The Banquet of Life: Chapter 2 Notes

Fun fact: originally, "Hunger" on Light's List of Problems was supposed to be crossed out, but ff.net doesn't like extra formatting.  If I really had to choose, I'd actually say erasure would be more Light's style, but the list looked uninteresting with just the single words.  Having both his original idea of hunger and then the more general concept of scarcity made the list more organic-looking, which made the scene a little more human.

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Light doesn't have to do his homework because he did it all at the beginning of the year.  This explains why he's so bored.  Thus, if he had not done his homework ahead of time, all the crap with the Note wouldn't have gone down.  The moral of the story, then, is that procrastination can literally save the world.

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One interesting difference between the Food Note and the Death Note is that the Food Note is far more humane, and thus Light comes off as a far more benevolent god as the Angel than he did as Kira.  Consequently, his services to society are much less morally ambiguous.  But as we saw at the end of the chapter, that doesn't stop L from finding something to ding him on (although if you ask me, L's just mad that the Angel is stealing his turf).  On the other hand, there's no guarantee that Light's use of the Food Note will necessarily stay humane, so watch out for that.

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I like the research journal sections because the narrator doesn't take Light nearly as seriously as Light takes himself.  And yet somehow I feel that it's more difficult to take him seriously in the journal sections.

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Normally you just see Ryuk floating around making snide comments and chuckling that humans are interesting.  I wanted to try a different approach here and make him more of a force of nature (because death is really easy to accept unless it's your own).

On a side note, the bit about Ryuk writing Light's last meal was required by parallelism with canon, but the implications are far more hilarious than anything I could have come up with from scratch.  Depending on if Light dies by the end, we may or may not see what role this last meal performs.

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For some reason, the line "Who taught you to read?" was inexplicably hilarious to me.  Then again, it was 4am when I wrote it.

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I like that L gets introduced while doing statistics.  Canon!L, and everyone else in canon for that matter, seemed to make do on ridiculous intuitive leaps.  That's why they all burned in Statistics Hell after their untimely demises.

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Next update will be when I last said the next update was going to be.

The Banquet of Life: Chapter 1 Notes

I cannot confirm nor deny that the new Hannibal show inspired the chapter title.

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It's going to be a lot of fun to play around with the Food Note in upcoming chapters.  I haven't quite decided on the rules yet (beyond the ones written in the chapter), so it's entirely possible this chapter will end up presenting plot holes.  In any case, if Light is creative about it he could end up being able to accomplish the things canon!Light did.  It seems to me that the main benefit of the Note is its ability to control its victims rather than the fact that they die afterward.  On a completely tangential note, I just realized that Lelouch vi Britannia would be Light's worst enemy—not only is he a scheming chessmaster of at least equal skill, but he also habitually wears a mask and can still do the whole mind control thing whether he's in character or not.  None of this using-blood-for-ink stuff.

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For some reason, I'm really tempted to pursue this Illuminati thing.  Besides supernatural powers, what else could possibly produce mind control technology?

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The funny part about the testing scene is that Light actually misspelled the hobo's name and that whole data point was, in fact, a coincidence.

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The last section ("The Facts") shamelessly ripped off The Book Thief.  I maintain that it's a gesture of respect.  And I like the effect.

On a side note, Statistics Hell is a real place and you will go there if you do not work out your salvation with fear and confidence intervals.

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Next update will be Saturday, April 5.

- Gonzalez

Overview: The Banquet of Life

I return, triumphant, from many long years of not writing!  Stories, that is!  And we're kicking things off with something I believe might be classifiable as a crackfic.  I'm not entirely sure what a story has to do to technically qualify as a crackfic, so take with salt.

Basically, I'm going to make a new post for each chapter, then put a link to those posts on this page.  That way you can just keep coming back to this page.

The Banquet of Life is a Death Note fic exploring the consequences of a slight alteration to the starting conditions of the plot.  Death Note characters, etc. are used without permission and not for profit.  Link to the story here.

Commentary by Chapter:
Chapter 1: Marinade
Chapter 2: Preheat
Chapter 3: Hors d'Oeuvres
(You've reached the in progress point.  Banquet of Life is currently on hiatus, and will return hopefully before Spring 2014.)