Kira(a)

Yesternight, a friend and I were talking about Gundam 00. ~How it was similar to Wing, and how there is no Kira-type character since Setsuna was more of a Heero-type. They even look similar.

Okay, maybe they don't look that similar, but look at the expressions on their faces. And really, they were si~mi~lar. Their prospective romantic partners were also very similar (Relena and Marina).

Anyway, that led me to thinking about Gundam SEED and Kira Yamato. And thinking of the name Kira can't help but bring to mind the existence of another famous "Kira" character: Yagami Raito. Yes, I choose to write it as "Raito" rather than "Light" because I like it better that way. Writing it as Light takes away the fun kanji part. Why fun? Because according to the manga, Raito is a very unusual way of reading the kanji "月". Actually, the author only decided that Raito would be Light later in the series, IIRC. Well, it's also logical. I don't think the author would've assigned a kanji for his name if he intended it to be Light, it should've been just written as ライト. I think. Anyway, with all that said, the kanji version is better. Along with his family name, it fits Raito's character really well. Plus, it sounds cooler.
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So, in the end I decided to find more Kira characters.



They are:
1. Kira Yamato from Gundam SEED
2. Yagami Raito aka Kira from Death Note
3. Kira Izuru from Bleach
4. Takuto Kira from Full Moon wo Sagashite
5. Kira Sakuya from Angel Sanctuary

I've only watched the anime of items 1 and 3, read the manga of 2, heard of the anime for 4 and never heard of 5. So basically, I only knew of 1 to 3 and got 4 to 5 from google.
Since I don't know anything about the last two, I won't say anything about them.
Since I consider Kira Izuru to be somewhat a minor character in bleach and I find him uninteresting, I'm not gonna talk about him either.
In fact, what I really wanted to ramble about are Yamato and Yagami.
I know it's a deviation from Raito-Lelouch comparisons, and while I do agree that that comparison has a lot of stuff in it, I don't feel like thinking or rambling about something that a lot of other people already rambled about.
So, this is a Yagami Raito ~ Kira Yamato comparison. Yay.
Now that that's settled, let's move on.
Erm.. Just for the heck of it. This may contain spoilers about Gundam SEED and Death Note. Don't read if you don't want to be spoiled.
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Yamato Kira - Yagami Raito Comparison

Okay. Drawing-wise, I love Raito's Hair. Haha. No connection.
Next.
When you think about it, Raito and Kira have very different personalities, but have some similarities as well.

Kiraness
While Kira is named Kira just because (since IIRC, Kira's name was written in katakana, so no meaning attached there. But I haven't tried looking for what the creators have to say, etc.), Raito got the title of Kira because he's a Kira (キラー) which is how you would katakanize the english word "killer". Actually, I just realized that there's something wrong with my comparison because while Kira is キラ, Raito is キラー. But it's just a matter of a prolonged "ra". Big deal. :P So, I'll go on. So there we have the difference. The similarity here is that they are both Kira. Yeah, okay, Raito's "Kiraa". Whatever, go away. :P

godness
Raito/Kiraa was regarded by a lot of people in the Death Note world as a god who came to punish the criminals and other bad people.
This god does his god thing by killing people.
Kira, in my opinion, is also like a god, in his own right (the Destiny Kira, at least). When he's in a Gundam (particularly Strike Freedom), it's like nothing can stand in his way. *worships*
Ahem.
Plus, in SEED Destiny, he does all this without killing people. How amazing is that? (I have a bias in favor of Kira Yamato, don't I?) In other words, he's really powerful. Well, he's the ultimate coordinator, after all.
Soooo, this god does his god thing by not killing.
Although both characters have similar objectives (saving the various things important to them), their methods were polar opposites.
One might argue that Raito didn't really have anything important to him anymore, and he was just a psycho who got consumed by his own ambitions and got crushed by his own power. But he did start off as a decent kid who wanted to change the world for the better. I say this because even though the change into a psycho was almost instantaneous (remember that early in the series he killed that guy on TV pretending to be L while emitting psycho aura?), the Raito who lost his memories was a decent guy who believed in justice and even believed that Kiraa should be punished. I know he was also trying to prove his innocence at that time, but come on, the amnesia Raito was a really good boy. No psycho aura at all.
This brings us to another difference to the godness of Kira and Kiraa.
While Raito's god value descended as the series progressed, Kira's god value was increasing.
Raito wasn't exactly a god without the death note, but he was, well, near-perfect. He was good-looking, good at sports, sociable enough, and was a genius to boot. However at the taste of a death note, he turned into a sinister god and went even further downhill from there. Well, I guess that kinda points out the value of all the apples in this anime. The real apple is the death note, the power to kill is knowledge, and Raito using it is like taking a bite out of the apple. Ryuk is the serpent. So, I guess with these, you could've actually predicted that there would only be utter downfall for Raito in the end. In this case though, there was no God to punish the serpent Ryuk and there was no Messiah to save Raito in the end. Darker, huh? Haha, anime symbolism, reaaaally. :))
Moving on...
Kira, on the other hand started off as a confused teenager. The whole SEED was mostly about Kira finding his place in this universe. Then in Destiny, Kira was in a much better state and his god value spiked up. (^__^. Bias. lol.) He was much more composed in Destiny. He was so kewl. Although his conversation with Athrun in the car in some Destiny episode reveals that they both haven't really found the answers to their philosophical(?) questions in SEED, Kira didn't falter like he did in SEED anymore. In a way, he was really like a god. *worships*
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. I miss SEED. Just an insert, but really, SEED and Destiny definitely have their flaws as a series, but I'm this kind of person who really gets attached to characters. SEED and SEED Destiny were among the things which comforted me in my dark college days. I know it sounds like.. hmm... pathetic? But I'll never trade this for anything else. Anime and books are friends and are much better than most living moving entities in this twisted world. Ahahaha~ bitter me. :P Of course I have living friends and I'll never ever trade them for anything either. Of course, if I'm offered infinite cash source, I might consider it. HAHA. Of course not. What would I do with cash without people to spend them with? That'd be lonely. Aww, shucks, the drama is killing me. Whatever. Next.
So the point made here was that I'm such an emotional sucker though Kiraa and Kira were gods, they differed in their principles and god journeys.
Next.

