i'm not aware of too many things

* Because Sayu's appearances in canon largely involve her family, you can't talk about her without talking about her family at length. Please bear with me. <3

* Dates are given as anime year/manga year, since the anime is set three years later than the manga, but virtually all the reference material is manga-based.

* HtR13 is the official manga reference "Death Note 13: How to Read".



player name: Vashti
player livejournal: vashti
playing here: N/A
where did you find us? dear_mun
are you 16 years of age or older?: Yes.



character name: Sayu Yagami
Fandom: Death Note (predominantly anime canon)
Timeline: Second arc, after the tea party but before her kidnap.
character's age: 20

powers, skills, pets and equipment:

Sayu doesn't have any particular powers or abilities in her canon. She's just a nice, ordinary girl; in fact, she's the sort of uninteresting, well-meaning everygirl you'd expect to survive into Kira's new world, even if she wasn't his sister.

Non-canon

Since her brother's machinations are likely to prove a liability to her, I'd like to give her a phase door ability - a short-range emergency teleport with no control over where she ends up.

For similar reasons, and because her role in canon is basically to support and nurture yes, I know, I know, I'd like her to have a low-level healing ability, based in the nursing vocation I've given her - the ability to progressively heal injuries, but not illnesses. She could heal over a severed arm, but she couldn't bring it back; equally, she couldn't get rid of the flu for you. This is something that will make her valuable, and which would help to give her a purpose of her own. I'd see extensive use of it as weakening her, and she probably won't be able to use it on herself - though since practice makes perfect, both of these might be avenues for future development.

canon history:

* Wikipedia's plot summary.
* List of Death Note episodes.
* My Sayu-centric manga summary.

Sayu is a minor character in the Death Note franchise. HtR13 describes her as "the pure girl whose brother is Kira", and that sums up her role and purpose. As Light's younger sister, she's there to give him depth and context - and, occasionally, to be used as a plot device. She's part of the family that's part of his background.

She's born on June 18th 1992 (1989 in the manga canon), to Soichiro Yagami, a detective with Japan's National Police Agency, and Sachiko Yagami, a housewife. When we first meet her, she's a second year student at Eishu Middle School, and she's 14 years old. Chronologically speaking, she'd enter high school in April 2008/2005, and university in 2011/2008; in second arc, she's a second year student. Canon commences when her brother discovers the death note and assumes the role of the mass-murderer Kira; we go from there.

When we first encounter them, the Yagami family is pretty much perfect in every respect; HtR13 even describes them as such. They're set up as perfect so that they can be more effectively subverted and broken. They're middle-class and clearly privileged. Soichiro, the father, is dedicated to his detective career and works long hours. Sachiko, the mother, stays at home, raising the children and expertly keeping house. Light, the son, is brilliant, athletic and the pride of the whole family - and then there's Sayu, our heroine.

As the second child, Sayu's somewhat overlooked. She's the baby of the family - cute, mildly (and not so mildly) impertinent, a bit of a troublemaker, and a bit indulged. She isn't pushed as hard as her brother; she's taken for granted in a way that he is not. There are suggestions that she's the go-to person for chores (probably because Light is (a) always studying, and (b) is a boy).

From her third-row seat for the Kira case, Sayu gets a close-up look at the events that shape the world, mostly without realising it. She's subtly discouraged from disturbing Light, as his bedroom becomes Kira's first HQ. She hears about the dangers of fighting Kira firsthand from her father, who leads the Kira investigation. She sees the investigation take priority over her and her family in the eyes of her father - and, ostensibly, her brother. She sees the dubious alliance of the first and second Kira, in the form of model Misa Amane's relationship with Light - and then, in short order, she sees her brother vanish from the family home, never to return; when he's detained by the detective L, his plausible excuse is that he's moved in with Misa, and their too-strict father has disowned him. Later in that arc, Soichiro resigns from the NPA; it's likely that this had repercussions for the family.

