Oh, forgot to mention. While I was on vacation, I watched the Death Note anime. The Japanese really are amazing. In the track serving as the background music in the first season's intro – English swearing, even though the anime is clearly for teenagers too. In the second season it gets even more fun – everything turns into heavy metal with growling. Can you imagine something like that in Russian cartoons or TV shows?
As for the series itself, it is very decent. (9/10)
The plot in brief. A “death note” drops into our world. The person whose name gets written in it dies, and you can also specify the cause of death. This brutal piece of paper falls into the hands of a high school senior, a straight-A student whose last name is Light. Since the Japanese have heard way too much about telling names, their Light isn't kind at all. That is, he's only kind formally: he dreams of ridding the world of evil. To do this, using the notebook, he starts whacking criminals left and right. When the Japanese police and global intelligence agencies try to catch him, he whacks them too. The only hope of taking down this presumptuous creator of good – a mysterious investigator going by the code name L.
It's a shame they dragged the series out for two seasons – one would have been plenty. Although I understand the creators – the concept is rich, the premise can be milked for a long time. It's funny how the main character can be associated with modern libtards – they too wouldn't hesitate to slaughter everyone they consider evil, becoming just like the regimes they supposedly “fight” against. However, for those out of the loop, the topic is uninteresting, and for those in the know, I won't say anything new, plus I don't really know that much about it myself anyway.
Understandably, the plot is full of all sorts of simplifications and stretches, but in anime there's no other way. Say, the main characters are always – teenagers or close to it. You can't change this – first, the Japanese have an unhealthy lolita cult all over the place, and second, the shows are mostly targeted at teens as well – not because adult Japanese wouldn't want to watch anime. Simply because adults have no time, so they read manga on their commute to and from work, and sometimes instead of work itself.
So overall I liked everything, but the ending isn't very punchy. As a benchmark here I take the protagonist of the Dyachenkos' “Wanderers” series, who at the end of the (first) book suffered all kinds of hellish moral agonies over his deeds.
P.S. I really liked the character dolls that N. played with in the second season. It's a shame they won't sell such hardcore ones as souvenirs – they'll make more kawaii ones. Even the Japanese have limits to quirks in mass culture. But there are no limits in the non-mass one :-)