Five days after discovering the notebook, Light is visited by Ryuk, a " shinigami" and the Death Note's previous owner. The series is based on a short story about a schoolboy who finds a Death Note and mistakes it for a diary.

At that point he rigged his desk to catch fire, destroying the Death Note, if anyone but him opened a secret drawer. Also (only in the anime) after Misora is killed by Light L mentions that they worked together on the LA BB Murder cases. The Death Note concept derived from a rather general concept involving Shinigami and "specific rules".To give you an idea, the two parts are almost equal in length in the manga; in the anime, the first part is covered in 25 episodes, the second in 11. Black-and-Gray Morality: At first, the series relies on Gray-and-Grey Morality to keep things interesting. In South Carolina in March 2008, school officials seized a "Death Note" notebook from a Hartsville Middle School student. note So, for example, if it were in the series proper (which it is not), it could bring back Mello, but not Matt, because Mello died from a Kira-induced heart-attack, while Matt simply died from gunshot wounds.

Chekhov's Skill: During the raid of Mello's hideout, Matsuda shoots the Notebook out of the hand of the one of Mello's men holding it. Nothing happens to the character on the receiving end, but in real life, the gunshot would have blinded him permanently and left him needing immediate medical attention.

Toshiki Inoue, the series organizer, agreed with Araki and added that, in anime adaptations, there is a lot of importance in highlighting the aspects that are "interesting in the original". Bittersweet Ending: Light's quest for godhood ends in disaster, and he meets a brutal and heartwrenching end, as do the other Kiras and their allies. An American film adaptation was released exclusively on Netflix in August 2017, and a series is reportedly in the works. When Ohba was asked, during an interview, whether the series was meant to be about enjoying the plot twists and psychological warfare, Ohba responded by saying that this concept was the reason why they were "very happy" to place the story in Weekly Shōnen Jump.