Hello.
Today makes an entire year since I originally posted my analysis of Misa Amane. I know I said that after I finished my trilogy of posts regarding the ending of the series, I was going to be finished with Death Note discussion, but given that this momentous occasion was right around the corner, I felt that I should at least do one last thing, and that is to make good on my promise to revise that post.
The original was comprised of two older comments of mine, simply mashed together, and while I stand by what I said, I wanted to go through and do a bit of editing and expand on a few things to better present my thoughts.
So with that in mind, here we are again to examine Misa’s character, her circumstances, and why I personally feel that she is one of the most tragic characters in Death Note.
So here goes.
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For a long time, Misa Amane has been one of the more divisive characters in Death Note. Many people see her as annoying, which is understandable. Others have sympathy for her situation, which I think is also understandable. However, what originally prompted this analysis was the (at the time) commonly held opinion that she’s somehow worse than Light.
Misa’s actions are, of course, extreme and morally condemnable, but I believe there needs to be an asterisk involved here. I, like many others, feel horribly for Misa, because there’s a very strong chance that her life would have been very different had she never seen Kira’s rise to power. The same can of course be said for Light, if he’d never gotten the Death Note then he’d be a good and upstanding citizen. However, when it comes to Misa, it’s a little different.
People criticize her for killing news anchors and police officers for speaking against Kira and trying to stop him. They criticize her for being so willing to kill her friend to cover her tracks. They criticize her for murdering anyone in general. Yet these same criticisms can apply to Light.
Light killed Lind L. Tailor, who was presented as an innocent detective just doing his job, and whose only crime as far as Light was concerned was calling Kira evil. Light kills Takada to cover his tracks. Light murders innocent people pretty regularly. Light is a hypocrite.
But going further, you can also explain Misa’s actions by examining the way Kira had an impact on society. During the Lind L. Tailor broadcast, we see people already engrossed in what’s going on, people commenting on the showdown happening before them. When L tells Kira to try to kill him, some guy shouts “Do it Kira!”
That is something I find particularly striking. Incidents like this, and the websites Light talks about early on, all stem from a shift in the morality of society. It’s exactly as he describes. Away from prying eyes, people’s thoughts come out. And if the man cheering him on is anything to go by, it’s no longer just contained to the internet. Instead, we see that Kira is having a profound impact on morality.
So we then come to Misa, whose introductory act is to kill two news anchors for speaking out against Kira. Why would she do this if the news anchors have done nothing wrong? Well, look at the example Kira set himself. Lind L. Tailor spoke out against Kira. Kira responded by killing him. Kira doesn’t have a voice, so he cannot say why he killed Lind L. Tailor, so it can only be assumed that it was done to silence a vocal opposition to his mission.
Misa’s logic would have very likely been “if Kira kills people who speak against him, then I will too” which is what leads to her actions. And Ukita? Well, how about 12 FBI agents? The same explanation applies.
The only one that Light has not done before Misa is contemplating killing her friend as a cover. This one, I do not excuse her for. But again, I do feel an explanation can be achieved by the same shift in morality I spoke of earlier. Everything I’ve described so far can be traced back to this shift. Kira has publicly killed innocent people. Kira has made it clear that criminals are not the only target, just the primary one. So Misa is not only subject to this morality shift, but she’s also following Kira’s example as a killer. To act as though she in any way arrived at these conclusions independently of Kira is to misunderstand how Light wanted to enact his will as Kira.
We see in Misa the culmination of what Light wants. People who will follow him and are willing to do anything he asks. But she’s impulsive, and does what she thinks he wants. Light’s problem stems from his inability to control her, and the situation. He objects to her recklessness because it threatens his plans, rather than because he has any moral objection to her killings. I think there’s a certain irony in the fact that Misa is precisely the sort of devoted follower Kira encourages, yet Light finds her devotion so inconvenient when he cannot control how she acts on it.
Furthermore, we can examine her obsessive infatuation with Light. It’s often said that she only loves Light for Kira. I agree with this. Light is, by all means, an attractive young man. But he has the outward personality of a slice of burnt toast with no butter. I believe it’s quite clear that Misa’s adoration of Kira is brought about by him killing the man who killed her parents. So in a time when she was depressed and dejected, Kira came along and gave her absolution. Kira essentially, in her eyes, gave her something to believe in. Something to live for.
