For no particular reason I decided to rewatch the entire original anime series. As for the winner of the match, without a Chinese calendar connection to help I’m going to have to declare Death Note the winner hands down.
Death Note is about a magical (to call it that probably insults the fans) notebook that gives the owner the power to kill whoever they want by writing that person’s name within the pages of the book. The series explores issues of justice, ultimate power and how it corrupts, and for some Hollywood value throws in some demons, car chases and guns along the way. And it’s a rip roaring good time. This synopsis does not do it justice and so we’ll get right to the main point of how it has a significance to gematria. At least as I craft it within this post.
There’s more to just writing down somebody’s name. There are rules. A lot of rules. There are so many Death Note rules and so many die hard fans they continue to analyze every episode, the manga (that’s not a fruit, Dan) the live action movies and all the Internet forums talking about the rules. The rules get so convoluted that there appears to be contradictions in some and vociferous arguments occur over whether there is a rule that is mentioned breaks another or not.
There’s a big knock against gematria right off with the rather cavalier attitude that is taken to the most basic of information - a person’s name. While Death Note insists that it has to be the person’s real name and aliases confuse the book’s power, in gematria the evil forces manipulate the name in a near infinite variety of ways. Initials count, with or without middle name, hundreds of elisions, nicknames, whatever works to arrive at a small number that matches up with an evil phrase.
And yet....
Should the person in question have a value that literally millions of other people have we are supposed to believe that the New World Organic Matrix* crafted these events just for this one person? I’m going to have to call bullshit on that right there.
And it gets worse. Just in case the insistence is that the story may be about a certain John Edward Smith, his name on the official birth certificate, the kind of name that would satisfy the Death Note requirement of real name, gematria via use of two and three digit numbers avoids concern of the thousands of other John Edward Smiths out there sharing an extremely common name. A key rule in Death Note introduced early in the series is that you must picture that person’s face while writing the name in the Death Note to avoid accidentally killing off the wrong John Edward Smith.
And it gets worse. Next up in gematria is that maybe John Edward Smithson is “close enough” or the “symbolism is obvious”. Or even Robert Chadsworth Cumbersnickles, Jr. looks like John Edward Smith becomes important enough to gematria. Death Note fans would laugh at the idea of how loose evil is with rules on matching something as important as killing off your hated enemies.
And it gets worse. Gematria users try to pretend their fantasy is real and that these are genuine rules to identify a single person that cannot possibly work. Death Note does an excellent job of recognizing that this is entertainment and gloriously introduces rules that are at least plausible. Whether planned early on in the scripting or ad hoc throw ins to explain a plot point after realizing that something actually doesn’t make sense versus a previous rule effort is made to have a set of workable rules in place.
A short break to introduce newcomers to Death Note rules here: Death Note rules
Notice that the first episode introduces just the five most basic rules. The first two, the real name and the face matching that name. Gematria videos introduce you to just the basics the same way. Here’s the four base elisions. Word=number. Evil identified! Then as time goes on both DN and gematria throw new “rules” at you. With a huge difference.
And this is important. This is actually a not frivolous post but would be a starting point to explaining to an open minded newcomer to gematria on how it doesn’t work.
ADDITIONAL DEATH NOTE RULES ARE RESTRICTIVE WHILE ADDITIONAL GEMATRIA RULES ARE EXPANSIVE.
If you lose the Death Note you have 490 days to get it back before you lose full ownership and the associated powers. You have six minutes and change to write a cause of death or the intended victim will just die of a heart attack. Compared to something in gematria where out of the blue, here’s this reverse ordinal cipher “we discovered”. Aha, his name has the letters “MAN”, the MAN hoax code!
Whether there’s actual contradiction in Death Note rules is debatable. In gematria it’s fairly easy to find something right away that doesn’t make sense, like AGNOSTIC and RELIGIOUS having the same value. Then gematria makes new rules that don’t help the case any, expanding the relevance of prime numbers and having to ignore that suddenly TRUTH=30 and 113 is the 30th prime and 113 is supposed to be DISHONEST.
Based on the topics for gematria stories I can picture the age of a newly introduced person to be at the time when they could enjoy watching the Death Note series or even already having seen it. Here you go Johnny. Look at the way the DN rules limit and make the concept more plausible. Look at how your gematria club keeps making up things that they explain away by telling you to just ignore it.
If the entertainment value is truly just to make any number you want then just make up your own rule, declare victory and keep at it.
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