mello's inconcistencies in writing still make me sad (because he's been my favourite character since i was 9yo i've been stuck with this dude rip). i /want/ to be able to say he wasn't totaly evil (as stated in dn13) but..."apologising" to matt/souichirou is p much all the evidence of his "mellow" side. having said that, how evil do you think mello was? and was it always in his nature, or did it grow over time? could he have turned out differently if he had worked with near from the start?
I don’t think Mello was evil, exactly. For me, when I think of someone who is evil, I imagine a person who hurts others for their own enjoyment primarily. That’s not Mello, Mello isn’t sadistic. He doesn’t hurt people for the sake of causing hurt and he doesn’t exactly relish in the pain of others.
He’s just... a bad person. Maybe it’s weird of me to make that a separate category from ‘evil’? Who knows! But let’s roll with it!
Mello will step over dead bodies for his goals. He is selfish and engages in all kinds of immoral and damaging acts to get to where he wants to be. He’s involved with drug dealing, he kills and kidnaps innocents, he blackmails the United States President... I’m hard-pressed to call this morally ambiguous, he’s just straight up not a good dude. Morally, he SUCKS.
But he’s not incapable of caring about people or feeling for them. He reasonably liked Matt and through their interactions during the kidnapping, he came to think of Soichiro as a decent dude - even if he ultimately caused his death, he didn’t feel good about it because he had some sympathy for the guy.Â
And even Near... in the end, Mello acts to save Near’s life. I don’t believe he intended to sacrifice himself in the process, but he does take measures to make sure Near doesn’t get killed by Kira before either of them can actually catch Kira.Â
So under calmer circumstances, I think Mello could build healthy relationships to people - he’s not inherently so bad that it’d be impossible.
As for how he got to be this way...?
I don’t believe in ‘inborn evil’ as an idea at all - Mello has come to be so callous because of the way he was socialized. The person he idolized and who’s job he wanted to become was a self-confessed law-breaker and the successor program at Wammy’s House was likely a high intensity environment. That alone isn’t so bad, but he ran away when he was 15 - a lot of his formative teenage years were spent getting his cred in the mafia and being involved with organized crime. It’s incredibly desensitizing to be confronted with massive violence day after day... I really do assume his experiences during the timeskip were a major contributor to the way he sees human life as largely disposable in the second arc. It’s a kind of mental distance you have to have for a job that involves this much death that you contribute to.
