Death Note is full of character foils. It’s an essentially nihilistic story with characters that use big words like Justice with a capital J. It’s about two kids who start their own cults and become completely obsessed with one another. It’s about death gone viral with no afterlife.
In this astrological analysis, we’ll be comparing three character foil sets with one another. I used the manga verse for birthdays and applied birthplaces when available, guessing when they weren’t. Hopefully nothing is too off.
L and Light Yagami/Kira
Born on Halloween with Moon in Pisces, L is a cult figure. He has no air planets in his chart, save for Pluto, so communications take a particular intensity. L is merticulous and complex, thanks for his Scorpio-ness, and doesn’t reveal himself to the world, hiding behind a personal brand. Mars in Leo gives L a taste of the theatric and the absurdly funny.
Then, he has this Moon in Pisces. Pisces Moon is a drugged out, deceptive, and secretly so. It has a way of believing in contradictory things simitaneously. When L tells the police that justice will prevail, we get a sense that he’s telling an inside joke with himself but no one around him notices, that he’s used to telling inside jokes with himself that no one else notices. Youremyqueen says in Nights, “L doesn't seem poetic, reeks of computers and technology and mechanized logic, but he is,” and later:
“L is poetic in the same ways that he is unreasonable: quietly. To look at him, you'd think he was the antithesis of subtlety, but Light's spent enough time with him to know that he's not, that there are layers and layers to everything he says. And so when he calls Light, 'ruthlessly manipulative,' it's, of course, not even close to all that he's doing.”
We all know that L is the one who is ruthlessly manipulative but, throughout the anime, it’s Kira who is presented as such.
Light, with a Libra Moon, is the personification of charm. He’s the perfect, enviable boy genius, who gets into a good school and gets the pretty girl.
Lacking personal earth placements, Light is all abstraction and no materialism. He doesn’t care about money or worldly possessions. He doesn’t care about beauty. He cares about souls and he doesn’t even believe they exist. What drives Light’s Libra Moon is an high ideal of ultimate social cooperation. Of course he would tell his followers that they should keep their morality to themselves, even if they don’t believe in him. In Light’s utopia, there’s room for everyone to be two faced. He just wants people to show their good side to the world. While L seems nihilist about justice, Light is weighing everyone’s heart with a scale.
Light, as a Pisces Sun, is more than just a god complex. He’s a walking contradiction. He’s picture perfect but hates appearances. He’s college educated but doesn’t care about status. He has a good job but he doesn’t care about money.
A Pisces Game of Manipulation
When two people have Sun and Moon in the same sign, there is a connection. The first time L sees Light, which is through the secret cameras he sets up in his house, he’s immediately interested. He visibly perks up when Light comes home.
The way L and Light talk to one another is full of gaps, misdirection, and manipulation and yet they’re always on the same page. Let’s analyze the ways they deceive each other.
Light hides behind his impeccable social facade, which he knows that L doesn’t have. Ultimately, L is a suspicious guy who isn’t able to inspire trust. Light, on the other hand, is able to fit into a social role. His defensive tactic is always vacuousness. “Look there’s nothing here,” it’s like he’s trying to say about himself, “behind my social veneer.”
L also uses vacuousness but his Scorpio edge makes this difficult since it’s so obvious that there is, in fact, something there. Most of the time, the L brand is a propaganda machine. In person, L spends most of his time infuriating Light by playing dumb when everyone in the room knows that he isn’t dumb. This makes L impossible to respond to. Even if he’s read, you can only tell that he’s hiding something but not the actual thing that he’s hiding. L makes it so obvious that his whole personality is an act that you can’t tell what his actual personality is. He’s valid, then deadpan, then disturbing, then smooth. When L executes unexpected things, the truly unexpected thing about them is the timing. Light can exhaust himself expecting L to do anything at all times, but L always seems to catch him off guard when he does decide to act.
In short, Light disguises his real work by maintaining a perfect social position. L disguises his intentions by being impossible to psychologically analyze and by using the elements of surprise. This is because L manipulates using social appearances and Light manipulates using psychological investigation.
What ultimately got L was that Light decided to stop playing their game. He decided that what L thought of him was less important than what society thought of him. Even if L never believed Light’s social mask, everyone else did. Light’s one big advantage was that he could go outside, that he’s acceptable socially, and that he could imagine a world without L. Light always relied on social pressure to get what he wanted not from L, but despite of L. Once L was dead, Light didn’t have anything to worry about.
On the other side, L knew that he was going to die. He’d always relied on psychologically understanding his enemies. When L realizes that Kira has a way to kill him, he doesn’t do anything. This wasn’t because L had given up. It was because, from his psychological assessment of Light, he realized Light didn’t really want to kill him. During Light’s first chance of killing L, remember that he hesitates and that’s what gets him into so much trouble.
Therefore, L does nothing. He himself doesn’t believe in Light’s ideals of justice and he truly believes that they’re playing a game of wits now more than anything else. What L misjudges is how Light cares more about an abstract and immature idea of justice than winning the game that they were playing.
