"the place they go is mu"

[vashti]

So last night me, honoumiko and nardaviel had a huge (and very fun) Twitter argument about the nature of Mu. Which I then wrote up for the DN Wiki, largely based on Libby's summary of Mu.

I figured (a) it might interest some of you gaiz, and (b) you're all smart enough to point out where I've got it wrong-so, haz.

Comments

[sashocirrione]

6) The term "Mu" as an answer can be roughly translated to mean "that question is unanswerable" or "nobody has the answer to that question" (i.e. "Mu" can be a fancy way of saying "I don't know"). If you take that interpretation then you can postulate an afterlife, as long as there is no way of either shinigami or living humans knowing that such an afterlife exists. In this case, you'd have to have it set up so that there is no contact between the afterlife and the realm of the living or between the afterlife and the shinigami realm, or alternatively you set it up so that there is little contact and the contact which exists is slight and unprovable. This involves a bit more mental gymnastics than ways #1 through #5, but it still probably stretches the rule rather than breaking it.

7) You can technically get past the rule if what happens to humans after death doesn't make sense in terms of the question. For example, if an afterlife exists but is highly nonsensical. For another example, if the self splits into multiple entities after death and those entities then go on to different afterlives. Some sects of Buddhism and some Pagan religions have something like this happen. In this case you couldn't answer the question because you'd first have to re-define the question.

8) If humans go to multiple sequential afterlives, then the answer could be "Mu" because they don't go to one place. For example, if you first go to a holding-cell-like place while the "paperwork" gets completed, and then move on to a purgatory-like place to learn lessons or purify yourself from wrongdoings, and then go on to a better or worser afterlife from there, and then maybe get reincarnated, the answer to "Where do all humans go after death?" might be conditional and complex enough to justify "Mu" as an answer. This is somewhat of a stretch but I think I've seen it used more frequently in fanfic because it is more attractive than most of the above answers.

9) The interpretation of "Mu" also depends greatly on whether you consider the rule "All humans go to Mu" to be an in-universe compilation of shinigami knowledge or an unshakable statement on how the Death Note universe works from the writer. If it is shinigami knowledge only, then there is always the possibility that whatever shinigami who wrote the rules didn't know everything. This is a particularly plausible stance because of repeated assertions in canon of just how little shinigami know, even about themselves and about their own powers, plus some minor retconning of the rules in the 2nd half.