It's not just the Panel itself that needs to be organised.  We are cosplayers - reasonably professional ones at that, insofar as these things can be measured with oodles of fun thrown in as the main event - therefore we need to look the part.  Act it too.  As well as physique allows, Squad Six Cosplayers must take the stage as near clones to those characters we choose to inhabit for a night.

That in mind, Lara has spent the holidays working on her Death Note Misa costume.  She cosplayed the character before, hence knows that her old wig is not up to scratch.  One should not have to redo those derpy pigtails ten times an hour!

This year then, she will be entering Ichibancon with a thicker, better quality Misa Misa wig; totally replacing the old with something new.  It was expensive, but worth it.  Here's your sneak preview of the hairy part of Lara's Misa Death Note cosplay, as it was restyled to match Second Kira's locks.

Meanwhile, it's crunch time here with just a couple of days to go and all hands to the deck to make our anime con panel run smoothly.  Wish us luck!  And if you are attending 2016 Ichibancon 7, we'll see you there!

Squad Six Cosplayers will be hosting Resurrecting L - Death Note 10th Anniversary Panel at Ichibancon 2016, January 1st 11pm-midnight, in Events 4.

Well, this is exciting, isn't it?  We all have our eyes on the Japanese Warner Bros Death Note 2016 live action movie, plus the US remake Death Note film, when suddenly a wild Death Note live action film appears from Ireland!

There has been no heads up about this at all, at least insofar as we've seen at Death Note News - and we like to think we have our finger on the pulse of all things in the franchise. Imagine our surprise then to return from seasonal holidays with the family to find a Death Note movie apparently plucked from thin air and doing the rounds of the Japanese promotional circuit.

This Death Note movie will be released in Japan by AMG Entertainment on January 5th 2016.  It involves a black notebook within which the names of criminals are listed. They soon meet a sticky end in mysterious circumstances - some of which occur whilst the victims are incarcerated in prison cells.

However, that's where the similarity ends.

The story is set in Ireland (or Scotland - reviews diverge on the point) and the protagonist is a man named Six (Liam Cunningham).  He appears as the Mysterious Stranger in a remote village, where rookie cop Rachel (Pollyanna McIntosh) is just starting her first night.  Not a great start to her policing career. Six takes over the minds of anyone with a dodgy past and forces them to basically do gory things to themselves and/or co-operate in their own demise.

Neither Light Yagami nor the rest of the usual Death Note cast are in this story. In fact, it appears to have no official sanction or any other relation to the main Death Note franchise.  At best it's a derivative work or some kind of extended fan work.

Or should that be merely a bad translation?   It seems that this Brian O'Malley directed Death Note movie was originally called Let Us Prey, and that's how it's still listed on IMDb.  Here is its rather gory trailer:

In short, though heavily marketed in Japan as a live action movie called Death Note, it's nothing to do with the manga by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata. It's fundamentally the same horror/slash film marketed in Europe and the US, in 2014, as Let Us Prey.  However, with its Biblical references and Angel of Death/Justice themes, it might appeal to fans of Death Note anyway.

Our ap0logies - it seems that we disappeared for the holidays along with a whole section of the questions for our Incredibly Hard Death Note Christmas Quiz!

No idea what happened there, other than the formatting was being a bit funky and was completed in a rush (after spending weeks collating the questions...).

Section 11-20 was present and correct at one point, but must have been accidentally overwritten and nobody noticed in the chaos of pre-Xmas preparations and partying.

I hope you all had fun anyway, fitting your own questions to the answers given at the end.  However, if you'd still like to try your luck with those set by us to tease your Death Note trivia knowledge, then the Incredibly Hard Christmas Death Note Quiz is now updated and complete.

Happy holidays all!

Even the author who created Death Note's Sachiko Yagami seems to underestimate her.  If Tsugumi Ohba's words, in Death Note 13: How to Read, are anything to go by, then he's totally misunderstood the character that he's writing.  His description of her there includes adjectives like 'verbose', which simply do not translate into what we're reading on the page in the actual manga.

All of this was explored in more detail in part on of Last Yagami Standing.  Now here's the proof from the narrative.

