L and Light: Two Sides of the Same Coin -- Part 1
L and Light are basically the same person, but they ended up in completely different environments that shaped their differing core beliefs.
L is a very odd, quirky person who doesn't follow societal norms. He sits hunched over in chairs, he isn't known to blink very often, and he is very antisocial. Most of the relationships he forms throughout the anime and musical are professional ventures rather than actual emotional bonding, with the exception of Light himself after the tennis match. This is best presented to us through Light's POV, who through the course of the show never knows L's full name, where he came from, or even his backstory. On a character level, Light is the closest person to L, and even he doesn't know all that much about L. On a meta level, us viewers only know about his current personality, that he lives a somewhat lavish lifestyle, and he has a high IQ, which is startling considering that L is around the same age as Light. Every other kid in this show gets more development than him, but in our point of view, L just dropped from the sky as soon as the Kira case proved itself worthy of his attention.
In contrast, we know pretty much everything we need to know about Light. We know that he is a very intelligent person, he is a high achieving student, and his father is in a high ranking position as the chief of the police force. He is smart, cunning, and driven by a strong sense of justice (warranted in the musical to the failing criminal justice system) to conduct whatever means necessary to make his "new world", which he asserts he will be the god of. Light himself is very socially adept, seems to come from a middle income family, and he is very charismatic by the way he easily manipulates those around him, like Misa.
Therefore, the expectation due to their backgrounds is that L, who doesn't seem to have parents or a stable home to live in, should be the one who is concerned about justice. He should be the one working to kill criminals for their evil actions. He presumably had to claw his way up at a very young age to be the de facto crime solver of the Japanese police, yet we don't see much rage in him. Instead, we see the strong sense of justice that should have been instilled in Light in L. Light is the one who got the anger, the rage, and the disillusionment in society's law institutions and is the one who worked to use violent means to end oppression, which ended up corrupting him.
Even through all of this however, we see so many similarities between the two. Both are intelligent nerds who are the best at what they choose as their passions. Both are driven by their own definitions of what justice and the ideal world look like; those definitions and framings differ between the two, but the core belief is the same: society is corrupt, so it is our duty to fix it.
They are both willing to go to the same extreme of sacrificing people so that they can build their ideal worlds, and I think this connects really well to the idea of the two extremes of a situation not being all that different from each other. Light's ideal world is a world without criminals altogether and who wants to feed his ego and be a god. L's ideal world is one where he is revered for catching the notorious Kira and restoring the legitimacy of the criminal justice system. Light and L's ideal worlds are so different in terms of scope, justice, and morals, yet they require the same immoral means to achieve and have the same egotistical reward once they get there.
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