3, 2, 1, post time! For today's blog post, I will once again be talking about Near from Death Note. Spoilers ahead for those who haven't finished the series. For those of you who don't know, Near is somehow highly overlooked within the Death Note fandom. Most people think he just took credit for L's work, while others defend him by saying he was better in the manga. However, I'd like to dispute this. The anime adaptation may have been rushed at the end, but even in the show Near is very clearly intelligent on his own. Firstly, he was chosen as L's successor because of his intelligence. But if you want to ignore this fact completely, he's also very clever. He comes to conclusions much faster than Light in almost any scenario, and he can come to accurate solutions with just a little information. He was able to pinpoint Teru Mikami as the extra Kira with ease, and not just because he "looked at a bunch of screens and picked someone out" like many people say. He actually noticed Teru Mikami because he was watching and listening to multiple news broadcasts at a time and noticed how often Mikami spoke highly of Kira. This made him realize that Kira would obviously choose someone who thought just like he did to carry on the killings in his place. His conclusions are very well thought out, and he's almost never wrong. He isn't just guessing or jumping to conclusions either; he's genuinely using all of the information he's gathered over time. Of course he also uses information provided by other people as well, because he'd be a fool not to. Every talented detective knows to use every resource they have. There are many points throughout the anime where you can see his display of intelligence, if you just stop to think of how he came to every conclusion. But, these are mostly just my thoughts on this topic. I wanted to talk about this because I think it's unfair of everyone to sweep Near under the rug because they think he isn't as smart as the other characters when that just isn't true. Near was the number one successor to come from the orphanage, so he's obviously highly intelligent. Regardless, I hope you all still enjoyed this blog post!