What's actually brilliant about Moriarty the Patriot — and something other writers could learn from — is that all the characters are smart and capable whilst still feeling like real people, each with distinct personalities and temperaments. You look at them, and you can see that their words, actions, and thoughts do match their age. They behave like adults with adult problems. They look like adults as well. When you watch them, you don’t forget that they are grown people because they don't act like adolescents. That doesn't mean some of them are not awful, of course, but it is one of those rare cases in anime/manga where characters who are more or less on the same intellectual level don't all become the same type of 'genius' with identical dialogue. You do not get the usual edgy clichés: no 'I shall read this massive physics book overnight and return with a complete plan and my physics degree,' no 'obligatory chessboard battles,' no 'I am solving advanced mathematics in 0.1 seconds and you are not.' Those troupes always feel so fake and unnatural. Maybe it's just me, but I am not going to call a character smart simply because the canon says so. An author can assign an IQ of a thousand (I don't believe in the concept of iq anyway), but that doesn't make their character look intelligent — they just make everyone around them seem so dumb. On the other hand, even if the canon never explicitly states it, I'll still recognise a character as genuinely smart if they demonstrate it through their actions. The intelligence within the Moriarty's team feels alive, and that is the clearest sign of a truly thinking mind: the ability to learn, adapt, accept, and understand, rather than merely recall shallow facts from unrelated fields. And despite certain plot holes, there aren't truly serious missteps in how their plans or intelligence are handled. At least, I didn't notice the kind of glaring errors you often see in other anime — for instance, when a character suddenly acquires an inexplicable 'super ability' simply because the author needs some way to justify how they escaped unscathed. William has weaponised his intelligence so effectively that people often overlook how smart Sebastian Moran or Mycroft Holmes actually are. No one in Moriarty the Patriot is born with all the knowledge they possess, which is why they feel so natural and well-balanced. They have all studied and worked for it, and that is precisely why William merely smiles when he is called a genius.