Humanness
Human=person. Ness=ality. Personality. But I'll focus more on their being (or not) humane.
Raito is a psycho. Okay, that about sums it up.
Seriously, Raito was a like a kid who suddenly had a machine gun fall into his hands and got overwhelmed by this POWER. And in the end, he didn't care who got in his way, and really got this illusion that he was a god. I'm sure he would've killed his family, etc if he had to. Psycho mode.
Well, even though it seems that I disapprove of Raito, the truth is that I don't. I do like him as a character. Plus he also had a huge influence on me, really. Just not in the same way as Kira. And really, I thought it was kind of sad that there was nothing but doom that awaited him at the end. While he was like psycho-evil, he was really just a victim. Ryuk was the evil one. >:) And he was just BORED. Well, it seems like Shinigami weren't exactly moral creatures, but really, even for a Shinigami, Ryuk was kind of evil. But I don't hate Ryuk either. I have an evil side in me that gets amazed at amazing evil too. Ryuk's existence was like an eviiil lie. Though he spent most of his anime screentime just eating apples and being a seemingly passive character, he was in fact the one who set this whole story in motion, and in the end, he was the one who put the final period on the last sentence by killing Raito. Well, he's just doing his job huh? Wakeke.
Kira on the other hand really values human lives. He wouldn't even sacrifice the lives of soldiers he didn't know (despite the fact that soldiers go to war knowing fully well the possible consequences--i.e. death). Polar opposites, for this one.
I guess a bit of a similarity would be that they both wanted to fight for the good of the world. Does it count?
Next.

Lness
Raito's archenemy was L. I don't know if it's right to label him so because, first, L died around halfway through the manga which was o_O-wtf. That was the start of Death Note's descent into a mixture of tl;dr, boringness, and zomg-when's-it-going-to-end-not-to-mention-how-??-ness. But I still read all the way to the end since I already started it and I did want to see how it ends. Fortunately for me, when I read the Death Note manga, it was already done. This could also be the reason I had a o_O reaction to L's death--I already knew how many chapters the whole thing was. Well, I could only imagine how it would've been if I read it as it was ongoing--THE HORROR. I would compare the experience to Naruto filler seeasons (though Naruto would be worse I guess--so bad that I decided not to watch), but that's only me.
Anywaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.
Second, L and Raito were friends at school. Plus, when Raito was in his good-boy mode (when he lost his memories of the Death Note), they were like BFFs. Weeeell, I know that in the end, they were still enemies, so this is really useless stuff, but well, the thing here is that no matter what L was to Raito, he was an enemy to Kiraa.
So now, on Kira, who is his L? I'll look at this the SEED way and not the Destiny way, because, well, Kira wasn't the main deal in Destiny. But he was reeaally kewl there ^____^. So, in SEED, Kira's L would be no one other than the masked character Rau Le Creuset. They weren't BFFs, but they had deeper ties, Le Creuset being the funding source for the creation of Kira, IIRC. But I guess they weren't friends. Well, Kira did have a friend-enemy in the form of Athrun ZaLa though. But he and Athrun weren't exactly enemies. So I guess, somehow, in a way, Kira's L was split into different people. Ok, I know, this comparison is forced, isn't it? Fine. :P
Now, despite the fact that I'm not a fan of the deviation (is it even a deviation in anime?) called shounen-ai, I would just like to point out that there's another possible L counterpart in SEED in this context, and that is: Lacus. o_O :))
Now why did I point this out? Because I just encountered an amazing discovery by someone in a forum somewhere while looking for pictures to place in this entry. This discovery may just hold the answer to whether there is truth in the Lacus theory.
The answer lies in spelling YAGAMI backwards.
HAHA. Isn't it just lol stuff?
:P
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End Commentary

In the end, I guess I managed to make a rather lengthy comparison. Well, it did include so many other things about the animes involved. Waha. Anywaay, I think I've said so much about this that I don't have anything for the end commentary anymore.
So I'll just end this with: VK OP is in last week's Oricon Top 20. o_O Haha. Oh well, I'm not a god, so my judgment isn't infallible. Hm. Maybe I should make Oricon top 20 into post material? We'll see if I have the patience. :))

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Disclaimer(s), etc.

1. Not claiming what isn't mine.
2. All images are from somewhere else and info links go to sites that are not mine. :P
3. You may have noticed that the order in which I write the surname and given name changes. This is based on the anime (at least for those I have watched). For example, Kira Yamato is Kira Yamato because he isn't from Japan in Gundam SEED, he's from Orb, blah blah, you get it. Yagami Raito on the other hand is Japanese and that's how they write their name. Ok.
4. Wow, I didn't know Death Note Anime had so many awards. Maybe I should watch it.
5. O_O LONG post.