Character · Death Note
Misa Amane
A famous model gives away half her remaining life for a pair of eyes, then gives the rest away for free.
In Otakana the clue reads: Model with a second notebook and shinigami eyes
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Death Note
- Letters
- 4 · Normal
Misa Amane found a second notebook and made a deal for the shinigami eyes, which show her the name and the remaining lifespan of anyone she looks at. The price is half of whatever life she had left. She pays it twice. For a while she is the most dangerous person in the story, because she can identify a stranger on the street in a second.
Then she meets Light, decides he is the reason she is alive, and hands him everything: the notebook, the eyes, her own judgement. Her devotion runs one direction only. He keeps her because she is useful and says so when she cannot hear. Around all this she is genuinely funny, dressed in black lace, cheerful in an interrogation, and the series never makes her stupid, only committed.
Her shinigami Rem is the one who actually loves her, which is a small awful joke inside a story about ownership. Obata drew her in gothic lolita at the point when the style was at its height in Harajuku, and the look followed the character into cosplay for the next twenty years.
Spelling MISA
MISA is four letters and the game wants the given name rather than AMANE. The S is an S and not a Z, which is the swap English speakers make, since a Japanese S between vowels can drift towards Z on the ear. Two vowels alternating with two consonants, no doubled letters, nothing hiding. One of the cleanest rows in the game.