After this point, the series skips ahead five years, and as you'd expect, the world changes massively over this time. It's common knowledge that Kira needs a name and a face to kill; both become something that you conceal if you possibly can. The police decline in popularity, and start to issue fake names and career titles to their officers. Posing as L, Light gives the order to have the names and faces of criminals concealed; they flood onto the Internet instead. Under Kira's thumb, war becomes a thing of the past, and crime decreases by as much as 70%. In some significant ways, it's a far safer world than the one we all live in - and yet it's also a world where you need to worry about someone who doesn't like you trying to have you killed, and where you have to be far more careful about what you say, about belonging and fitting in. Think of East Germany under the Stasi. Smaller governments begin to bow to Kira directly, and every living human being is faced with one question - are you for Kira, or against him?

This is the world Sayu grows to adulthood in. By the time we see her again in the second arc, she's twenty years old, and well into her second year of university. I plan to take her from this point - however, canon continues, and Sayu's involvement with the Kira case quickly takes a more direct turn, when she's kidnapped by Mello and the mafia to be used as a bargaining chip: the Kira investigation team have a death note tucked away, and Mello wants it.

We know she's taken from the street. She's bound, gagged with tape, and taken across the world to a location in an unnamed American desert. Her abduction lasts for two days. While Soichiro and the taskforce make every effort to retrieve her, Light comes very close to killing her to save the notebook - ultimately finding that he can't do it. But still, Sayu's life is very visibly threatened, she's nearly shot, and ultimately she's exchanged for the notebook in the full knowledge that her father's risked his life to save her, and imperilled the critical investigation that he's so devoted to. At this point, she also learns a number of details about how the death note works, which she may or may not recall due to dissociative amnesia.

After following through on the deal to retrieve Sayu, Soichiro is a broken man. Sayu listens as he explains that he's failed in his career, that he traded a deadly weapon for his daughter's life and must resign. She's questioned by the SPK, but gives very little information. Her father returns to Japan with her, still swearing never to return.

By the time we see them again in the family home, Sayu has withdrawn from the world, in one of the classic examples of the Break the Cutie trope. Her shattered parents agree to take her to the countryside to recover; she ends up sad and still and silent in a wheelchair. Fanon describes this as catatonia, but it actually meets the criteria for acute stress disorder in every detail - a heavily dissociative state that follows exceptional stress, and lasts for a maximum of four weeks, possibly leading to post-traumatic stress disorder and possibly not.

Almost certainly without her knowledge, Sayu is still being used by Mello to pressure Soichiro, since she can be killed at any time. In response to this development and others, Soichiro returns to America. Someone is required to deal for the shinigami eyes, gaining the ability to see people's names at a glance in exchange for half their remaining lifespan. He seizes on this opportunity, seeing it as a chance to regain some of the personal honour he's lost - and as an acceptable way to give his life, removing the threat to Sayu. And indeed, he does die in very short order. He's cremated overseas, and his ashes are returned to the family home, leaving Sachiko there alone with a broken daughter and an absent son.

Shortly before Soichiro's death, the US President apparently commits suicide to avoid being pressured by Mello. Not long afterwards, his replacement capitulates to Kira, out of fear. This sends shockwaves round the world, and tilts it into Kira's hand. Light begins to broadcast his ideals to the public, through flashy TV broadcasts which are the most popular thing on the air. Kira's presence in the media becomes increasingly heavy, and increasingly positive. People are further urged to keep an eye out for criminals and report them, and unsurprisingly, when asked, even anonymously, most people will say that they're pro-Kira; those trying to catch Kira (like the Japanese investigation team, the SPK, and as far as Sayu and Sachiko are concerned, Light) quickly become viewed as enemies of society, as governments and police bow to the new order.

Society becomes increasingly violent and oppressive. With no opposition from the old authorities, mobs are easily called up to target Kira's enemies, and they're given a good deal of publicity. Kira's spokespeople are surrounded by vast crowds of followers, and are impossible to get close to; those who try are exposed, and executed on flimsy pretexts like breaking and entering.

But even those working for Kira aren't safe from him; when he goes off-message, calling for donations, Kira's first spokesman is killed without a second thought. He's replaced by Kiyomi Takada on NHN, which is a blanded version of the real-world NHK - Kira moves from a trashy satellite channel to the Japanese state broadcaster. Imagine what it would take for the BBC to speak for a cult leader! Takada quickly draws a huge following, and is again guarded by intimidating crowds of men in black. They're violent and even murderous (as Matt finds), organising the media to cover their brutality, and they have absolutely no patience with those who oppose them, as "death is the only way to pay for crimes against Kira". For all that war's a thing of the past, with unsanctioned violence following it, this is the public face of Kira's new world.

