Misa Amane

Petite and slight, Misa cuts a striking figure with long, poker-straight blonde hair, usually gathered into pigtails bound with red ribbon, though she sometimes lets it fall loose. Her eye color drifts between tellings, leaning light brown in the manga but occasionally green, and she frequently hides it behind blue contacts. Her wardrobe runs to Gothic and punk styling, softened somewhat after the series' time skip, finished off with red or dark-purple nails and vivid red lipstick. Crosses are her jewelry of choice, swapped out for fleurs-de-lis in the animated version.

Bubbly, loud, and famous, Misa pulls crowds wherever her career takes her. She is impulsive and childlike, prone to talking about herself in the third person, and many around her dismiss her as a dimwit. That reading sells her short: she is sharp enough to bait Kyosuke Higuchi into exposing himself as the Yotsuba Kira. As a killer she is reckless to a fault, mailing her incriminating tapes without wiping fingerprints or DNA and ignoring orders to keep her distance from Light, blunders that land her in confinement. Her cheer masks deep trauma from watching her parents die, and she treats life, her own included, with alarming carelessness, halving her remaining years twice for the Shinigami Eyes and killing critics and meddlesome police without a second thought. Above all she is defined by devotion to Light, professing a love he rarely returns, refusing even a scripted on-screen kiss out of loyalty, and threatening to murder any rival who gets near him.

A year before the story opens, Misa watched a home robbery turn into the murder of her parents. The drawn-out trial began drifting toward acquittal until Kira struck the killer down, and that act of perceived justice turned her into a fervent believer. Not long after, as her modeling career was taking off, a knife-wielding obsessive cornered her and tried to kill her. Gelus, a Shinigami who had fallen for her while watching from his realm, scrawled the attacker's name to spare her and crumbled to dust for breaking the rule against extending a human life. His notebook passed to Misa through Rem, who was bound to remain at her side and, in time, came to care for her much as Gelus had. Hoping to find and thank Kira, Misa bargained with Rem for the Shinigami Eyes and used them to trace the original Kira to Light Yagami.

Her campaign as the Second Kira begins with videotapes sent to Sakura TV, prepared through a friend to keep her own prints off them, and escalates when she kills officer Hirokazu Ukita during the broadcast standoff. After spotting Light in a crowd by his missing lifespan, she forces her way into his life and offers herself as a partner, an offer he accepts purely to exploit her eyes against L. Her carelessness soon gets her seized and confined; to slip L's net she surrenders the notebook and loses every memory of it. Light later engineers her release, and she proves unexpectedly useful, unmasking the Yotsuba Kira. When she resumes killing after regaining her memories, Rem realizes that only L's death can shield her, and the Shinigami writes down L and Watari before disintegrating, once again buying Misa more years of life. She aids Light through the time-skip years, gives up the notebook a second time, and drifts apart from him. After his death, she is last seen alone atop a high ledge, an ending the author confirms was almost certainly suicide.