u/Extra-Photograph428

This might be a bit of a strange topic, but I’m curious to hear others opinions. So I remember after I first watched death note and went searching for more information particularly about L, something I’ll say I was very shocked by was L’s true age. It’s not necessarily because the possibility of L being 24/25 is crazy, if anything there’s a bit of sense in it that would explains L’s maturity in his views on Kira and the complexities of justice (plus also just not being an egomaniac), what confused me was the push in making L and Light friends. There really is no indication in both the anime and manga that would clue you into L’s age, so when I first watched the anime I simply assumed L and Light were meant to be about the same age considering the hard push of them being “friends” (plus how they were alike in so many other aspects), that he was maybe the exact same age if not just a few years older. Finding out that there was such a big age gap between does make their whole friend dynamic seem a bit strange imo.

My point of this discussion since I don’t think there’s a conclusive answer, is questioning whether or not you believe Ohba had in mind L’s age when originally writing the series? I went back to the manga because at the very least I thought there was some sort of explicit mention of L at least being older than Light, but was a bit surprised to find that in the manga (at least by the English translation), L speaks more so in the present tense at the mention of being 17— here. I’m not quite sure if this is simply a translation issue, so I checked the sub of the anime to see if there was any variation and it aligns pretty closely with the manga translation, that makes it seem like L is 17, or at least around that age to speak about it like it was a recent thing (which wouldn’t be crazy if L was only a year older, his birthday would’ve been quite recently). The only slight minor clue that we have is the honorific that L uses with Matsuda and Light, which could potentially indicate that L was meant to be younger than Matsuda, but older than Light— but even that’s not conclusive considering both of these honorifics can be used by someone who’s the same age as them.

Lots of things about L specifically were only confirmed after the manga ended, so it’s not crazy to imagine originally Ohba had pictured L being around Light’s age, but was later confronted with the issue of L having this crazy extensive career— he just couldn’t be that young so he had to be aged up quite a number of years than his original vision. I’ve also seen it mentioned a few times questioning the legitimacy of these character sheets, with some saying that it wasn’t Ohba who wrote these, so perhaps this wasn’t Ohba’s call at all. I’m not honestly sure myself. Like I said L being 24/25 makes sense considering literally everything else about his character, the only weird aspect is his friendship with Light. They have more of a “big brother” or mentor-type figure kinda age gap, not people who we’re meant to believe could’ve maybe been besties in another lifetime. It’s even stranger when you consider the fact that this story comes out of Japan, where age differences matter so much in their culture, it just gets even stranger that the gap between them is so big. I’m also quite aware L and Light weren’t ever really meant to be real friends, but they were at least supposed to pretend like they were.

So what are your thoughts? Do you believe L’s age was a later correction or something Ohba had always intended?