If anyone wants a peek inside my twisted mind one of my first thoughts after finishing death note was “wow. light’s plans sure started to fail miserably after he stopped relying on misa and switched primary minionship to takada and mikami.” and after rotating this thought for several months I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s because yagamane are soulmates.
okay not in the. romantic sense. even in the platonic sense. lawlight are soulmates because L can see to the heart of Light’s petty humanity and because their minds work exactly the same. yagamane are soulmates because they are both so inherently, diabolically selfish. i think in both dynamics, there’s this core understanding of light as a person that gets reflected and revealed (with L and Misa acting as mirrors). L looks at light Yagami and wants him to be better than he is. Misa looks at light and thinks that even if he’ll never be better, what he is right now is good enough for her.
like. do you get what i mean. one of these is transformative. the other one is content in stagnation. and this is not to make an argument as to which one is “better” but to point out the narrative choice that light spends five years of his life with misa amane, able to kill her all the while, but kills L as soon as he can. misa makes light uncomfortable because she’s this honest version of all his darkest impulses; his selfishness, his possessiveness, his desire for everything to go his way and his willingness to hurt others for it. she doesn’t have any high flying ideals to justify herself with and that bothers him, it does, but he never seems to articulate exactly why other than “selfish murder bad.”
and to return to the original point, which is that relying on kiyomi and mikami was generally quite bad for Light’s ability to wiggle out of Situations (though not the entire reason he lost), misa’s clear eyed selfishness is also what makes her his strongest piece on the board. she knows what she wants, she has no illusions about some higher purpose, and she’ll stop at nothing to get there even though she’s tangentially aware that light doesn’t really love her the way she wishes he does. mikami and takada both have to justify themselves and it means light had to twist around in knots to make them do what he wants them to do, even if they’re, ostensibly, more ideologically aligned with him than misa.
also sometimes i think about mikami’s rejection of light when he sees him pathetic and wounded and stark raving mad on the floor of the warehouse. “you’re not god!” he cries. which is correct because light is a guy in his mid twenties with a magic notebook.
but i think, had it been misa, she wouldn’t have rejected him. she doesn’t ever reject him, even at his most fractious and deranged. i think she would have seen him bleeding out and she would have fretted and tried to call an ambulance and i think she would have hauled his sorry corpse out of there, barehanded and mascara streaking down her face.
she’s the last person light calls out to as he dies, begging for someone to save him. I think—out of the people light calls for—she would have been the only person who would have tried.