Our first sighting of Sachiko Yagami, in the Death Note manga, comes as Light returns home after finding the shinigami notebook.  This supposedly verbose lady hears his key in the front door and calls out, "Light, is that you?"  Then hurries out to intercept him.  Not saying a word, just standing there smiling.  In fact the kanji in the background reads 'smile, smile'; her aspect glowing out in anticipation and pride.

It's obviously an important test result for her son, yet Sachiko doesn't gabble at him.  She radiates pride - anticipating that he's done well - but there's none of the verbosity that we would expect from her listing in How to Read.  Light couldn't care less. Just like the title of the chapter itself, he's apathetic with boredom. Yet his results stun even his mother, and look at her reaction.

I want you to imagine for just a moment what your own mother's reaction would be if that was you.  Your child has just ranked NUMBER ONE in the entire country for scholarly achievement.  Ok, he's being an obnoxious brat about it, but he's just ranked first in THE WHOLE NATION.  Yet, he patently wants no fuss about it.  He just wants to hand it over out of duty and get his mother out of his face.

And Sachiko lets him

Part Three:  More Than Just Light's Mother - the Humour and the Worry of Sachiko Yagami in Death Note coming soon.

Just a reminder about a Death Note event on Tumblr, which began yesterday and continues over the Christmas period to finish on December 26th 2015.

Death Note Ladies Appreciation Weeks looks to redress the balance in focus given to Death Note's women and girl characters.  Let's face it, the fandom really does relish its male personae over the female cohort.  Yet there are some extremely kick-ass and/or fascinating ladies in this universe.  Explore their stories in canon pics; elaborate upon them in fan-fiction and fan-art; discover that they even exist, if you blinked and missed their cameo.

This is the second year running for the Tumblr event for Death Note fans.  Anyone can join in. You just tag your update with #dn ladies appreciation and post away, preferably on the day scheduled for your yuri pairing and/or each individual female Death Note character's bespoke date:

For more details, check out our original head's up about the event; where you'll also find a slightly easier collage of Death Note women to test your knowledge of characters in the Death Note universe.  For answers to the much more difficult one posted at the top here, see below:

And if you're looking for inspiration and/or something to post on each day, then our sidebar has all of these ladies listed under Death Note News Categories - archives full of things about them!  Feel free to post links to what you will.

Death Note fans know when Mello was born - December 13th 1989.  Today, had the larger than life, Mafioso character lived, he would have been celebrating his twenty-sixth birthday.

Instead he died at the wheel of a stolen lorry, clutching his rosary and taking Takada with him, their bodies consumed by the inferno (metaphorically as much as literally) and his fractured reputation consolidated as a Wammy House hero.  Illuminating so many clues with his  purpose driven suicidal stunt, that Near could denounce Kira on behalf of them all.  Mello died in Tokyo on January 26th 2010.  He'd just turned twenty-one.

All this we know about Mello's death. But where was Mihael Keehl born?

Author Tsugumi Ohba never said where Mello's birth actually occurred, just when it did.  The earliest location for the Mafia boy was Winchester, England.  Mello was an orphan raised as L's successor at the Wammy House for Gifted and Talented Orphans.  Dodgy place that it was.  But those children were rounded up from across the globe.  Mello doesn't necessary need to be English to wind up in Winchester.

In short, the field is wide open for head canons galore and fan-fiction writers to run rampant in answering the question of Mello's birthplace for themselves.  Me included, though there was method and research behind my own designation of Yugoslavia for Mello's country of origin in the It Matters series.

When I'm not here blathering on about Death Note, I'm a historian.  (To be fair, I'm still a historian here too, just not so obviously.)   Which means that I have research means, programs and the such like to provide me with data to play with during historical query. Or more pertinently here, genealogy.

I strive for  realism in my fan fiction, insofar as it's possible with killer notebooks, shinigami and genius orphan trafficking rings going on in the actual canon background.  So when it became imperative to reveal Mello's nationality, I took the clues at hand and interrogated them to see if clues to Mello's country of birth could be discerned.

