F A N L I S T I N G S

Quoting The Fanlistings Network, a fanlisting is "a place for all fans of a particular show, movie, actor/actress, singer, etc. to come together and build the biggest listing of people from all around the world who are fans of that subject."

R A Y E   P E N B E R

Raye Penber is a minor character from the manga and anime series Death Note by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata. He's an FBI agent and Naomi Misora's fiancé and appears in the first two books (or anime episodes 3, 4 and 5). Even though his role in the story is fairly small, he's rather important to the moral side of the series: before Naomi and Raye, everyone the main character had to get rid of to achieve his goal were faceless (if we can say that in the spirit of the series) agents and policemen, but with Raye and Naomi we learn a little bit about their lives, we find out that they're going to get married and Naomi's in Japan with Raye so he can meet her parents before the marriage. With them the reader really comes to understand the seriousness of Light's deeds.

Here's Raye's bio from Death Note 13: How to Read:

Birthday: 12/31/1974
Deathday: 12/27/2003
Height: 5'9"
Weight: 152 lbs.
Blood Type: O
Likes: Naomi Misora
Dislikes: Overtime

Stats:
Intelligence: 7/10
Creativity: 6/10
Initiative: 6/10
Emotional Strength: 7/10
Social Skills: 8/10
Surveillance Skills: 4/10

Random info bits:
• Raye was voiced by Hideo Ishikawa in the anime and portrayed by Shigeki Hosokawa in the movie.
• Raye's death date is different by three years in the anime version. Apparently the producers wanted the anime to happen as close to the airing time as possible as the manga happened near the publishing time as well: in the manga, Raye dies on December 27th, 2003 while in the anime, the date is December 27th, 2006.

I W A M A T S U

Some may not be familiar with this name, but in Death Note live action movies this character was actually called "Raye Iwamatsu". This was probably because his actor was Japanese and they tried to avoid nationality issues by making his character completely Japanese. (Interestingly though, they seem to have been a tad scared of the fans' reaction as they tried to hide this by calling him only "Raye" in all the trailers even though all the other characters had their whole names used.)

T H E   S I T E

I'm quite bad at naming my fanlistings, so when this listing first came to be it was called "Final Effort" in reference to Raye's last moment at the train station when he turned around with all the strength he had left to see Kira's face. However, when changing the layout in November 2008 I decided to change the name as well as I really didn't like the previous one, and took one of the first non-retarded names that came to my mind: "Tragedy in the making". It does describe the situation around Raye and his fiancée quite well, after all.

Also, you may have noticed that I call him "Raye Penber" even though people sometimes refer to him as "Ray Penbar"; the latter might be more accurate (even his signature clearly says that), but as Viz translated his name this way I decided to stick with it.