we dig our own graves

MIKAMI!!!! I LOVE MIKAMI MY BELOVED MEOW MEOW i used to talk more about him but i think i just ran out of observations fjkdjdkgkdjf you can probably find some if you look through the #teru mikami tag on my blog and filter by original. also this is my favorite mikami meta ever and super thorough i highly recommend

anyway i think it's really funny how the black-and-white view of humanity that people like to assign light is and has always been mikami's thing

^my man

but my favorite thing about mikami and my favorite lens to view him through is that he is so desperate to be helpful. he grows up saving his fellow classmates from bullies and he glows when they thank him. (for comparison: light hates bullies but does not even consider intervening when he sees one of his classmates getting money extorted from him.) mikami does not care how beaten up he gets as long as there are people around who go thank you so much teru you're the best. he lives off affirmation.

the problem is that as he grows up, people start being too afraid to stand with him, so he doesn't even get praised by the victims he saves anymore. he loses that source of affirmation. in a last ditch attempt he confides in his mom but his mom tells him to stop helping (she's trying to save him of course but he takes this as a serious blow to his ideology). no one in the world is giving him a good star for behavior at this point.

and mikami has based his entire identity on being helpful. so his survival mechanism is making a guy up in his head who needs him and calling him god, ages and ages before kira ever shows up. there is a god out there on his side, deleting evil people, and mikami has to help. there's something he can do. there's someone (an abstract concept) who will be happy with mikami if mikami just proves himself useful!

it's like, really sad honestly

but it's also what saves him for a long while, because god believes in everything mikami believes in. because mikami made up god by himself. he doesn't need external validation anymore, he's got this motor in his head that he has full control over, whether he acknowledges that control or not.

so when light finally contacts him it's awesome because mikami gets to feel like he's serving light/his-god-now-externalized but he is actually just doing whatever the fuck he wants! kira wants me to continue killing? okay let me use all of my own criteria instead of his and also kill annoying newscasters and also pick a new spokesperson and also kill that spokesperson without being asked and also

(mikami's naturally a foil to light but this always reminds me so deeply of misa, the other person who is determined to help light but Her Own Way, regardless of whether light actually wants it)

anyway. mikami does take light's alarmed course corrections with remarkable grace because helping his self made god is more important than actually helping the public via his own sense of justice at this point. if god disagrees for once then mikami will listen. god's word is absolute. (haha remember when he was actually helping other people concretely in real life? what naive schoolboy times)