Like all of the other books so far in the series, I thought the mind games between L and Light were awesome! I love seeing the ways that they outsmart each other.

However I felt weird about the way that Misa was handled. The book can’t decide whether she’s ditsy or smart, and there were some weird fanservice-y moments where it showed her underwear. Even the way she was tied up was really uncomfortable and weird. Maybe this is a common trope? I’ve heard of manga fanservice but I haven’t read manga before lol. 

While I thought Misa’s character could have been written better, I did like Light’s reaction to her. He values his goal and aspiration of a perfect peaceful world through Kira above everything, so it makes sense that he would want to use her as a means to his end. Rem and Gelus’s protectiveness of Misa was also cool, and shows how not every shinigami is like Ryuk. I’m hoping that there will be more information that the readers get to learn about shinigami.

Still loving the series, but this one gets a lower rating mostly because of the misogynistic characterization of Misa. I knew it was coming because this is a re read, but I’d forgotten how bad it was. They just made her this dumb ditsy girl whose only purpose is to be simultaneously infantilized and sexualized, add conflict for Light in the story, and be a tool for him to use to his advantage 😒.

Besides that though, I continue to be impressed by the amount of thought that went into this, and I love the art. Misa’s fashion sense is top tier. This is my favorite cover so far.

Excuse me while I sob over L saying he considers Light a friend. I forgot about that part 😖😭

Also, this makes my 70th book of the year! Just barely finished on Dec 31st 😅

CW: sexual harassment, discussion of assault/Spoilerkidnapping, uuuhhh idk how to tag some of this but it could be kind of triggery imo.
Actual rating: 3.5 stars

So... hear me out.
I love Misa. I love this girl. It's taken me a long time to get to this point and it took a lot of anime-watching, manga rereading, and terrible adaptations to get me to this point. Much of it due to my own subtext reading, I see a lot of interesting character traits in her, which are highly underutilized by Ohba and Obata. She's determined, she's loyal, she's motivated, she's a successful career woman at 21... I could go on. She's just struggling with some mental illness and more than one severe trauma. It's understandable that she would go a little wild for a time.
Honestly, the illustrations do her dirty. Especially as I've been reading so much Fullmetal Alchemist recently (written and illustrated by a woman), I can clearly see the difference in visuals. Misa is oversexualized in multiple instances and generally portrayed as less. But the cure for that definitely isn't whatever the Netflix adaptation did, 'cause they messed up real bad. I think it's fine for her to not be as smart as L and Light - and honestly, it's not like she's dumb, because she isn't - because then this would be kind of boring, to be perfectly honest. I just think Ohba overlooked many of the positive traits he gave to his own character.
This volume also features Matsuda being adorable and Aizawa proving that he is a good and smart detective.

Favorite panel: page 138/9 full page spread. There's also a really funny two panel sight gag with L and Ryuk on page 32.