Give Me Back My Broken Night, My Mirrored Room, My Secret Life

★ Character Information ★

Character Name: L Lawliet (CRAU: Linden Tailor)
Character Age: 25 (CRAU: 27)
Character Species: Human
Current Health: Decidedly Unhealthy; underweight and malnourished.
Outfit: A plain white long-sleeved t-shirt, baggy blue jeans (CRAU: A shift-like garment made of llama wool, gathered at the waist with a gold belt. He wears gold cuffs and bracelets around his wrists and ankles, a golden headdress, and a golden collar; the overall effect the presentation of a capacocha sacrifice.)

Character Canon: Death Note (CRAU: The DWRP game Aefenglom, from 2019 until the game closed in 2021)
Link to History: https://deathnote.fandom.com/wiki/L_(character)
Canon Point: Episode 25, point of death (CRAU: The final battle with the Cwyld, in which L’s ability to defeat his flower vision of being entombed with Light Yagami and potentially rescued by Myr was left on an ambiguous note.)
Canon Iteration: Aefenglom CRAU
Canon Iteration Explanation: L’s a Witch and assumes the name Linden Tailor for his business and doings. He’s diligent in his studies, gifted at combining creative rune-work with blood magic with a focus on illusion and scrying, and he manages to form some close relationships all by himself. There are dynamic, sincere and even vulnerable elements to these relationships that change his outlook and broaden his perspective. L nevertheless grows preoccupied with past wrongs that extend beyond the single catastrophic failure that was losing to Kira. Confronting and even Bonding with his successors, he is forced to reflect on the damage his life and ambitions did to others.

As a personal sense of redemption becomes the focus of L’s search for purpose, his relationship and Bond with the Faun Myr become more important to him. He looks to the religious Myr for guidance and acceptance and eventually love, and hides from him when he feels he’s fallen short in his goals to be a better person. L’s moral compass, while being informed by a draconian and childish sense of “fairness” or “justice” is incredibly flawed, and he falls victim to occasionally trying to strong-arm the “right thing” into manifesting. An example of this is when he pretends to return Mello’s affections in the hopes that it might make up for the events following his demise. This doesn’t work and just makes him feel like a game-playing liar. Another example is striking up a friendship and partnership with Light Yagami, and maintaining it even after Light confesses everything to him. This is an extreme example of burying the hatchet, to the point where it’s probably more damaging than healing in the long term. Conversely, sometimes he gets it really right; he finds working at the orphanage as a tutor to be rewarding, and turning Niles from an enemy into an ally to be ultimately beneficial and cathartic.

Aefenglom’s L struggles somewhat to handle relationship conflicts and strife. Over time, he picks up something of a drinking habit to blunt the difficult emotions that come with caring, which he’s secretive about, seeing addiction as a weakness he should be above.

Near endgame, phylaxes (manifestations of the soul appearing as animals) were introduced; L’s looks like an orca whale. Aef’s ending is ambiguous for L, leaving him entombed in a mountain cave with Light’s unresponsive body and conflicted about walking away safely with Myr.

★ Folkmore Roles & Attributes ★

Skills:
-Seasoned and spectacular sleuth. L is, canonly, the world’s three greatest detectives, with nearly two decades of experience in his field even though he’s just cracked his mid-twenties.
-Polyglot (L speaks multiple languages fluently)
-Helicopter pilot
-Tying a knot in a cherry stem
-Competent at Capoeira
-Can almost beat Light Yagami at tennis
-Knows his way around tech circa 2004
-Multitasks (or switches tasks quickly) very well
-Stock market know-how
-Good at carrying a persona
-Good at memorizing his lies
-In Aef: knowledge of runes, divination, illusion, and scrying. He can manipulate runes like computer code to get the effects he wants much of the time.
-In Aef, L’s elemental affinities for offensive and defensive magic are ice and lightning.
-In Aef, L can share dreams with his Bonded.
-L has an orca whale phylax, a manifestation of his soul. She’s smaller than a real orca and kind of like a daemon or a Deer Country Omen.