We see Sayu for the last time in passing, at her coming-of-age ceremony, dressed in kimono with a bow in her hair. She seems very quiet, very reserved and inward-looking; there's little left of the bubbly, cheery girl who would have thrown herself into the ceremony a few years before - but she is recovering.

The story climaxes when Light is killed. Kira disappears, and the world quickly rebounds to how it was before him - but it's likely that Sayu and Sachiko don't notice this much. According to HtR13, Aizawa tells them that Soichiro and Light gave their lives to defeat Kira; they, and the world, never learn the truth. The series creators, Ohba and Obata, agree that Sayu and Sachiko, who survive alone through no fault of their own, and who have "no evil about them whatsoever", are the most pitiable characters in the story. Oh, isn't that depressing?

personality:

Sayu is 163cm tall (5'4", as opposed to the 5'3" misconversion in HtR13, orz) and weighs 45kg (99lb / 7st 1lb). Her blood type is O, and she's right-handed.

She gets very involved, and she's very good with people (HtR13 scores her at 8/10 for involvement and social skills), but she's not as smart as some, and she tends to go along to get along (3/10 for intelligence and initiative). She's moderately creative, and copes moderately well (4/10 for creativity and emotional strength).

When we first meet Sayu, she's fourteen years old. She's childish, young for her age, very dependent on her family and the people she loves. She's gregarious, and there's no sign that she's not popular - she's happy-go-lucky and fun and sociable. We see her rushing off with friends, and spending all her time in the sitting-room. She's a bubbly, breezy creature who acts on almost pure emotion. She's wonderfully expressive. She's very WYSIWYG; even when she's trying to be sly, it's written all over her. She has no mask, though she develops one by second arc. She acts and speaks without thinking; she has no brakes; she's almost completely heedless.

She's got no time for schoolwork, though; that's her brother's thing. Sayu isn't one for applying herself; she puts things off, she'll do them later. HtR13 tells us she doesn't like "difficult things". She's the sort who always gets "could do better" on her report cards!

She's sheltered and protected; she lives in a bubble of privilege. She has everything she could want, in material terms. Light displays an inability to understand people who aren't like him - rather than acknowledging that crime has social causes and that most criminals are underprivileged, he writes them all off without a second thought. Sayu shows hints of the same sort of thing - the way she reacts to Misa, who doesn't dress anything like a nice young girl ought to dress, certainly not one who's associating with her brother. Everyone she encounters is the same; everyone she encounters is like her, and people who aren't will intimidate and startle her.

She likes idols and pop music and fashion magazines; who sits and watches TV dramas with her mother in the evenings. She's also, believe it or not, the family's big eater of potato chips - almost every time we see her in first arc, she's toting a bag of 'em. She prefers the plain ones.

By the time we meet her in second arc, she's grown up; HtR13 tells us she's grown into "a mature woman", and an admittedly wry comment in second arc mentions that she's more grown-up than Matsuda manages to be. Her tastes have developed; we're told shoes are her favourite thing - but she's also serious; she hates alcohol. Together with the fact that she's usually home before 11 at night, that tells us she's not someone who's out partying till all hours. She has a social life, she has friends, but she's sensible rather than full-tilt.

She tries to be demure; she can be coquettish and even flirty, but she hasn't grown out of her trickster ways - she still likes to embarrass her brother, especially if she can make a point doing it, and she has a neat line in put-downs.

This brings up something rather important - while L, of course, is Light's main foil within Death Note, Sayu acts as a minor one. Sayu is mainly defined by the ways she's not like her brother; she's there to emphasise things about him. One of the main differences is that, despite what we, the audience, know of Light, Sayu is the naughty one. This is a major contrast between them - Light is appallingly bad, but conceited enough to think that if he can't be good, he can at least be right. But Sayu is really a pitifully good girl, who'd like to think she's bad! She'd like to think she's a little bit edgy.