Item one was to look at Mello's real name.  Historically, were there any Mihael Keehls anywhere in the world, as discerned via my genealogical databases?  YES!  And he lived in California.  True story.  Travelled there from New York, which he entered in 1870 by ship, then continued on west.  Not quite our Mihael Keehl, but a real one in existence once, and spookily in the right place.

Oh!  And a century earlier, there was another Mihael Keehl holed out in Sacramento, California.

However, US data isn't fabulous for working out surname (and first name) origins, particularly geographically, unless they happen to be First Natives of the Americas.  The USA is a nation of 'huddled masses', which fundamentally came from elsewhere.  Unfortunately no-one noted where Kern, California's Mihael Keehl came from, just where he caught the ship.  Britain.  But Mihael Keehl is not a natively British name.  Nor was he the only Keehl ever to emigrate to America.  The New York port records can give us a run down.

But they are just the Keehls who went to the USA.  Not those staying put wherever they were around the world.  Though before we leave the States, it was amusing to spot Mello in the phone book.  Kira and Near should have just looked there.

Next up was to see where lots of Keehls congregated throughout history.  I had several choices there - Prussia, modern Germany (where it became Kohl),  the Netherlands, Hungary, Slovakia and the former Yugoslavia.  Blond hair and blue eyes points to a Germanic ethnicity for Mello, so the first three were strong contenders.  But where in the world is Michael most usually rendered Mihael?

One quick internet search later and my list is getting narrower - Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, but mostly from countries which formed part of the former Yugoslavia.  Which also featured on my surname list.

So could a native Yugoslav look like Mello?  I searched digital images with the tag 'blond' + 'male' + 'Yugoslav' and somewhere in the mix, I discovered Andrej Pejic (now Andreja Pejic, but still physically male at the time of my search).

Thereon, it was just a case of working out which former Yugoslavian country was the birthplace of Mello in my fan-fiction stories.  I checked out them all on Wikipedia and landed upon Croatia, because it has a sizeable Catholic population.  With all those rosaries, Mother Mary portraits, icons and the such, there's a case to be made for Mello's Catholicism.

And there you go, a credible place of origin for Death Note's Mello.   So where would you have had him born, in your head canon, on December 13th 1989, 26 years ago today?

It's been a fraught few days with technical issues, mostly surrounding internet access, but that's all over now. We're plugged in and raring to go with the first major bit of news being that Ichibancon has just released its official schedule.  We're on it of course, but there's a surprise attached. Squad Six Cosplayers' Death Note panel - Resurrecting L: Death Note 10th Anniversary - has been bumped up an hour.

We're now on at 11pm, instead of midnight, on January 1st 2016.  Same venue, same room, just a different time.  A fine excuse to redesign the poster advertising our Death Note appreciation panel.  Though a frantic scramble to alert all who have already promoted it for us.

Next up is the flyer that everyone will receive as they walk into the panel.  You get to see it before they do!  It's a four page flyer, folded concertina style. In the box, on the inner page, is where a piece of candy will be placed for the guests to enjoy as we present. We'll also have candy and Death Note themed prizes throughout the presentation.  L eat your heart out!  We're resurrecting him indeed.

It's quite sobering to stop and consider the situations met head on by Death Note's grand matriarch, Sachiko Yagami.

What was great drama for us was fundamentally the story of her entire family's destruction.  Yet she is last seen standing strong, mothering in the ruins of shinigami boredom and all it wrought upon her home, kith and kin.  Pushing her traumatized daughter Sayu in her wheelchair through a park.

Seen from above, like a Death God watching; sharing its view with us - the voyeurs in a series of personal tragedies. Should the sympathetic perspective ever switch to that of Sachiko. But we were rapt.

We too watched only until we were bored. Or the instalments ended and there was no protagonist left to kill. Then like shinigami ourselves, we flew away to manga and anime pastures new.  Finding other sources of entertainment, leaving the character to continue on with her strolls in the park.  Caring, because what else was there for her to do?  Scream?  Sob?  Collapse under the grief and sorrow for the cards that life dealt her?

Frankly, she doesn't seem the sort.

