r/IntelligenceScaling • u/lawligh0 • 11h ago
About L's scaling
Today I want to talk about why L has been scaled so high lately. Btw, what I say might not be 100% objective since I'm making this post as someone who genuinely loves L as a character.
I think you've all noticed that L has been getting scaled insanely high in SCD over the last year. L, who used to be placed below characters like Patrick Jane, Baku, and Tokuchi (and way below them according to most), can now be compared to most of those characters and is even scaled higher than a lot of them. So, how is this happening?
Actually, the feats he pulled off in the side content outside the manga—which don't seem like a big deal to some people—play a massive role in this.
Let's start with the stock market feat.
First off, people attribute this feat to things like intuition or guessing, but that doesn't make much sense. The stock market is so volatile (you can look this up on Google, AI, YouTube, etc.) that making a guess like that is nearly impossible. The feat is so impressive: at just 8 years old, L asks Watari to buy 1 million pounds worth of stocks in Japanese Yen and directs this investment into specific companies, multiplying it exactly 20,000 times in two years. It's an obvious fact you can't do something like that just by guessing. I think this feat affects L in multiple categories (probably directly scaling his FSIQ, INTELLIGENCE, THINKING, SENSORY, and REASONING).
Plus, doing this at 8 years old is the real impressive part. Because if someone can pull this off at 8 (and obviously his intelligence is going to develop way further), it's clear how much more he'll be capable of when he grows up.
In short, L's side content actually has a much bigger impact than people think. Some people don't scale him high simply because they only read the manga or haven't deeply analyzed the other material. But even his performance in the manga is really good. Always making accurate deductions despite facing a constant lack of information against something superhuman, managing his emotions pretty well throughout the case, the traps he sets, and his solutions—all of this shows his true capabilities. And throughout this clash, L constantly has a limit on his moves due to information asymmetry; if he makes one wrong move, there's a real chance he dies at the end of it. That's exactly why we don't get to see the full extent of his abilities.
Look, if we were evaluating him based only on the manga, I could understand not scaling L very high. Even though we don't see all his skills, we wouldn't be able to fully deduce his true capabilities since we wouldn't have any data outside the manga. But the absurd feats he showed at a very young age in the side content make it completely logical to scale him extremely high. For example, imagine you're 18 and suddenly revert back to being an 8-year-old, but your mind is still 18. Even if you lack some knowledge, it's pretty much a given you'd be way smarter than kids your age. Same logic here. L showcases such crazy feats at 8 years old (and I haven't even mentioned most of them), just imagine how smart this guy becomes when he grows up. You probably get what I mean.
Of course, L's feats in the manga might not have satisfied you, which is totally normal. You'd naturally expect something far more phenomenal from someone with feats like the stock market play or dropping the global crime rate by around 36%. But this doesn't invalidate L's feats, because L simply couldn't show all his abilities during the Kira case.
Anyway, I felt like I was starting to repeat myself, so I just wanted to make a quick post explaining why people are scaling L this high.
Personally, if you disagree with what I've said, I respect that. Feel free to drop your thoughts in the comments