Looking at the two of them, certainly early on, you'd think she was the manipulative one, the one who plays games with people! She challenges them, picking out flaws in their logic. She wangles 5,000 yen out of Light in exchange for her silence about his "girlfriend", Misa Amane. The games Light plays with outsiders are critical to the plot, and very obvious - but the ones he plays with his family are so subtle as to pass unnoticed except on a close reading. Sayu is far more obvious, but equally, far less serious about it. She doesn't play to win; when she's called on her games or contradicted, she shrugs and backs off. She's used to her brother outwitting her, in short. Still, "bratty" is a better word for early Sayu than "bad"; she plays up and makes noise just to be noticed. If she didn't, her brother shines so brightly that she might be lost entirely.

She's far more perceptive than people often think - it's always her who comments on changes in Light's behaviour, or who seems to spot inconsistencies like the fact that he really doesn't seem happy with Misa, and this leads me to wonder how much of her seeming unintelligence is an act. She's a second child, and she's a girl-child. Especially when one child in a family is particularly gifted, it's not uncommon for most of the parents' effort to go into the first one; there have been extremely gifted children who were overlooked simply because they already had a gifted older sibling, and they didn't try. This corresponds with the way Sayu seems overlooked and rather neglected; like Mello, she's always second, though her response is to take things easy, to let them slide. Intelligence isn't her thing; her place in her family is as the bright, indulged baby, and that's how she acts. Note that I'm not saying she's a genius too by any means, but I do think it's important to realise that she's portrayed in canon as being rather smarter than a surface reading might indicate.

All along, her voice is a little bit nasal - again, pointing up that she's an ordinary girl, who doesn't rely on her voice to wow crowds or charm the world.

We're given no indication of what it is Sayu actually wants to do with her life, before it's derailed. We know she's studying at university, and we know she's grown up under the same influences as Light - while there was probably no pressure on her to follow in his footsteps, she's also lived with Soichiro's public service obligation and sense of duty. I don't think it's too far-fetched to think that she'd train for some mid-level vocational career. She also doesn't live in a world where it's safe to stand out too much, or to be in the public eye. In a lot of ways within the story, too, Sayu is there to contrast with Light. Given all of that, I've decided to make her a student nurse - with a special interest in midwifery, which, while it's never likely to come up, appeals to me when juxtaposed with her brother's calling. Plus, she seems the sort to get really excited about babies.

Misconceptions

* Sayu's not stupid! When we see her in second arc, she's a university student. She's not as smart as Light, and when we see her early on, she's not someone who goes into depth, but there's no lack of smarts there. If anything, she's the opposite of Matsuda, who is clearly very intelligent on paper to have the job he does at the age that he does, but who isn't all that worldly wise. HtR13 says about him, "He's not thinking anything ... He just acts on emotion!" - and this certainly describes Sayu too. She's not going to ace all her test scores, but she's not an idiot. Again, HtR13 tells us she's not as smart as Matsuda (by one point, as it happens) - but when we actually see the two of them up against each other, she outwits him easily enough.

* She doesn't go to pieces easily. People see how she reacts after her kidnap and think of her as fragile, and certainly by comparison to the core cast she is (just as yes, she's stupid by comparison with them, but so are you and I). During the kidnap, though, she copes startlingly well. We see her terrified when she's bound and gagged in Los Angeles, but later when she's in the underground base, she seems nervous, yes, but otherwise communicative and even calm! I'm not sure I'd cope as well as she seems to. It's not until her father arrives to make the trade that she goes to pieces - her father's life is threatened, her own life is threatened (the order is actually given to kill her!), and she's nearly shot (the gun is repeatedly fired almost in her face), and then her father hands over what it's made clear is Kira's murder weapon to save her life, destroying his career and his self-image in the process. Of course she collapses after that.

How does she relate to...

her father, Soichiro:

Soichiro's a high-level official in the Japanese police bureaucracy, and Japanese organisations demand a huge level of commitment from their workforce. He leaves the country for international police meetings. He dedicates himself to finding Kira, vanishing almost entirely from the family home. But it's likely that he wasn't there much before Kira, either. You can see this in the subtle way the family's behaviour shifts when he's there - when he's around, everyone is on their best behaviour! When he's home for dinner, the family make conversation round the table, and he catches up with the children, asking about school - but when he's not there, the remaining three watch TV and talk about that.

