Izaya is not evil.

He’s not a good person, no, but he’s not evil.

At least in my opinion, there are certain things that a person must be willing and able to do in order to count as truly evil. Murder (not to be confused with killing in self-defense or in defense of a loved one or innocent being), rape, torture, etc. This is not to say that everybody has done one of these things is automatically evil – some of the worst crimes against humanity have been done by people who were just “following orders”, which is still absolutely awful, but cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug and I feel like a truly evil person wouldn’t need nor care about justifying their atrocities. I guess to me, it’s like this: all evil people are bad people, but not all bad people are evil people. It’s about reasons – most evil people do evil things because they want to and enjoy it, while most non-evil people do evil things because they have convinced themselves that those things are necessary for the greater good. 

That is why I say that Izaya is not evil. 

Shiki of Awakusu-Kai himself said that he believes Izaya is too much of a coward to ever actually kill anybody, I FIRMLY believe that Izaya would never, COULD never rape a person (if you believe otherwise, that’s your prerogative, but I like my Izaya with hard-limits and a fear of anything that might lead to Feelings, and that includes sex), and while I think that he himself might believe he has the guts to torture a person, I don’t think he’d actually be able to go through with it. 

Anyway, thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.