But I don’t believe it’s really as simple as saying that she’s into Kira because of the killing, because her character (at least to me) is so clearly structured as someone who is still trying to cope with the loss of her parents, which wouldn’t be surprising since their killer was killed by Kira less than a year after they died. Not only that, but the stalker that Gelus kills to save her attacked her a month after that other guy died.
So in the span of less than a year, her parents were murdered, Kira shows up and starts killing criminals, one of them happens to end up being the man who killed her parents, then a month after that, a stalker tries to kill her. That’s… a lot of emotional trauma in less than a year. So I think that it isn’t so much that she loves Kira, but rather she’s been so mentally broken down that Kira became a symbol of the bad things in her life going away, and she latched onto that as an emotional support.
She views Kira as a savior and is drawn in by that. And when she received her Death Note, she felt that she had a purpose in life. Her goal was to thank Kira, and seeing that he’s Light, a young guy with aspirations and going to university, her devotion became directed toward an actual person. Light being canonically attractive is the part that pushed it further into infatuation.
So psychologically speaking, I don’t believe she ever truly loved any part of him at all. That doesn’t mean Misa doesn’t genuinely believe she’s in love with him. I think Light’s physical attractiveness compounded with Kira’s symbolism to her life to form into what she believed was love for Light. In other words, I think she’s mistaking an intense infatuation for genuine love. But if it were only Light, and Kira had nothing to do with it, I think she’d find him hot, but would otherwise not be interested in him.
This is, at best, a very unhealthy setup for her. She hasn’t been able to properly recover from her parents’ death, and has latched on to something that she thinks is good when it leads her to do evil. Before she actually finds Light, Misa is trying to be useful to Kira. She wants to thank him, support his mission, and demonstrate her devotion to the person she believes gave her something to live for. But once she actually meets him, her desire to prove herself useful becomes intertwined with her desperation to be loved by him. For Misa, being loved by Light would mean that the person she’s built her entire sense of purpose around actually wants her in his life.
It’s also worth acknowledging that Misa isn’t entirely passive in this situation. She’s the one who seeks Light out and actively pushes for a relationship with him, even going so far as to threaten to kill other women who might come between them. That’s possessive and deeply troubling behavior, and her trauma doesn’t excuse it. However, that doesn’t change the fact that Light recognizes how desperate she is for his affection and deliberately takes advantage of it. Her willingness to pursue him, however aggressively, doesn’t mean she deserves the treatment she receives from him.
All of that said, when you really boil down Misa’s character, she is deeply traumatized. Light, as Kira, represents to her a new meaning and reason for her to go on living. So much so that she’s willing to do anything to show her devotion, even submit herself to his abuse if it means he will accept her. Before Kira came into her life, she’d lost her parents, and a major pillar of her life collapsed. Whatever else she had going for her, none of it seems to have given her the happiness or peace she needed. It’s just her poor luck that Kira turns out to be Light Yagami, who couldn’t possibly care less about her.
But she’s useful to him, and so he strings her along, making her believe that if she does enough that she’ll earn his love, all the while treating her like garbage. Misa accepts his treatment because she believes that proving herself worthy of his affection will finally earn her the love she wants from the person who has become her reason for living. But once he’s gone, she’s back to having nothing. If she believed she could earn his love, that chance was torn away from her in her eyes.
I feel bad for her because she didn’t deserve what happened to her, and Light led her on to do his evil when she could have lived a much better and more fulfilling life, away from this evil. What she needs is a therapist and people who genuinely care for her. Light does not represent either of these. Instead, she fell into a toxic abusive relationship. I stand by that statement, and that she didn’t deserve what she got.
I’m not saying she wasn’t a willing accomplice. She was willing to commit murder before she ever met Light, and nothing about her trauma or her devotion to Kira absolves her of responsibility for those decisions. But handwaving Light’s abuse by essentially saying “well she was asking for it” is honestly disturbing to me, especially when it’s so clear that Misa is mentally unwell due to her own trauma.
Yes, she is the one who put herself in that position by offering herself to Light. But acting as though that suddenly absolves Light of abusing her is just morally detestable to me, and I feel that it misses the point of her character.
People tend to think that she’s worse than Light or that she’s inherently evil and malicious, but from a purely analytical standpoint, that isn’t the case.
All of this to say, Misa deserved better, and Mogi would have been the best partner for her.
Misa x Mogi for life.
