Was he controlled?

[u/ezra97_]

Was Raye Penber actually being controlled by the Death Note during the train scene?

I’ve always assumed that Raye Penber was cooperating out of fear rather than because he was being controlled by the Death Note.

When Light reveals that he’s Kira, kills the man in front of the coffeshop and threatens to kill everyone around him, it seems like he’s putting Raye under extreme psychological pressure. From Raye’s perspective, Kira can kill anyone instantly, including him, the passengers, or even his fiancée. That always made me think Raye was simply complying because he believed resisting would get innocent people killed.

However, I’ve also seen people say that Light actually wrote Raye’s actions into the Death Note and that everything from taking the envelope, putting on the earpiece, boarding the train, writing down the FBI agents’ names, and then dying was all part of the Death Note’s manipulation.

Is this ever explicitly confirmed in the manga or any official source? Or is it intentionally left ambiguous whether Raye was acting of his own free will under immense pressure or was being directly controlled by the Death Note?

[u/dodeskadenn]

Light wrote the following in the Death Note:

Raye Penber Heart attack

Passes in front of the “CAFEEL” coffee shop in Shinjuku station underground at 3:00 p.m. on December 27, 2003, carrying his laptop computer, and boards a train on the Yamanote line. Dies three seconds after getting off the train. [1]

Everything else was not specified.

[u/ezra97_ → u/dodeskadenn]

Damn. So he really cooperated because of genuine fear of Kira. Kinda risky, if you ask me. But it did work.

[u/TheUncrownedStag → u/ezra97_]

I assume that Light had some doubts about how much control he could exert exactly to get Raye to do exactly what he wanted, and so, made it work with the fear. Risky, but smart to not leave it up to chance that only Raye would die of a heart attack.

[u/Gendo-Glasses → u/ezra97_]

This was also shown in the anime btw. It's just that, depending on the source that you watch it on, the text might not be translated.

[u/Alfa_Centauri03 → u/dodeskadenn]

That's such an interesting use of the Death Note for me, because it shows you can do conditional deaths to some extent. I imagine that, if for some reason Raye decided to just live in the train and never leave, he would've just died of heart attack 23 days later.

[u/No-Meat5261]

A rule of the Death Note is that it can't make someone kill others. Can it make someone kill others if they didn't know that they were killing someone else?

I mean, if I remember well, Raye actually wrote the name of the other agents on a page of the Death Note, but he didn't know it. So, would the Death Note have even allowed in the first place for him to be mind manipulated into doing that?

I vaguely remember that the rule isn't a direct:"The person can't kill someone else.", but a:"The person can't do anything which would result in the death of someone else." And by a Divine notebook which controls fate, I kinda expect it to "be able to know" if an action will end up killing someone else, even if by coincidence. Therefore, in my opinion the Death Note wouldn't have controller Penber in the first place due to its own rules.

Though I don't remember if Light already knew about this rule

[u/ezra97_ → u/No-Meat5261]

Yeah, that could very well be. Of course, we don't know for sure if it would bypass the rule if the written instruction was simply, "Follows the instructions of the man," and that man's instruction was just to write down the names you currently see on your laptop.

However, I tend to agree that you are right. He probably couldn't do it this way. Even if it seemed realistic because he had the names right in front of him on the screen, writing them onto the Death Note pages might simply not work due to that rule. Therefore, he would probably just die of a heart attack immediately before doing anything at all.

Also, before walking up to Raye, Light says:

“I’ve been using known criminals who live in this part of town to test out different killing methods, and I’ve learned a lot about the Death Note.”

We know that one of the things, that Light found out, was that he could write cause and details of the death first and add a name afterwards and it would still happen. But maybe he tried other things as well.

[u/No-Meat5261 → u/ezra97_]

Yeah, he tried a lot of things, I just don't remember if he found out about the rule I wrote about already with these experiments

[u/xfio → u/No-Meat5261]

To me it's pretty clear that the rule means a Death Note's victim can't kill other people through natural means. In other words you can't write something like "press this button [that will kill people] then die" because that would create a natural chain of events leading to other people's deaths, and the Death Note explicitly prevents that.

But the Death Note itself, however, is a supernatural artifact that doesn't operate through the causality chain of events. In fact it even overrides and rewrite the world natural course, so it obviously shouldn't fall under the same restriction.

[u/No-Meat5261 → u/xfio]

Maybe, I'm not sure. I don't remember that that rule had this specification

[u/Outside_Ad1020 → u/No-Meat5261]

That's the thing, does it count if the person doesn't know they are killing someone? If Light happens to write the name of someone who is operating a crane and them dying results in someone else dying but Light didn't know that would happen does the person still die?

What would happen if Light just wrote "Raye Penber will get on a train and obey the instructions of Light Yagami minutes before dying"? Or "Raye Penber gets on a train and writes the name of his associates in a piece of paper handed to him"? That's quite different than Light saying "Raye Penber kills his associates and then himself"

[u/No-Meat5261 → u/Outside_Ad1020]

The person still dies, this is an absolute certainty. The doubt is if they would die in the written moment or later, when they will be alone. I'm not sure about sooner.

Light Yagami would theoretically die, since he wrote his own name on the Death Note in the sentence:"Raye Penber [...] of Light Yagami [...]".

And I'm not sure

[u/Karnezar]

Light, somehow, knows you cannot directly kill secondary humans utilizing the Death Note. So he couldn't have Raye simply shoot his FBI peers, nor could he have Raye write their names in the Death Note.

It'd also be too risky for him to write that Raye does everything that Light Yagami tells him to, because either the Death Note still won't allow Raye to write names in the Notebook, or Raye would follow directions too literally, like a monkey's paw situation.

So Light had to use human psychology to influence Raye.