Canon Abilities:
-L is a spindly little human. He has no particularly special or remarkable natural abilities, outside of being an anime genius. He picks up new skills quickly, has a sharp memory and creatively analytical way of thinking. His IQ is alienatingly high; his process might seem chaotic but it comes together unexpectedly and satisfyingly well. This can result in him occasionally seeming to others like he has a preternatural gift for deduction.
-In Aefenglom, L is a Witch. This means that he is a Mirrorbound individual with the natural ability to study and practice magic.
Role: Legend
Role Qualities/Attributes: Feathered wings (a dingier drabber grey-white that doesn’t quite glow) and a halo (a dull and almost bronzy gold that doesn’t quite shine.)
Role Reasoning: In Death Note, L is the antagonist, facing off against a mass-murderer. Prior to this, he’s solved over 1,000 cases that have ultimately benefited humankind. On paper, he absolutely is on the side of what most people would consider “lawfully good”. However, his intentions were selfishly motivated since he mostly solved his cases for his own amusement instead of any innate sense of justice, and he also engages in many crooked, illegal and morally dubious acts during the Kira case. With such a coldly pragmatic “ends justify the means” approach, I would choose Myth… but his stint in Aefenglom introduced some genuine effort, pride-swallowing, and personal sacrifice into his motivations. He actively tried to be better, which is what tips me in the direction of Legend for this app. I’d like for his manifestations to be dull and shaded, as if to remind him how close he came to being a myth, and really get that imposter syndrome churning. L thinks of himself, even after his two years in Aef, as a childish lying monster, and will think that a mistake was made or that he does not deserve the designation of “good” in this setting. He’ll feel like he’s stolen it or deceived the Fox in some way, and is therefore perilously close to falling.

★ Personality ★

Please choose one of the following options for your personality section. Please clarify which option you have picked and, if option 2, which questions you are answering:

Option 2. Choose FOUR-FIVE of the following questions to answer and expand upon. You may choose a fifth question if you feel it is integral to your character's personality. Each answer has a 100-300 word requirement.

OPTION 2 QUESTIONS (PICK 4-5) 100-300 WORD LIMIT EACH:

What experience challenged your character's core beliefs? How did they handle this or change from it?

During an event in Aefenglom where characters are made to relive and interact with memories, L encountered the chimera Niles, and reacted cruelly and callously to a perceived slight. Rather than rescue him swiftly from a violent and traumatic situation, L intentionally took longer to break the illusion to pettily punish the other character for said slight. Myr, knowing L’s ability in this area, was horrified and speechless at how his Bonded could be so monstrous and left his side, unable to remain in his presence. What followed was an uneasy mutual silence as L and Niles began a vicious cycle of revenge.

When Myr gently invited L to the Coven to discuss something, L gamely showed up, assuming that the intent was to annul the Bond. He prepared himself for the eventuality, playing it out in his mind beforehand and reaching a state of acceptance in preparation for grief. He held to the sense of control that provided. When Myr rejected that idea outright and chided him for even thinking of throwing away the love and friendship of their Bond like that, insisting that what he did was inexcusable but that it didn’t make him unworthy of that love and friendship, it challenged L’s notions not only of love and friendship, but of redemption and goodness as a state to strive toward, rather than bestowed or withheld by nature or grace. This momentarily tore him into pieces, but ultimately shifted his outlook and strengthened his Bond with Myr as well as his resolve to try harder. Rather than a transactional relationship based on what he could do for Myr materially, he was valued unconditionally for his intentions, efforts, and vulnerability for perhaps the first time in his life.

What is a headcanon (or two) you feel strongly about and that you prefer playing your character with? How is this supported in canon and why do you think it benefits the character's story?

I play with the headcanon that L was orphaned by abandonment, and not by parental death. His mentally ill and impoverished mother left him sleeping at a bus shelter with a paper bag lunch when he was five years old before she disappeared forever. This headcanon is close to me because it establishes L’s cynical self-concept early on as unlovable and unwanted, conditionally valuable by merit of ability and function. A strikingly gifted (but difficult) child, L learned to be the best at what he did by first learning to be indispensable, however awful an enfant terrible he was.

In canon, L is hesitant to get close to people and keeps them at arm’s length unless it’s framed as a game and he’s deemed it worth his while. The exception seems to be his handler, with whom the boundaries between manager and parent aren’t always clear, as well as who calls the shots and when. That is, full-stop, his healthiest and closest canon relationship; otherwise, L looks for connections that concern his cases, and will by nature be temporary, dynamic, and fully under his control. When he solves the cases, those connections will vanish from his life forever, completely on his terms.

In Aefenglom, L has significantly less control over how his relationships begin and end. The first time he sorely disappoints and angers Myr, he assumes that they are finished and proposes dissolving their Bond. Myr refuses on the grounds that he cares deeply for L, and that their Bond is too important to just throw away and resolving the issue is possible. L initially reacts with confusion and hostility, because that gentle, unconditional acceptance is something he’s been secretly grieving for years.

