#exmicha dn

[exmicha]

happy pride month i guess

Chapter 89 "Kindred Spirits"

[exmicha]

mikami autism spectrum disorder sooooo neat to me. mr. strong sense of justice. like obviously a lot of death note characters have a very strong clearly defined sense of justice, but mikami's is so strong in the way people mean when they're specifically talking about the autistic trait ... the black and white right/wrong thinking ... the obsession with goodness and fairness and contribution ... the clear split of " good " people and " bad " people that results in a very simplistic way of viewing the world's problems ...

i do think having light also be autistic adds such a fascinating dimension to their contrasts. light who is able to pretty much fully mask and in the ways it is still evident he is praised and celebrated. compared to mikami who is autistic in a way that society tolerates but does not approve of. his perceived shortcomings ridiculed and his great efforts and positive traits only minimally recognized. he has scraped himself up into a respectable position in adulthood, but he had to fight tooth and nail to get there, and despite his success he still lives an isolated and singular lifestyle.

so interesting, then, that their worldviews turn out so very similar, yet different. mikami whose black/white thinking was encouraged and strengthened by the injustice he experienced in his youth and further compounded by his experiences at this one thing where his oddities were tolerated and even praised. compared with light who is praised and celebrated, yet is deeply isolated from his peers, a friend of all and a friend of none. his worldview shaped from that mostly opposite experience. that they are uniquely positioned to understand each other like few others would ever be able to, and yet still in all likelihood never would, in many ways due to their similarities.

they are fundamentally coming at things from different angles. they may find the same solution, but the path to get there is entirely different. the man who hikes the treacherous path to the top views the mountain far differently than the man on the gondola and so on. they are wired so similarly and yet are irrevocably not the same. and i think even if they ever really truly properly met each other, they would find no solace in the other.

[exmicha]

i do still think matt read homestuck for the short few months he and it coexisted.

[exmicha]

can see it so clearly in my mind. mattmello both having ocd. CW: them coping terribly w/ ocd, ocd-related disordered eating

mello primarily dealing with morality-related obsessions, but having intermittent bouts of severe contamination obsessions that he never recognizes and never handles well. he's up all hours of the night trying to fend off whatever is haunting him, trying to repent, trying to excuse himself, so on, so forth.

matt's presents typically as very severe paranoia. he runs in cycles between being far too depressed to scrounge up the energy to be anxious, and checking locks obsessively and unplugging the entire house for fear of an electrical fire. mello often comes home to a bare fridge and days at a time where matt won't eat or drink for fear of spoilage or tampering. it's rapidly changing and impossible to predict.

and they play off each other so badly. matt's a slob, which makes mello's contamination-related anxieties pick up badly to the point he's spending a half hour washing his hands and eating standing up in the kitchen with gloves on. it is not entirely uncommon for him to get to the point where he's seeing infestations where there aren't any. mello keeps strange hours, keeps bad company, and generally praises matt for his paranoia, making him feel validated in it, and in turn making it worse. if mello thinks it's a good idea to check the locks every hour on the hour sleep be damned, then matt's probably right to. as he sleeps less his paranoia gets worse and his compulsions get more nonsensical, tied to superstition and folktales.

matt's also liable to crack jokes and throw barbs that set off mello's moral obsessions. sometimes it's just thoughtless banter and sometimes it's fully intentional. it can leave mello locked away praying until his knees are bruised. they're both far more aware of the other's ocd than their own, and not necessarily against pulling each other's strings to their own advantage.

they love each other, but without outside intervention they're liable to drive themselves into a hole of paranoid obsession, slaves to compulsion and only feeding each other's fears. they didn't always make each other worse like this, but as adults they're so tied up in each other they lose sight of other people, other ways of life that don't beat on the drum of meaningless anxieties.

[exmicha]

have been making my way through lady elaine's (lumcheng) death note doujinshi collection over on live journal recently and it's been a lot of fun. i even recognize a few of them from when i was in high school !

if you haven't already, i wholeheartedly recommend sorting through this page to see what you'd be interested in. there are 40 different comics linked here (all of the ones i have checked so far have working downloads as well, even all these years later), across many different ships and ratings, many of which have even been translated to english. the art is beautiful, and a lot of the tropes, a/ns, t/ns, and so on are a perfectly preserved snapshot of what death note fandom, and anime/manga fandom at large, was like back in the 2000s.

Doujinshi-stuff

Hi, please read the rules and let me know, when a download doesn't work anymore. Thanks. • My complete collection of scanned/scanlated Death

and... a wayback machine link, because browsing lj is an exercise in dead-link driven frustration these days https://web.archive.org/web/20251112112945/https://lumcheng.livejournal.com/58690.html

[exmicha]

really important to me that matt intentionally positions himself as helpless but to follow mello to hell and back. he is simultaneously a selfless martyr giving up everything for a burning, unkind love and also a subordinated victim lacking all autonomy or responsibility over his own life. he is in control of his own actions when it makes him seem altruistic, and a slave to love when things go south. he and mello are always in this dance of victim and abuser that they both play into perfectly.

it isn't true or accurate. matt could leave. he is within his power to. he and mello are not necessarily incredible for each other (and matt is in many ways just as much a poison on mello's soul), but mello is lording nothing over him, there is no guilt, no strength, no power, tying matt to mello. just love (and an abstract directionlessness that sinks like a hunger in his chest, clawing him apart from the inside and promising to be filled by the sweet burn of self destruction). love to which he is helpless. love to which he is blameless in the face of. love under the glow of which he has meaning.

[exmicha]

incredibly funny side-by-side. what a manga.

[exmicha]

posting death note drabbles until i have an actual story with plot to show for myself.

Mello's pretty sure Matt would stick his head out the window like a dog or a child if he wasn't the one driving. As it is, he drives with the window rolled down and the A/C blasting, car freezing, and music going loud enough to blow out their eardrums. If you took a snapshot of the moment, Matt would look as calm as anything, like he could be going 30 MPH down a scenic path, cigarette held out the window and a little smile playing on his mouth. In reality, a chronic speeder, Matt can't seem to go any slower than twenty-five-o, but regularly pushes one-ten on highways. First time Mello ever got in a car with him, he was half-convinced he was going to die. Matt drives like a crazy goddamn bastard, weaving between transports and motorcyclists like he wants to kill someone, singing along to the radio and smoking all the while. The first time Mello ever rode shotgun to Matt, Matt turned to Mello and asked, "You okay? You look a little clammy, man." and the first time Mello ever drove Matt anywhere, Matt put his hand on Mello's knee and pushed until they were speeding well-over. Matt has to have a special talent for evading police notice though. In all the time they've been back together, they've never once driven legally, yet Matt's only been pulled over twice. The first time he managed to spin a story about a pregnant girlfriend no one in their right mind would believe (even without Mello in the passenger seat, lips pink and puffy, throat covered in marks), and got off with a warning. The second he spun around mid-pursuit, and drove back onto the wrong side of the road, barely missing startled motorists until they lost the police and ditched the car. Mello almost strangled him the second his boots hit solid ground.