and last name, and finds a picture based on that. Hopefully, the same guy. Irvin's the echo of Roger, here.)
L learns of the hacking and tries to trace it back, only to run into dead ends. He gets a bit of a profile through his actions, though.
We see more of the back-and-forth tennis match. (I'm not sure what, exactly, to have here, only 100% have it better than the Netflix movie.)
Class scene. Aaron starts a debate in their philosophy class about Kira, pretending to take L's side, knowing that he'll be able to pick out a Kira follower by who gets the angriest about his stance. If we're gonna have Mia anywhere, it'd be here, probably pointing out that at the very least Kira's statistics on punishing sexual offenders are better than any justice system currently in play. He's impressed by her intelligence. Because I'm being lazy here, I'll just leave it as Mia.
L is closing in, but hasn't decided whether father or son is the culprit. Aaron executes his plan--he'll have Watari try to find the new L's name. He doesn't get it, but before Irvin will die, he breaks into the Kira follower's locker, places the Death Note inside, and forfeits the Death Note.
That's the other new Rule. If the User forfeits the Death Note before the date and time of death of an individual written in the Death Note, that human will not die. However, any actions written in the Death Note will still happen.
This might seem cheap, like the Death Eraser, but it has problems. The scene with the Agents jumping off the roof, for example. If it was written to happen after Aaron forfeited it, they'd still jump off a skyscraper, but would walk away unharmed. That could give even more clues as to the identity of Kira. It saves everyone equally, so if you write the Agents' names, they'll still be investigating, even if you wouldn't be Kira anymore. And Aaron has to be able to get the Note back if he wants to keep being Kira.
He planned for it, though. He chooses some of the students he'd blackmailed and wrote months in advance that they'd make fake Death Notes and meet in a cult-like fashion in the school, writing out names and dates shared in Discord. He also hacked into one of the school computers to create the Discord remotely, and with the Note included instructions on how to use the Discord server. It might implicate her. It's definitely going to implicate the fake Kiras.
But there's the moral question of the movie. It becomes clear, quickly, that the first new Rule is the theme of this movie. The first human to own this particular Death Note was Yagami Raito, or Kira. Any human who obtains and uses the Death Note afterward will essentially become possessed by the spirit of Kira, wanting to use the notebook to obtain that "perfect world". Anyone is capable of evil. But--does Aaron really want to get it back? The work's still being done, just not by him anymore. He got justice for his mom, and he still has a twisted sense of justice, where blackmail and threats are the only way to achieve 'good'. Is he a hurting kid? Or would he willingly choose that fate? And it's Ryuk who's bringing back the terror of Kira now and then, when he gets bored.
Mia probably would figure out Aaron was the original "new Kira", though. Because of the handwriting trick. She's fairly sure she would've noticed if Kira was a death cult at their school, and no one else is that good.
No idea where it ends. But Mia gets to actually be competent, Turner actually gets to be competent, L gets to be competent... And that Rule regarding the first human to own the notebook might seem, like the original Netflix movie, like I'm letting Aaron Turner off the hook here. "Not his fault." But while he's a troubled kid, like Yagami Raito, he's no innocent either. He's not going out of his way to implicate any one person, but he's definitely spreading the suspicion around. And see, we've circled back around to that question of 'how do you define justice?'
I might come back to it if I have more ideas on what to do with L. He's definitely not Near (who randomly died at the end of my dream; it was weird). I think he was probably a kid who fixated on L (...might even be an echo of Beyond Birthday, given the whole 'attempt to be a copy' thing). Ideally, he'd make some out of the blue moves of his own, ones that, like the Rules, are completely new but fit the feel. ...Maybe he announces that the Note exists, and suggests that people wear masks to try to avoid the Eyes? That definitely would be out of let field. Say it works, even. (Though according to the Rules, it'd have to be a full-face mask to avoid it, but that could easily be another changed Rule.)
You probably should include a few things like a few random kids swearing by Kira or fan-merch, just little reminders of a First Kira, even way back at the first scenes. Instead of Mia smoking, show other kids thinking she's edgy because she has a Kira keychain (probably the font used for the Sakura TV announcement).
The other thing? This makes it even more of a tragedy, if you believe the 'everyone can be evil' bit, because it makes trying to create Kira's perfect world a Sisyphean task.
But, unfinished as this is, this is a movie I would enjoy. It's not a pitch-perfect Death Note, but it definitely does interesting, thought-provoking things with the concept, and has an interesting villain-protag like the original.