Now we are told that Sachiko 'is Light's mother and as the wife of a policeman, she has been quietly supportive of Soichiro. Despite being an ordinary housewife, she fiercely upholds her trust in Soichiro and kept the family together during the most troubled times of the Kira case.'   Because you know, 'ordinary housewives' are generally distrustful of their husbands and live to scatter the family in times of trouble.  But at least she's not 'dutiful' anymore, a word which doesn't sit well in the Western mind, whatever the etymology.

The panel caption is now worded, 'when Soichiro had his doubts about his decisions in the Kira's case (sic), Sachiko was at his side, urging him to see it to the end.'  Which makes her sound a bit bad-ass and the rock in the family.   Until you put the panel into context, then you have to wonder if there was a touch of psychopathy there for Light to inherit.  Soichiro has, after all, just announced to his family that he's prepared to die to bring this evil to justice.

Which is all very well and noble for society at large, but not much good to her.  Nevertheless, Sachiko pretty much says, 'Yeah, go on, martyr yourself for the cause then.  I support your decision to die a hero.'   Like one of those fabled wives of Sparta, who purportedly told their spouses to return with their shield (victorious) or upon it (dead). 

Supportive, dutiful or 'as long as you get from under my feet and stop whining, dear'.  Apparently the former, given the emphasis placed upon her support of husband Soichiro Yagami in both translations of the original Japanese penned by Death Note author Tsugumi Ohba.

There are also some small differences in the personal data between my own copy of How to Read, and that found elsewhere on-line.

Sachiko's birthday - October 10th 1962 - and the blankness of her death day (because she didn't die; she survived Death Note) remain the same.  As does her blood type, liking for TV drama (the reproduction adds 'serials') and dislike of salesmen.   Perhaps some hint of a story lies in that last entry.  It does to any self-respecting fan-fiction writer anyway.  Leave it with me.

My version says that she's 5' 2" in height and weighs 110lbs.  The other 158cm/50kg. Same thing, different units of measurement.  (And for the benefit of any British reading, that's 7 stone 86lbs, on the off-chance that anyone cares for such things.)  So far so pretty standard, but then we get to the personality chart and the wording changes significantly.

Both are agreed on 'intelligence' and 'creativity'.  The above version's 'willingness to act' aligns with mine own 'initiative'.  Then this alternative translation has 'motivation', where my copy of How to Read states 'emotional strength'.  Two rather different concepts. In all so far, Sachiko ranks rather low.  She does just a little better in the next point charted. 'Social life' says that recreated above.  My book goes for 'social skills'.  Same ball-park, different sport.  Finally there's the section in which Sachiko Yagami actually excels.  Above it lists 'housewifeness'.  Whatever that is.  In my Shonen Jump Advanced published edition, that reads 'verbosity'.

Verbosity.  An excess of words; long-windedness; the propensity to never shut up.  Describing the Queen of Understatement in Death Note.

Maybe something got lost in translation - twice - because nothing thus told matches the personality exhibited in the manga panels (nor anime scenes) themselves.  Therein a very underrated, quietly fabulous Sachiko Yagami emerges.

Go to Part Two:  Meeting the Subtly Stated Sachiko Yagami

Can you think of any Death Note manga panel that more perfectly encapsulates the whole damn story? 

Are you loving the Death Note Christmas gift shop gif that's over there on the sidebar being all festive?  Wonderful, isn't it? 

Orangepunch created it for us and it's been gently snowing away in that corner, calling people in to remember that seasonal Death Note decorations do exist and all that.

Whilst also reminding me that I never did get around to finishing half of the stores that it's inviting people in to visit.  Plus some of them went up with way too big images attached to every pretty product, rendering them too long to load for the average sense of patience to withstand.  If it doesn't crash the prospective buyers internet first. 

What can I say, I was young and foolish, followed by forgetful and lazy.  Swiftly introducing, 'Oh no! All of that should have been fixed months ago!' *cue pulling an all-nighter* into the bargain.  One unfathomably long night later, we have a much improved Death Note Gift Emporium (though granted, that might have been more useful a few weeks ago BEFORE you bought all your Xmas presents), plus some new departments entirely.

You will still find flaws in there (size of pics in DVDs and books pages, we're all looking at you), but I also found something quite intriguing to bring to the table.  Plus some gossip.

