The general consensus of the Death Note fanbase is that Misa Amane is an idiot that Light gets saddled with in order to throw the delicate balance between him and L back into uncertainty, thus keeping the story interesting. The general narrative purpose of Misa is definitely accurate. She’s not as smart as Light, but she has more supernatural power than he does, which means she represents both a chink in his armor and a potential opportunity for him. She’s also obsessively in love with him, which means Light’s only choice for passing on that package is to kill her, which would cast a shitton of suspicion on him, further incentivizing to accept Misa’s assistance.
But while Misa Amane is not as smart as Light Yagami, she is smarter than you. It’s predictable but still annoying how many fans arrogantly assume Light’s perspective on this, that Misa Amane is an idiot far beneath their own level of intelligence. In fairness, Misa herself projects this image. Like Light, she puts a lot of effort into her appearances, and the appearance she projects is that of a bubbly goth-pop idol, which means she intentionally comes off as kind of dumb. But her actions reveal repeatedly that she is smarter than average – she only comes off badly by comparison to Light and L.
Unlike Light, she is much less deliberate about her appearances. Misa would never spend a tennis match trying to figure out if it’s more or less suspicious if she wins or loses. For starters, tennis isn’t part of her goth idol style to begin with, but even if it were, she would blindly assume that there’s no way a tennis match could give any meaningful information to L about whether or not she’s (a) Kira.
And she is 100% correct. One of the things that sets Death Note apart from other media is how it shows intelligent characters, especially Light Yagami, going through the process of questioning assumptions about the world, including the part of the process where their initial assumptions turn out to be completely right. L can’t and doesn’t get any meaningful information about whether or not Light is Kira from that tennis match. Its only purpose in the story is to show that Light is constantly thinking about these things even when it turns out he’s in no danger at all, because an effective ploy to discover his identity won’t announce itself, so he has to be always on.
Misa, on the other hand, only stops to think about something when she sees some obvious sign of danger, and when she does that, she can come up with some really clever ideas. Sending a tape to news stations as Kira is obviously dangerous, so she stops and thinks about how to do it without getting caught and comes up with a good plan. She tricks an unnamed friend into getting her fingerprints on the Kira tapes, so not only did Misa leave no evidence herself, she’s put misleading evidence on the tapes instead. Now, if the police arrest her friend, the Kira murders will continue unabated. The tapes might be chalked up to another one of Kira’s supernatural powers, mind-controlling people to send messages. Misa also already knows this friend’s name and face, so she can tie off the loose end in an emergency – she offers to do so for Light. Considering how quickly she makes the offer, this is presumably her plan as soon as her friend gets arrested, since her friend has enough context to figure out what Misa did once she knows that her fingerprints appeared on the Kira tapes somehow.
Be real: You probably would’ve known to wear gloves while making the Kira tapes so that you wouldn’t leave any fingerprints of your own, but you absolutely would not have constructed a ploy to trick someone into planting their own fingerprints on the tapes in order to frame them.
Having done one smart thing, Misa then decides that the universe now owes her success, and makes no effort to get rid of the stamps, stationary, or pen that she used to fake the message, let alone make sure that any of the pollen on the envelopes is all stuff that can be found in the Kanto region, where Kira is by now publicly known to originate from. She’s not fully stupid with this, she keeps all that stuff in her room, but she isn’t anywhere near the paranoid overdrive that allowed Light to stay level with L long enough to get enough lucky breaks to eke out a win.
Every time Light gets frustrated with Misa being “stupid” it’s for something that no ordinary person would’ve ever thought of. He’s not angry that Misa is dumber than average because she’s not. He’s angry because Misa is dumber than him, that he could do better if he were in her position, and also because he’s a megalomaniac who lashes out whenever anything goes wrong for him. The closest thing to an actual dumb move Misa ever makes is when she forgets L’s name, but this 1) comes after two months of supernatural memory-erasure bullshit, during which she was unable to use the kinds of tricks people normally do to keep important information in their head over a long period of time.
And 2) this also comes at the part of the story when the emphasis on the real, practical intelligence of characters is totally collapsing anyway. The only reason Misa even reaches her hidden death note is because L has suddenly gone braindead and forgotten that he has tons of physical proof that Misa sent the Kira tapes and is definitely complicit in the Kira murders, and allows her to walk around totally unsurveilled. Yeah, yeah, there’s a fake rule in the death note he recovered that suggests Misa can’t possibly be using the death note to kill people, but 1) L immediately suspects that rule might be fake, something more in line with his usual level of intelligence, and 2) even if it didn’t occur to L that the rule might be fake until after he’s done this, all this proves is that Misa did not personally use the death note to kill anyone. She’s still definitely in on it, and letting her walk away unsurveilled could still let her provide critical assistance to Kira. Shinigami eyes work through photographs! A 2004 flip-phone is absolutely capable of killing L! I’m not marking Misa down for forgetting a name when L is also acting much, much stupider than normal.
Misa Amane is, similar to Light Yagami, a depiction of intelligence laid low by hubris. She gets what she wants for a while before ultimately losing everything because it turns out she’s not as smart as she thought she was. Like Light, she’s used to being the smartest person in the room and assumes that anything she tries will work the first time because that’s usually how her life goes. She goes up against the deep institutional knowledge of the police, cleverly jukes one method of getting caught, and then gets blindsided by three more that the police have worked out over a century of trying and failing and trying again, whereas Misa acted alone (her meeting with Light came afterwards) and only got one chance to get everything exactly right.
Chamomile Has A Blog 