Was Blank Space inspired by Death Note

There have been a lot of myths and rumours in this fandom that are founded on misconceptions or lack of accessible information. Since misinformation is my mortal enemy, I’m going to dedicate a post to going through the ones I encounter most frequently. If you’ve been around the fandom for a while, there will probably be no news for you, but who knows.

If I somehow wrote something factually inaccurate myself, please point it out to me so I can edit the post as soon as possible!

So from fundamental DN rules to color schemes to presumed pop culture influences…. I’ve tried to go through what I can. Enjoy?

1. The Death Note contains a full ruleset - FALSE!  This one is entirely the fault of official merchandise. The notes you can buy irl all contain each and every rule. This is not the case for Light’s Death Note. As you may remember, Ryuk doesn’t even know all the rules - and he wrote those in Light’s note.

The only rules written inside Light’s Death Note are the first page. They are written on the backside of the cover instead of actual notebook pages.
So even if you as a reader are aware of rules existing, this may not apply to the characters in the series. There’s been a lot of questions in the fandom as to ‘why doesn’t xy make use of xy rule??’ and the answer is pretty much always ‘they didn’t know that rule existed’.

2. Light becomes a shinigami - FALSE*! This is one that I expect is more prominent with people who have only watched the anime. The statement that humans who used the Death Note can neither go to heaven or hell has been widely taken to mean that heaven and hell exist alongside a third place - potentially being the shinigami realm. This is untrue.

The matter of fact is that inside the Death Note universe there is neither heaven nor hell. Ryuk is lying by omission to fuck with Light for his own entertainment - when he says Death Note users can not go to heaven or hell, he’s right. They can’t, because heaven and hell aren’t real.
The manga dedicates a scene to uncovering this hoax for the reader while the anime only implies it by showing the according slides of rules in episode 37:

“All humans, without exception, will eventually die. After they die the place they go to is MU (nothingness).”

The phrasing ‘place’ is misleading because Mu is a known concept that is a negation of any state of being. It’s not a place. Mu is just. Nothing.
More simply put: there is no afterlife of any kind.

And, as the rule states by saying ‘without exception’, this applies to everybody no matter whether or not they are good or bad, used a note or didn’t use a note.  Death is final and the only time you can achieve anything is while you are alive - that’s DN’s stance on mortality, as confirmed by the author in the special interviews of Volume 13.

So, Light just dies at the end. That’s all there is to it.

* I put the asterisks here because there is one particular incarnation this does not apply to: the first OVA canon “Relight: Visions of a God”. This particular piece heavily implies that Light becomes a shinigami and even shows the shinigami who, with high likelihood, is Light’s new form.

However, any statement that refers to the OVA as ‘deleted scenes’ or ‘director’s cut’ is flat-out wrong - the OVAs are officially alternate retellings of the story. They directly conflict with canonical events and rules and thus cannot be counted into the main continuity. 

Yes, Light may well be a shinigami in this particular OVA. No, it’s not intended to carry over to main canon and thus confirms nothing outside of this particular adaptation. The rules that are in place for manga and anime themselves make the idea of Light becoming a shinigami impossible and the origin of shinigami is officially unknown.

3. Raye Penber and Naomi Misora go to different places after their death - FALSE! Closely related to the above, since heaven and hell don’t exist Naomi and Raye both go to nothingness as well. Any worries that Raye, since he  wrote into the note, can’t go to heaven while Naomi can are unfounded.

4. You can extend your life with the Death Note - FALSE! An often made critique of Light’s actions is that he doesn’t use the note to extend his life, while as a matter of fact, doing so would be impossible.

• If you write, die of disease for the cause of death, but only write a specific time of death without the actual name of disease, the human will die from an adequate disease. But the Death Note can only operate within 23 days (in the human calendar). This is called the 23 day rule.
  

Thus, setting a death date years in the future would not work.
But even if your destined lifespan ran out tomorrow, you would not be able to receive an extra 22 days by writing in your own death to be later.

• In the Death Note, you cannot set the death date longer than the victim’s original life span. Even if the victim’s death is set in the Death Note beyond his/her original life span, the victim will die before the set time.

So that’s the official rules on the matter.