First let me run you through what's changed and sparkly new in our Death Note shopping area, plus a 'to do' list of what's coming up, so you can check if the issue you've found is already known.  If not, then naturally we'd be very grateful to get the heads up. 

The front page (screenshot above) got a redesign.  The thumbnails were all much reduced in size, in order to boost the speed at which the page loads.  Hopefully it is much more navigable now.

In addition, every Death Note merchandise page has been reconfigured with funky tabs - making finding things at a glance much easier and again dropping that load time a lot!  Check them out in any department clicked below.

GOSSIP STOP!  In filling up those cyber shelves, I found several new Death Note tribute tracks by other artists, including two available for pre-order on release dates later this month or January.  They are both in our gift store now, but I will be hunting down the musicians and featuring them as separate Death Note News reports.  Death Note's 10th anniversary, TV drama or upcoming movies, appear to have inspired a veritable flood of them!  Happy days.

These next two kick start a whole new category in Death Note memorabilia - collections based on merchandise for Death Note characters.  I'm sure that most people choosing which characters to begin would have gone for Light and L.  But I know my readership.

Anyone want to prod us towards which character to compile a collection for next?   If there's no broad hints in any other direction, we'll default to Light Yagami and work through the series from there.  Though I'm half tempted to be perverse and go Sachiko Yagami instead!  Reckon there would be anything out there to buy in honour of Light's mother?

But this brings us nicely to the salient question with which I led.

I know where my money is.  In fact, I've written twelve novels of Mello/Matt fan-fiction spelling it out - and one of them initially ran with the working title Cyberpunk.  Another had titles lifted from several Cyberpunk dictionaries and cultural references.  Matt in my universe ended up with a motorbike once, but we've barely seen it since.

Maybe that's because I've missed a trick.  In conjunction with most of the Death Note Matt fandom, I missed what was in plain sight, because I never thought to look certain things up.

Matt's gift shop was looking a bit sparse.  Mello's was jam packed.  I felt bad.  So I thought it would be a nice idea to hunt for that habitual Matt costume for Death Note cosplayers to buy, love and cherish.  After all, its probably the most ubiquitously seen, ordinary collection of clothes on any Death Note character. You could grab half the items in any given mainstream clothes shop.

Or could you?  It's harder than it looks, this cosplay malarkey.   I started with the gloves.  How do you search for those?  They're quite distinctive.  Racing gloves? Long, black gloves for men?   Finally, I found them.  They are officially known - in non-Death Note circles - as motorcyclist's gauntlet gloves,  or motorbike racing gauntlet gloves.

Next I went for the goggles.  Bog standard cyberpunk, I thought, with an option on steampunk, if that outfitting genre fell short.  Close, but no cigar.  Yet I was finding something similar, if not precise, in a whole new class of goggle sporting necessities.  Necessary, that is, if you happen to be a motorbike racer.  Like those wearing the gloves too.

Shoved some stripy, long-sleeved tops in and off into the jeans department.  Mmmm, several billion here, what to search in order to narrow this down?  Ribbed jeans?  Denim with circles around them? 

Turns out that there are some jeans created specifically with patchwork patterns surrounding each leg - just like Matt's wears in fact.  They're made especially for bikers.  Apparently it improves their saddle grip upon the seat.  Saves them slipping about, as ordinary jeans might.

So goggles, gloves and jeans all point due Matt the motorbike rider, with a strong nudge towards racing them too.  You going for that in your head canon?  Fan fiction writers, is that why he's beside a bike the first time we see him, and why Mello acquires one only after Matt's on the scene?  Death Note fan artists, what motorcycle does Mail Jeevas ride?  If this releases the throttle on anybody's muse, let me link the results, or show them  off here.

Or are you just going 'cyberpunk geek' like me, and dismissing this out of hand?  I'd be fascinated with your thoughts!

As part of our research and heads up on stories to bring you about Death Note, we're subscribed to several general news sources, each searching for the key phrase 'Death Note', amongst others.

However 'death note' doesn't only describe a manga from Japan.  In some countries (the USA seems prevalent, as does India) it's an alternative name for a suicide note.   Every so often, our trawl through the world's online papers feeds a tragic, albeit off-topic for us report about someone ending their own life and leaving a message to tell their kin and kith why.

