// Death Note //

This is just an opinion.. (spoilers)... uhh rant i guess

Death Note is definitely one of my favourite anime. The utter brilliance of the premise in the first place is amazing, a notebook that kills people and having it executed in such a complex way. Light Yagami is the morally grey protagonist, who happens to be a dangerous genius as well, meets his match with another genius under the name L. Their rivalry is simply unmatched, the constant tension that was present as these two butt heads. But the, L died. And we get introduced to Near. Who, in my opinion, is the worse character of the show. They killed off a character which they built up during the series, we were so invested in their attempt to outwit the other, but that is fine. Dramatic deaths normally should make a show better. But taking Near, a practically carbon copy of L, and introducing him to be the one finally defeating Light is ridiculous.

We hold no emotional investment to him as a character nor have we seen anything to match the level of rivalry of L and Light. If they had to introduce someone else to match Light after L died, I would’ve wished it to be Mello. His personality is significantly different from L, we have clearly see he is a character of his own. Near possesses way too much for L’s traits that it’s sorely obvious of the similarities. We see that Mello inherited L’s love for sweets, fine. But then we have Near who has the same posture, personality and just physical look overall. The final arc was the worse.

Misa is definitely an underrated character who gets a bit too much hate in my opinion. People dislike her for being clingy for Light, but to be fair, he purposely manipulated her to use her. Misa is also smarter than people want to give her credit for, how she tracked down Light in the first place was pretty smart, albeit not near the level of L and Light’s plans. Having Misa survive while Light died was a perfect ending. He had used her (and others) as mere tools, abandoning them whenever he didn’t need them, this clearly bit him back in the end when he called the names of those he had abandoned.

Touta being the one who kills Light was a perfect idea. Out of everyone, he had always been the one to believe Light’s innocence the most. Naturally, the betrayal taking the biggest toll on him. I think he is a very important character, every character is either super smart or very depressed and serious. Touta, being the slight comedy relief, really just adds colour to the show. Compared to Light, Near, Mello, L and others, Touta is, for lack of better word, dumber. But this lets him be the most closest to an average human.