Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Humans are truly... disgusting creatures!”
Rem Quotes
3 quotes from Death Note, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Read the character analysis and its source limits
Rem can give Misa information without settling whether Misa’s next choice will protect her. VIZ’s Death Note Volume 6 synopsis describes Rem revealing the Kiras’ identities while L uses Misa to infiltrate the Yotsuba group. The publisher pairs that disclosure with Misa’s determination to help Light. Her knowledge increases, but so does her commitment to someone whose purposes may differ from her own. Wikiquote’s manga excerpts expose a related problem in Rem’s judgment: chapter 47 records her considering whether Light is as pure as Misa, because she interprets his use of the notebook as serving humanity rather than himself. Chapter 58 records a very different assessment of Light’s capacity to kill even a shinigami. Those bounded records do not supply every step between the thoughts. They do make protection harder than providing useful facts: Rem’s reading of Light is itself a source of danger worth questioning.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Light... he can even kill a shinigami. He has surpassed us.”
An epitaph written by the victim. What the sentence describes is a person who found the arrangement of pressure that makes a god of death write L's name at the cost of her own life. The series treats this as the high point of the protagonist's competence.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Light Yagami might be as pure as Misa... He was not using the Death Note for himself, but rather he was using the notebook in order to better humanity as a whole.”
She is not wrong about the motive, which is the uncomfortable part. Light has no yacht, no fortune and no private appetite the series ever shows him indulging. He wants the world arranged correctly and he wants the credit for arranging it, and those are the only two things he wants. Rem has him described. The error is the inference: that a man acting for humanity rather than for himself is therefore safe to stand next to. She reaches that conclusion while Light is already assembling the situation that will oblige her to kill L, and so herself, and the assembly depends on her holding exactly this opinion. Purity of motive is a specification, not a safeguard. It tells you what the machine is for. It tells you nothing about what it will do to whoever is standing in front of it.
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Usually taken as a god of death sneering at mortals from above. Its target is narrower: humans who use the notebook for their own gain. Rem is the shinigami who behaves most like a person in this story, protective to the point of self-destruction, and the disgust in the line is aimed at people using the notebook to get ahead.