James Dittiger/ Netflix /Courtesy Everett Collection
IndieWire critic, Hanh Nguyen, wrote about how this affected the story: "This story, like many taken from the most popular anime or manga, has cultural significance to Japan. ... The concept of a death god is very common in Japanese lore, and therefore comes with a set of expectations or rules. Setting the story in Seattle and not having anyone Asian American play the role of Light Yagami, now Light Turner, removed that context." Fellow critic, David Ehrlich, agreed, "the vanilla treatment suggests that race/culture/identity isn’t important to this story. In which case, genre stylings notwithstanding, whiteness — and a lack of Japaneseness — become some of the only notable ways that this film differentiates itself from the previous iterations of this property. And that doesn’t sit well. Neither does the implication that whiteness is synonymous with the American experience."