What are your characters dreams and nightmares? Do you believe they are more likely to obtain one rather than the other?

Before Aefenglom, L rarely dreamed, sleeping in long and dark stretches or hardly at all. His most common recurring dream is a lake surrounded by dense forests, with the weather conditions reflecting his overall state of mind. It’s common for the air and water to be chilly, whether or not it is snowing or iced-over; it is usually night, with icy, bright stars or white and blue aurora borealis lighting up the sky and reflecting in the still, glassy waters. Sometimes he dreams that he’s in the forest, which represents a hibernating danger temporarily frosted-over; sometimes he’s underwater with a stalking, starving creature he’s named the Leviathan that seeks to find and devour him. Unfortunately, they share a common soul and can’t survive without the other; there is no defeating the Leviathan, just learning to live with it, as it’s inseparably a part of him.

With the growing pains that come with stepping outside of his comfort zone in Aefenglom, the Leviathan also seems to start to outgrow its lake, growing restless as the climate warms and the forest wakes up, growing legs and trying to climb out. L has a harder time keeping the lake glazed in ice and ensuring the environment remains sleeping and silent, and he increasingly becomes engaged in the sisyphean task of trying until he wakes up thoroughly exhausted.

Because L’s dreams are rarely purely positive or negative experiences, and frequently lucid to give him a sense of control, he does not make the nightmare distinction. Those close enough to him to be considered Bonded are individuals he sometimes shares dreams with, and when he does he is often struck by just how different it feels to not be locked in his own inner battle every night.

If you could give your character a Taylor Swift playlist, which songs would be on it and what would they represent about your character?

The Archer- This mellow track is lyrically fitting for someone who associates conflict with passion, and blurs the line between excitement and fun. Picking a fight to stave off boredom unfortunately comes at a high cost.
Blank Space-The upbeat energy of this track captures the almost reckless confidence with which L approaches the Kira case (he does go down in flames at the end, and it’s absolutely because his name was written in a blank space.)
I Did Something Bad- Mutual obsession, lies and damage come through the restless minor key.
Haunted L realizes that much he assumed about the case was wrong, and Light in fact has the upper hand. An event horizon and final gambit ensure that there is in fact no turning back.
Epiphany The tranquility in this track, contrasting with the bleak lyrics and unexpected vocal catches, speak to the resignation of realizing he’s lost and dying in Light’s arms at the end of their battle. L’s epiphany is a mere glimpse of relief as his vision fades.
My Tears Ricochet- Even after death, Light Yagami becomes a villain-in-mourning, imagining that he sees L sitting at his computer days after his death. When a successor emerges to challenge him, Light feels that he is not worthy of the L title and resents his perceived inferiority.
Call It What You Want- Starting a new life in Aefenglom with the shadow of the old one still looming
This is Me Trying- Effort and results not always matching up in Aefenglom, the ensuing discouragement and rallying attempts.
Willow- Probably on every Folkmore app’s playlist Being led to a new life and new potential by someone who truly cares.

What does your character feel like they struggle with still? Where could they improve? This could be physically, mentally, emotionally, or otherwise.

L struggles, overall, to let go of the past and all the resulting psychological and emotional baggage. He wasn’t always like this; it started with waking up not-dead after the Kira case, his final achievement tarnished and ruined by his failure. When one devotes his entire life to something, only to end it one infuriating step behind his opponent, he isn’t who he thought he was. He begins to question everything.

Looking to the past can be torturous, but it’s also the comparatively easy route, because nothing in the past can actually be changed. While L made progress in Aefenglom towards looking to the future and all the myriad ways it could be guided and improved, Light’s arrival caused a nostalgic regression. Like an addict relapsing, L cleaved to Light, recalling when he was at the height of glory before his loss, rather than the very imperfect fumbling through all the novel and mundane things his committed, professional early life did not prepare him for. This carried all the way to the end of the game, when L couldn’t decisively walk away from the shared fate that was written and right, even when a brighter and happier future was offered to him by someone who cherished, challenged, and loved him through all of his flaws.

L knows that he needs to not only move on from the mistakes of the past, but make his peace with them. He needs to accept that perfection cannot be the standard, because as well as being flawed, L’s just a human being. Forgiveness and help are things he deserves and is capable of providing; a life’s value isn’t measured in achievement or material output alone. Not everything needs to cost something; it is OK to merely be enough.