So Sayu's a little awed by her dad, in a way she isn't of Light, or even her mother; we never see Sayu chafe at Soichiro the way she does Sachiko. She's overjoyed to see him; every time he comes home, she rushes to the front door. When he asks her uncomfortable questions, she gets flustered and gives evasive responses. When he tells her off, she blames others for the trouble she's in. She's proud of his work, and overwhelmed by his determination to make the world a better place, which so rarely comes into focus.

It's the Kira case that really brings that drive out in Soichiro. He prioritises that investigation over his family in a very explicit way. Though he eventually gets it back, and though, thanks to L, there's no impact on the family's income, he gives up his career to keep chasing Kira. He knows the case could cost him his life, but won't give it up, even when Sayu and Sachiko beg him to. He works over the new year holiday, which is the rough equivalent of missing Christmas for a Western family. Sayu blames Kira for this, rather than blaming Soichiro - she believes in him, but she knows - again - that she takes second place to his calling. A silver lining to this is that while she knows there are things that are more important to her father than she is, she's also grown up with his example in front of her, just like Light. She's got that to live up to as well, from both her father and her mother.

But she finds him overprotective, too - old-fashioned, restrictive and overprotective; "stubborn" is the word the official translation uses, and this is common knowledge amongst the family. There are restrictions on her behaviour which she takes for granted, but probably isn't happy about - in second arc, she seems to take delight in flirting with Matsuda in front of her stuffy parents.

It's an irony that Sayu eventually does find that she's more important to her father than his investigation is, when she's kidnapped and he saves her at the risk of his own life. Sayu thinks it's her fault she got kidnapped - and subsequently, no doubt, she blames herself for Soichiro's near-resignation, and for the effects of the weapon that's given up to save her.

her mother, Sachiko:

The Yagami family's full of parallels. Just as Light, in a way, grows up to be his father, Sayu is clearly growing up into her mother! They often act as a unit, expressing concerns, criticisms and approval in the same voice; Sayu follows her mother's lead. They spend time together - while Light is up in his room plotting evil brooding studying, Sayu's spending time downstairs with her mother and the TV. They talk to each other! They watch TV dramas together in the evenings. We see glimpses of an ordinary family intimacy between Sachiko and Sayu (and even Light, early on) which, again, is really missing from Soichiro's relationship with the children.

Sachiko waits on the family - she cleans their bedrooms, up to a point, and serves them at the table. Sayu doesn't obey her mother unquestioningly by any means. She argues, resists and finds excuses - unless Soichiro's there, or matters are serious, when she doesn't. When asked to do chores, she'll find a way out of it if she possibly can. She can shock her mother with the games she plays, and with her unthinking observations! - ("I'll keep quiet for 5,000 yen, oniichan!" "I can see her panties!")

When Sayu is kidnapped and subsequently unwell, it's Sachiko who cares for her - and ultimately, the two of them are left alone together, all that's left of the family.

her brother, Light:

When we first meet them, she adores him. She looks up to him tremendously; she thinks he's smarter than anyone else in the world! She's proud of his accomplishments; she isn't above basking in his reflected glory. She flatters and admires him; she cheers him on and goes to him for help with all the things she can't be bothered with - though you get the impression she's enjoying his company, more than letting him teach her. But she also scraps with him, in a bright-little-girl way; she likes to bring him down a few pegs when she can. She thinks he's way too serious, and has trouble believing he ever does anything fun. She finds dirty magazines on his floor and asks about them with wide-eyed interest. She tells him off, not entirely seriously, when she finds him out of line, or when he gets her into trouble with their parents. She teases him, seizing on apparent inconsistencies in his logic, or on odd behaviour! - though there's no sign that she hits on anything like their true meaning; it's inconceivable that her serious, conscientious brother could be the monster their father is looking for.

In retrospect, it would be easy to look at Light's odd behaviour at home, his work with the NPA which precedes canon, and the fact that he ends up working with Soichiro, and conclude that he was on the investigation almost from the beginning. I think this is how Sayu explains it all to herself (and probably how Sachiko does, too) - and I think she's quite proud of herself for putting the pieces together.

