I think you are generally right about the bizarre focus on happy endings and "good always prevails", and that Light's speech after he confessed was over the top, as you mention later on, but I believe the writers of this show chose the best and most satisfying ending, rather than a moral ending. It was also very compatible with the earlier implied notion that two of L's successors, Near and Mello, were required to defeat Kira/Second L.
The end does not always justifies the means, nor do the means always justify the end. What kind of end would that be if there was an enforced world peace under Kira's terror, and that terror was progressively enforced to more and more people? That would be a dystopia rather than a utopia, which was supposed to be Kira's goal. Everyone, from the President of the United States to the non criminal "kind of lazy, non productive members of society", and maybe later people who were regarded as just stupid, would function under constant fear of death, and that is clearly not true peace.
You cannot enforce peace, that can only be done through global cooperation and by educating people. You also cannot enforce kindness. "Behave or else" does not lead to kindness, it just leads to pseudo-kindness out of fear. A world where Kira was the ultimate and eventually only law would be the absolute dictatorship, taking what the Nazis did to a whole new level.
Light was also too smug, thinking he could not ever be defeated, and at last he was surpassed by Near and partly Mello. That was extremely satisfying for me. I could clearly see a dark ending where Light eventually prevailed in his goal of creating his Dark New World, but I believe that world would soon collapse. Everyone would be functionally and emotionally crippled out of fear of being the target of Kira's wrath, so society's productivity and scientific and technological progress would plummet rather than rise. Fear blocks you, constant fear paralyzes you. It would be a return to the Dark Ages. But Light, despite all his genius, was too stupid to ever think about that. Or, if he did, he just did not care.
Would I accept a dark ending that would (clearly) lead to the above? Certainly. Ideally, if Light prevailed (and he almost did), all the above could have been suggested in a summary at the end, looking decades into the future. Not because it was the moral thing to show, but it was the logical thing to show. Plain old common sense alone would explain why the world would turn to $hit under Kira's rule, but some people lack even that, so I think such a summary should have been at the ending.
Fanboy : a person who does not think while watching.
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Kawada_Kira
8 years ago
Light was also too smug, thinking he could not ever be defeated, and at last he was surpassed by Near and partly Mello. That was extremely satisfying for me.
I can kind of see all sides of the debate here, but this part I disagree with for the simple fact that the second half of the show was written so much less intelligently than the first half. L was brilliant but only human, and flawed, capable of making mistakes and actions of highly questionable morality. Near however was written as a veritable superhuman who just magically and psychically managed to overcome Kira with ease, standing on the shoulders of L and his hard work. It felt to me like the second half of the series, both the story and characters, was just written very lazily, like the authors just wanted to get it over with in the easiest possible way. It wasn't as clever as the first half. For this reason, I couldn't find any satisfaction in it, and ever since the first time I watched it, I no longer watch past the episode where L dies. For me the second half is just a disappointment. Whether Kira or L won, it should have been Kira vs L to the end. I don't mind Kira losing (though the first time I watched it, I hoped for Kira to win partly for the reason similar to that elucidated in the OP, that everything always has to have a conventional "happy ending", and Kira winning would just be more interesting), but if he had to lose, he should have lost in a clever and satisfactory way. I don't think Near earned his victory. It was cheap, and as the OP says, it stunk of a shallow and hypocritical moralism that, IMO, weakened the whole story.
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