(1/2) Ok so I'm new to the death note fandom and I recently finished the anime. Before I watched the second arc I saw posts expressing hate towards Takada or just her being a character that's easy to dislike. I expected myself to feel the same way but I just.....felt NO hate for her whatsoever???? If anything I actually really liked her and thought that she was WAY more interesting than Misa (and not as annoying).
(2/2) Hell, I even thought she was more deserving of Light’s affections (say in an au where light wasn’t a sexist piece of shit and didn’t use and manipulate women for his own cruel intentions). She was definitely a character who deserved better imo and I wish she had stayed alive in the end. I thought I had more to say on the matter but I can’t seem to remember!
Yeah I really liked Kiyomi on my revisit of the series too, especially in the manga! I didn’t notice her all that much in the anime tbh, but I find she’s very smart and interesting in the manga. I really like her character design, and her vanity/pride/seriousness is a fun contrast to Misa and a good parallel with Light; and she’s also got quite a bit of sass to her as well, such as when she invites Misa over to have a really passive-aggressive dinner together whilst secretly also dating Light, lol. Honestly, I think fandoms are sometimes just way harder on the female characters than the male characters in general; particularly the female characters like Misa who are obviously morally flawed, or who might come off somewhat unapproachable like Kiyomi. It seems like fans can be less forgiving toward them, and more willing to write them off as irritating instead of endearing for being obviously bad people. Granted, it’s WAY better now than it was back in the late 2000s when I was in the Death Note fandom for the first time; the amount of Misa-bashing in particular back then was incredible! Misa’s not my favourite character by any means, but I can definitely appreciate that she’s a complex and interesting one who does a lot of important stuff in the story, and she’s certainly no worse a person than many of the male characters that I really like in the series, too. And very much the same with Kiyomi! I wish we’d seen a lot more of her, and that her intelligence had actually been rewarded by the plot in some way.