In second arc, it seems as if they've grown apart, and this is more than understandable. Light's made it his business to grow away from everyone, and he starts distancing himself from his little sister almost at once, by casually mentioning that he's still helping her with her homework; he doesn't want her in and out of the bedroom he's sharing with a shinigami and a murder weapon. He doesn't want her to have the constant access to him that she's taken for granted ("*puzzled rattle* Oniichan? Why did you lock your door?"). So that kicks in, and she does notice; she comments that he's becoming a real teenager, moody and private in a way she isn't used to. Things continue like that for a few months before Misa enters the picture, and Light moves out.

He doesn't see Sayu again until the five-year timeskip begins, when Light's released from surveillance by the death of L, and presumably accepted back into his home. While there's no way to tell how the timeskip goes, it's possible to make a few guesses. After L's death, Light goes into full swing as Kira again, running things from his new home as both Kira and L. We've seen the way Soichiro and Aizawa disappear from their respective family homes, and Light is working with them. To all appearances, he grows up; he becomes more distant, more preoccupied, generally colder; he's got no time for anything but his work. The boy Sayu grew up with, who helped her and looked after her, is gone forever; though he still loves them, he's more than prepared to give up his family relationships to his higher calling.

I think she regrets this loss of what they were, even though Light's departure is unquestionably good for her. HtR13 tells us she's hugely dependent on him at 14; she's probably so young for her age because he takes care of her. Without him, she has to learn to stand on her own feet.

her brother's girlfriend, Misa Amane:

lynkemma has pointed out that you can tell a hell of a lot from who is and isn't allowed into Light's bedroom, since it's where he takes off his mask; it's where he hides from his family. While Sayu's progressively shut out, Misa's welcomed in at once, and repeatedly. We know it's because she's part of Light's scheming as Kira, but both times Misa visits Light in his room, we see Sayu staring up the stairs as they go - once in shock ("I can see her panties!"), and once in envy ("your legs are so pretty. :o"). From Sayu's perspective, Misa pushes her out of her brother's affections.

Misa's as good as calculated to give girl-next-door Sayu an inferiority complex. She's beautiful; she's elaborately, daringly dressed; she's a model, increasingly in the public eye! Her manners are, apparently, perfect - note that deep bow Misa gives when she first meets Sachiko and Sayu. Even Misa's cutesy ways are charming, seen in the right light, in a way Sayu sometimes tries for, but never quite pulls off. Sayu, who's so starstruck and who follows her idols religiously, is dazzled by Misa. She wants to like her! She wants Misa to shine on her the same way Light always has - even if her mother doesn't approve, and even if, initially, Sayu thought Misa was shocking and weird...

... and then Light vanishes, supposedly exiled from the family home because his father can't accept that he's gone to live with Misa. When we next encounter Sayu in second arc, she's rather distant from Light and Misa both. She comments that "it's not often we see the two of you together", and asks Light when he plans to make an honest woman of Misa. This is said with a smile, and you could believe it's a straightforward question - until she turns away, when only the camera can see her look of distaste.

Soichiro and Sachiko give the very strong impression that nobody could ever be good enough for either of their children; they're scandalised by any suggestion that either Light or Sayu might have a sexuality. So Sachiko never approves of Misa; this is made very clear - and Sayu frequently takes her lead from Sachiko; her mother's dislike rubs off on her. It would be very reasonable, I think, if she feels that Misa's stolen her brother and made a stranger of him, since he never returns after the Yotsuba arc. I don't think she can quite make out what Misa and Light are doing together, either; Misa's so bright and bubbly and superficial, and has nothing in common with Light, who's so clearly unhappy with her.

It doesn't seem at all as if Sayu and Misa know each other well. Sayu keeps Misa at a distance; they don't see each other much. At the second arc teaparty, the whole family are gathered in the same room, and Sayu even comments on how rare this is - yet she makes a polite excuse and leaves at once, not even stopping for a cup of tea. She's polite to Misa, and friendly, but wouldn't choose to be in her company.