5. Matt was the one Mello met up with after the explosion - FALSE! This is a fanon with no factual basis whatsoever. Mello lived with Lidner from the explosion until he meets Near - only a while after that event he contacts Matt, as per official HTR13 timeline. If you want to see this backed up with manga-caps, see here! This also makes it highly  unlikely that Matt was with Mello during his mafia time - they would have established contact earlier in that case.

6. The one shots ‘One Day’ and ‘The Wammy’s House’ are definitely manga canon - MOST LIKELY FALSE! These two manga tidbits have been created by Ohba and Obata, but they were not published in any place that suggests they apply to the manga continuity. As a matter of fact, they were published as part of a photobook about movie!L portrayed by Kenichi Matsuyama - the movies are a vastly different canon from the manga or anime, following a different storyline and divergent characterization. For these manga to be published inside a book dedicated to movie!L makes it seem very likely that they were meant to be a homage to this specific version of L, rather than meant to be applied back to the very different manga!L.

7. Death Note influenced Taylor Swift’s Blank Space - TOTALLY FALSE!
… don’t believe every “article” you see a “screenshot” of.
The only “source” for this claim is this image:

Anyone who has ever tried looking up the article will know it doesn’t exist - the image is photoshopped to look like a screencap, the actual source is not real.

This may be made to look like a crunchyroll news entry written by Mikikazu Komatsu, but looking down this writer’s profile there is nothing of the sort.

The image is fake and that’s all.

I have seen people claim the Blank Space lyrics don’t make sense without being a Death Note references and I urge those people to relisten to the song. ‘I’ll write your name’ obviously refers to the singer’s mentioned list of ex lovers - who are all perfectly alive or else they could not “tell you [she’s] insane”. Writing a name does statedly not equal dying in this song.
No Death Note reference here. 

8. The girl at the end of the manga is Misa - FALSE!

This is easy enough to assume if you haven’t read the author interviews, but she is confirmed to be just a random Kira worshipper and not a known character. Further, the official full color reveal of the manga shows her with a colorscheme different from Misa’s:

9. Matt canonically has red hair - FALSE! Redhead Matt may be the most well-known version of Matt, but no official release ever featured this. The red hair was a fan estimation before Matt received any official coloring - and it stuck around on fanart even after the official colors were revealed.

This is every official hair-color Matt has ever received. In order: anime, full-color manga (2012), Trading Card Game, DS Game.
Obata himself never colored Matt at all.

10. B canonically has red eyes - FALSE! 

The rules have the following to say on the matter of shinigami eyes:

• No matter what medical or scientific method may be employed, it is impossible for humans to distinguish whether or not the human has the eye of power of a god of death. Even gods of death cannot distinguish this fact, except for the very god of death that traded his/her eye power with that human.

If it is impossible to distinguish, then a changing eyecolor is definitely out of the picture. When the shinigami eyes appear red during the series this is a stylistic choice and does not reflect actual usage of the eyes (which is permanent).

In this scene, for example, Misa is using the eyes at this very moment. Yet the stylization of her eyes as being ‘shinigami eyes’ is not shown.
Shinigami eyes are as little red as Light’s hair turns red during introspection in the anime - it’s an art choice that does not carry over to the fictional universe.

On related note, the stylistic shinigami eyes aren’t actually just red eyes:

They have a lighter circle in them, which is what characterizes them in the BW version as well.

11. Ryuk has a published human design - FALSE! While it is true that Ryuk was originally planned to look human (as per HTR13 interviews), no sketches or illustrations of this have ever been released.

In recent days, this image is often rumored to portray human Ryuk (in earlier fandom, people thought it was either Jealous, Mikami or Beyond Birthday) - that’s wrong. So are the other options.

It’s from the Obata Artbook Blanc Et Noir, but this illustrations stems from the section for images without series affiliation - NOT from the Death Note section.
It’s a stand-alone illustration Obata has drawn for the Erotics-F magazine, based on a tarot card. There is no relation to Death Note whatsoever.

If you don’t believe me, here’s some proof from the artbook.

12. Light’s hair is genetically impossible and has to be dyed - FALSE! Here’s a post about hair genetics to go with this. 

Phew…  if you have questions about anything on this list, feel free to ask! I may actually just go back and update this post if I come up with more wide-spread misconceptions because it is nice to have them all in one place.

Hopefully this was informative for someone out there. Have a nice day!

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