The game they were playing was a game of two. It has nothing to do with justice and nothing to do with society. L has been emotionally manipulating Light this whole time to make him feel like his ultimate motive should not be to kill L but to convince L of his validity. That’s why Light hesitated the first time. He felt there was something incomplete and unsatifying about only killing L. That’s why L gets so close to Light and pretends to be his friend. He understands that Light has a deeply ingrained survival skill of seeking the approval of other people and frames himself as a person whose approval Light should seek. You can imagine L thinking as he died that Kira shouldn’t have done this, that they had something real going on here. It’s impossible, of course, to tell whether L throught they had something real but he definitely thought that Light thought they did. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out that way. Though Light wanted to prove himself to L, his Pisces Sun is all too ready to sacrifice his personal needs over a greater cause.
Amane Misa and Kiyomi Takada
We get the sense that Takada came from a well off family and that she’s used to getting her way. We know that Misa is an orphan who is used to hustling for everything she has. While Takada is the image of good wife and mother, Misa is a disobedient image of perpetual and all consuming girlhood.
Misa is a Capricorn who pretends to be a Sagittarius. At first glance, she’s too optimistic to be real and a wild child. The more we get to know her, we realize that she’s an absorber of pain and probably one of the smartest characters in Death Note.
Misa literally does all the hard work of building Light’s cult of personality and utopia. She gives up half of her life span twice, does most of the tedious work of writing down names, and is the one to catch Higuchi in the Yotsuba arc. She does all this while building a personal empire, becoming a household name, and making tons of money.
Think about it. She never makes a mistake over years and years of killing and she has a killer career. Misa is completely ruled by Saturn, with a Moon in Aquarius to complement her Capricorn Sun. She pretends to be carefree because it’s smarter for her to, as a woman. In reality, she’s someone who feels like she has to earn love and she’s willing to do anything to get it.
Takada, on the other hand, is a Sun in Cancer with an exalted Taurus Moon. Takada lives in the land of luxurious things where other people take care of her. Things are given to her without her needing to ask. The reason she likes Light is because he’s the only one who wasn’t easily available for her to have.
It was frustrating to see Light put every single burden he had on Misa and expect her to take it without a thank you but, then, in the same breath, baby Takada with nice words and quality time. He did this because Light knew Takada expected it and that he couldn’t get her to work with him without emotionally appealing to her first.
Eventually, Light kills Takada. Misa was lucky to escape the same fate. However, this was more because Light knew that Misa was infinitely more useful. It was also because Misa always took charge over situations instead of letting Light decide everything and made herself vastly inconvenient to kill. As a woman who began with no social power, Misa is a far better strategist than any of the characters. Maybe L was always trying to catch her before Light not because he saw her as the weak link but because he knew her retaliation would be hard to combat. Light underestimated Misa and you get the sense that she could have killed him at any time, if she felt like it. It was lucky for him that she never wanted to.
Touta Matsuda and Teru Mikami
Besides both these characters having the same initials, they also were both born on the full moon in sister signs. Mikami was born on the Sagittarius full moon, with Sun in Gemini and Moon in Sagittarius. Matsuda was born on the Gemini full moon, with Sun in Sagittarius and Moon in Gemini.
Sagittarius is the fanatic or fan. It’s the self righteous angel who follows god blindly. Gemini is the cynic or devil’s advocate. It’s the voice on doubt on your shoulder that makes it impossible to believe. Both Mikami and Matsuda play both these roles throughout the series.
When Kira was still niche and the mainstream saw him as a criminal, Matsuda was the one who kept bringing up inconvenient facts, like of Kira bringing down the crime rate. He even says later that he would probably be a Kira supporter if he weren’t on the police force. As a Sagittarius, Matsuda finds fandom easy. He thinks that he would get wrapped up in Kira’s personality cult if he weren’t already wrapped up in Light’s, not realizing that it is in reality the same thing.
While Matsuda’s identity may be that of easy fan, his Moon in Gemini makes him slightly critical of everything and anything. He’s critical of the police, and of Kira, and of Near. In the end, Matsuda is the only one who realizes that Near probably cheated. Matsuda’s Gemini Moon makes him a problematic person even if his personality is easily welcomed into any social group.
Mikami is the complete opposite. He’s a social outcast who doesn’t fit in anywhere. In school, he was the one who disagreed with everyone else’s sense of righteousness. He was the devil’s advocate all the way back in elementary school.
Mikami’s Sagittarius Moon makes him a true fanatic who seems like a cynic. Part of why Light chooses Mikami is because he’s been a Kira fanatic since the beginning, when it wasn’t popular. Once Mikami was in, he was in all the way. At the end, Mikami is truly disappointed while Matsuda goes on with his life, doubting Near just as much as he doubted Kira.
Think of Mikami as that guy who likes an under appreciated band and talks about how he liked them when they were indie to everyone who would listen all day. He exists in the social margins but is a true believer. Matsuda is the pop idol lover who dishes out juicy gossip that hurts his idol’s careers. Matsuda appears as a more sympathetic fan, but he’s engaged in interest only. He has no loyalty. His version of fandom is about exchanging information until it falls apart and he easily moves onto the next thing.
In Conclusion
So, there you have it. Here’s to astrologically analying three sets of Death Note character foils. Death Note is so fun to watch because the games of manipulation L and Light play are completely without morals. Then, the side characters bring other themes into the story but nothing in the plot ever takes a moral stance. There’s nothing that feels like a final word about Misa and Takada’s tragic fates. The contrast between Mikami and Matsuda never takes a definitive stance on what ideology and belief mean.
There are, of course, more in the universe to talk about. I didn’t get into the Wammy kids and Beyond Birthday here but will definitely do so another day.