The world around her:

Sayu grows to adulthood in a world that's increasingly repressive, as Kira's influence pervades it year on year. This starts right away. L confronts Kira in a very public way, launching him onto the world stage. The public find the clash between the two fascinating, and the media whip it up into a frenzy. "Kira" (actually the second Kira, Misa) begins to exercise direct power over the media, killing journalists who've expressed anti-Kira viewpoints. When the power passes on again, to Kyosuke Higuchi, the Yotsuba Kira, he uses the Yotsuba corporation's power and wealth to bribe Japanese politicians and the police, bringing the official investigation into Kira to a close. It eventually resumes, but on low power; Light has taken over as "L", as the brains of the Kira investigation, and he doesn't want himself investigated too closely.

During the timeskip, society tightens into a noose around the necks of the people it's meant to be run for - the new world's only run for one person's benefit, and he's up at the top. People are encouraged to spy on their neighbours, to present people they suspect of wrongdoing to Kira on the Internet. Japanese society already places a lot of pressure to conform, and now it has weapons that are more literal than symbolic. This has played out in every totalitarian state in modern history, from East Germany to the Soviet Union to North Korea - you can't say what you think. You can't speak out without the risk that the wrong person will hear you. This is one of the mechanisms that could quickly turn a heedless, outspoken girl like Sayu into someone who seems to think carefully before every word, to be a little unhappy, and who eventually, as we see, retreats into saying nothing at all.

Sayu is the sort of person who, if her situation was different, might never believe the world has changed. But living in the family she does, she's too close to the investigation to be allowed to ignore it. She isn't up on what's going on, but she'd hear enough (Sachiko scolds Soichiro and Light for "talking about this again").

Kira:

The Yagami family, with one carefully-concealed exception, are not exactly pro-Kira. Early on, Sayu hates him for keeping their father away from home so much, especially around the holidays. She makes no bones about this whatsoever.

Support for Kira, early on, is widespread and almost silent; a lot of the world's worst criminals are being wiped out by someone secret, and while most people would never admit it, popular opinion approves. Sayu, certainly at first, is not a deep thinker, and seems exactly the sort to think it couldn't be bad if bad people were killed. She also seems to like to think of herself as a bit edgy, as a bit of a problem - so I don't think it's out of the question that she was initially pro-Kira. Again, she parallels Matsuda, who acts on emotion and doesn't think in depth - and is also instinctively pro-Kira; there is this suggestion running through canon, often voiced by Light's antagonists, that it's the stupid masses that Kira's ideology appeals to.

Sayu is nervous enough at the family meeting Soichiro calls to support this reading. However, she's always led by her father and her brother, and I think she certainly comes around after seeing that both of them are so strongly anti-Kira - and that her father's likely to be killed for his part in the investigation. She sees the massive strain the Kira investigation places on her father and her mother, and no doubt on her too.

Yet she also sees the world change around her as she grows up, with war eliminated and violent crime massively reduced - and fear and repression the engines of change. This is one of the questions Death Note poses - if not seriously to the reader, who can see exactly what Light is and what he's doing, then certainly to the ordinary people like Sayu who live in that world. What's the tradeoff between safety and liberty? What price is too high to put on a human life? How many people would you kill to save your loved ones? Sayu's family are everything to her; she supports them, she believes in them, but is what they're doing right? Is the whole world more important than they are? These all seem like very natural worries for her to have, and never speak of.

What signs we get suggest that the family becomes increasingly strained across the timeskip; Kira's rise marks the end of Sayu's childhood, for a number of reasons - her father and brother are virtually absent, her mother is unhappy and under strain and Sayu would have to support her. They're eventually left alone when Soichiro and Light die - but really, they have to cope alone from almost the start of the story.

why do you feel this character would be appropriate to the setting?

While at her departure point, Sayu's a relatively cheerful character, she comes from a very dark canon, and we get a lot of detail on how she reacts to trauma - too much, in fact. She's made for a setting like this one.



Network Post Sample:

[There's a quiet click, and the video feed flickers into life. Strangely, it's not showing a face, but a floor in the outlander block, and the toes of some neat canvas shoes in a bright pink. Whoever it is has their forge turned face down. Must be an accident. Girls and technology, eh?]

All right - so that's - aha—

[It's a young woman's voice, grey with nervousness, but slow and preoccupied by the shiny metal box. Thin fingers scuttle past the screen, searching for something; the fingernails are carefully manicured. When they find their target, there's another click; the picture shuts off, but the voice remains, soft, hollow and uncertain.]

