Do you have any moonriver thoughts? Or L/Near? Not necessarily romantic, also just them as platonic.
for lawnia i shall have to refer you to my good buddy @likeaclosingdoor, they've been trying to get me into lawnia for five morbillion years and nothing quite's hooked me but i'm sure it's only a matter of time. moonriver though. moonriver i can talk about.
the reason moonriver is so appealling to me is because they just hate each other so fucking much and i think that's fun. like it's so fun. near is having a lovehatefuck affair with mello for the entirety of act 3 and light is a widow looking for L wherever he can find him and there's just a mess of identity and grief and love. and none of it is between near and light. it should be a perfect storm for hatefuck and yet the two of them have almost no chemistry. at least to me. but because i'm a sicko i think that wraps back around into being delightful, because there is something so inherently good about characters who don't have any natural chemistry.
near's contempt for light alone is incredible. when L looked at light yagami he saw something brilliant. blinding. for the first time in his life he felt like he'd met his match. and he treated light with the respect and caution that afforded him. there was obsession. there was attachment. there was light's wrist chained to his for months on end. near has no such love lost between him and light and he acts accordingly. zero respect, zero attachment. zero obsession. when near says he's going to catch kira and kill him it's not because he's hot under the collar about it. it's because it's his job.
and light looks at near with equal contempt! as a pretender for the throne? you're not L, he says, with so much seething hatred it's almost comical. of course he's not!! near tried to cede his position to mello! near claws back his birthright from light yagami's corpse and then goes ugh i didn't even fucking want this. hello!!
like. act 3 of death note. is light yagami thirdwheeling his own story. okay. hear me out. because dn, right, is a story about two men who more-or-less are obsessed with each other in a way that is both toxically romantic and absurdly psychosexual. that's mello and near. that's not light and near. it's not even light and mello. light outlived the end of his story.
so the dynamic of nearlight, i think, is this. deconstruction. of the enemies-and-lovers dynamic established in the first part of the anime. it's jarring. it's devoid of attraction or chemistry. everything between them is hatred and fear. it's not even proxyfuck because light is painfully aware that near is not L and because light doesn't want him to be L. and near himself thinks this whole thing is stupid and awful. it's why he cheats. it's why he wins. and that dynamic is paradoxically so fucking good. because all they have is hatred and fear.
personally i love how this gets further deconstructed with postcanon near and matsuda because if you view matsu's dislike of near through the lens of kicked dog matsuda who always wanted light's attention-love-acknowledgement you can almost replicate meronia. almost. hotshot policeman with a killer shooting arm etc etc etc. it's a whole thing. near's life is a fucking tragedy because mello was always supposed to be the end of his story (to me) and mello dies alone in the driver's seat of a truck. and near survives. you know? it's like. him and light both outlive the end of their story. and they fucking despise each other for it.