All right. I think I see how this works. Hm. [There's another click, and the sound cuts out for a few seconds before it's hurriedly reenabled.] —o, no no no no no!.. maybe not quite.

What I wanted to say was - I see the messages on this thing. Can anybody hear me? I'd like to know what's going on, please. If it's not too much trouble. Um.

[What else is there to say? Nobody's put a bag over her head yet, but this is quite enough to be getting on with.]

Third Person Sample:

The first thing Sayu thought in Anatole was that this was just typical. Or rather, as the suggestion of mist hit her, as she stumbled through cracked marble and stone and then right over her own feet onto her face, she got as far as just ... ty....

Much later, when she finally opened her eyes, she realised this was nowhere near typical. Scuttling backwards like a collared cat, her spine bumped up against cold, hard metal rails: ow! But there was nobody else; there was nobody else around. That meant she was safe for now, right? There was a door, in the corner - a vast affair of darkly panelled wood that looked as if you'd need a rope just to pull it open. Whoever brought her here, they had to come through there, right?

All right, deep breaths, Sayu. You can't go to pieces here. Later, when you're safe, but not here and now. Though she didn't realise it, the chiding voice in her head was startlingly like her mother's. Sayu was a detective's daughter, after all, and there weren't many as prominent as her father. She'd grown up with her mother's worries, with the unspoken knowledge that she had to be more careful than most, that it wasn't beyond all possibility that her father's work might make her a target. That didn't seem to be so much of a problem, these days; Kira wasn't exactly the Yakuza, after all, and she didn't remember being kidnapped, but - but—

But - all right, a room. Forcing herself to slow down and just breathe, Sayu, she took a look around it.

She was on a small, high bed, with a hard metal frame and a thin mattress. The rough brown blanket she'd kicked off lay crumpled at its foot. That was good, right? Whoever it was probably didn't want to hurt her if they'd go to the effort of covering her with a blanket, right? Oh, please let that be right. The ceiling was rough and pale and unpainted; the walls were painted, but the yellow pigment was too thin and too pale, like the light that filtered in through the high window. The marks of the brush stood out in pastel-powdery streaks. Cheap, she thought - but more than that, the idea the room gave her was old. Long-ago, even - the look of the furniture, and the way the lights rested in ornate brass fittings on the wall, rather than neatly overhead.

It all had the feel of something unbearably far away, and intimidatingly foreign. Scooting her legs over the side of the bed, she huddled there with a defeated little sigh.

Heroines in TV dramas always knew exactly what to do, because someone was good enough to hand them the script in advance. But that was how life seemed for everyone else too, wasn't it? If she was her father, she could walk out of that heavy-looking door with all his quiet authority behind her. Nobody would dare get in his way. And if she was her brother, she could just walk out of the building with a smile as if she had the right to be there, because it would never occur to him that he didn't. Even her mother would poke her head out of the door with her quintessential politeness and that way she had of making it clear she disapproved without ever quite mentioning it, and she'd know all the right questions to ask, and somehow, she'd find all the right people. She'd make a point of finding them.

But Sayu was just ... Sayu. Cheerful rather than chirpy, demure and cheeky in the same small package, she tried to be friends with everyone, because these days it was so much better not to give offence. Still curled unhappily on the edge of the uncomfortable bed that wasn't her bed, she insisted to herself that she was good in a crisis. But when things really went bad, when half your family was chasing a murderer who'd kill them literally as soon as look at them, when you realised you couldn't remember the last time you really saw your mother smile, when you went into class in the morning and realised you could never trust any of the people there - well, that was when you'd much rather have someone else around than her. Or, she thought, glancing dolefully around at the walls, when you passed out and found yourself shut up in someone else's bizarrely antiquated guest room.

She didn't want to have to do this now. She still needed time to learn how to do better, how to be an adult, how to shrug on that other Sayu who was so smart, so professional and calm. That shadow-Sayu who always knew what to do, because she didn't exist at all. And as she sat there, one thought refused to go away. Maybe this is what it's like when you die. Maybe it's just a room and a bed, forever and ever and ever.

Anything else?

Thanks for plodding through all of this. <3