I've heard it said that emergency services note that suicides peak around the holiday season, but this is the first time I've seen it reflected in our RSS feeds.  Right now, I'm staring at ten distinct and separate cases from around the world.  Over half of the whole feed, with the rest reporting actual Ohba penned Death Note news (all of which we've already long since covered in our own stories).

Ordinarily I'd skip over them, as they are irrelevant here.  But today, I wondered if perhaps they are. Perhaps someone searching for death notes/suicide notes online, in order to write their own (stranger things have happened) might stumble across this.  And that would be Fate.   Don't do it.  You matter.   And most of all, sod 'em.   This is your life, as much as it is your death, and there is always a third way unforeseen until you attempt the audacious.

Here is the wording for your death note:

'Today I was going to kill myself.   Today, I will.  But not that part of me that lives and breathes. Only that which has been straining to breathe, yet chokes on the cards dealt to me.   Today instead, I will take the first deep and long breath of many, and today I am going to find out what living means.  And I will be fabulous.

Watch me fly.

yours
That Beautiful Person you used to call The Sad One
xxxxx'

And on the off-chance you need more than my prose to keep this show on the road, then please make like Alice and CLICK ME.  Good luck.

The roles are just rolling in for Nat Wolff!  The American actor's calendar is quickly becoming inundated with work for 2016 - the year in which he's strongly rumoured (practically confirmed) to be playing Light Yagami in the US live-action Death Note movie remake.

Shooting on Adam Wingard's Death Note film is meant to begin in the Spring.  However, Nat Wolff has just been booked to appear in theatrical performances of Buried Child, running off-Broadway from February 17th through to March 13th 2016 (with previews for critics starting on Feb. 2nd).

Wolff will be playing Vince, whose arrival at his grandparent's farm throws everything into chaos.  He's left trying to explain to girlfriend Shelley why nobody seems to recognize him, amongst a family where sanity is held by a thread and dark secrets seek to arise.  A task made all the more heart-breaking and confusing, as he doesn't understand the reasons why himself.

Playwright Sam Shepherd won a Pulitzer Prize for penning Buried Child.  It will be staged at the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre, in NYC's Pershing Square Signature Center.  With soon-to-be  Kira actor Nat Wolff taking his place in The New Group theatrical company, under the  direction of Scott Elliott.

This is in addition to other recently announced parts for Nat Wolff in 2016.  He'll be starring as Jim Nolan in James Franco's movie In Dubious Battle, and also as Doug, a creepy loner who snatches and imprisons a woman expecting her conform to his will, in Jessica Manafort's film Rosy. 

While strongly expected to squeeze in global domination, the God of this New World arisen as Light Yagami in the American Death Note movie.  By the look of it, Nat Wolff is halfway there before his shinigami even dropped a notebook.  At least in terms of utter ubiquity!

Soon we'll be able to work out when Death Note filming in the USA will occur, just by looking for the gaps in Nat Wolff's diary.

A Shinigami sculpture!  Isn't this wonderful?  Built entirely of Lego, Ryuk from Death Note was created by Neo's Bricks:

Once again I go back to the wise and venerable Ohba in search of answers and once again he disappoints. In an interview he was asked, “Did L have any friends?”  We are told, “No. When he told Light that Light was his first friend, it was a lie. L could never have a friend, as he found humans to be a very cunning species.”

I find this a very disappointing answer, as it removes the ambiguity from the relationship that makes it so compelling.

As humans, we find uncertainty far more interesting than simply being told the answer. It’s why the ending of Inception - where we don’t know if the protagonist is in a dream world or not - is so frequently discussed. We don’t like being told all the answers. Characters like Hamlet stay with us because we don’t know whether or not he’s mad; that’s what makes him interesting. It allows us to continue engaging with our favourite series after we’ve watched them.

The series that captures this best is the original Death Note manga and anime. Sometimes I wonder if Ohba (like George Lucas) actually understands what made his series so brilliant.

I also wonder if this is what makes the Yotsuba slightly less popular than earlier parts of the series - because it removed the cat and mouse aspect of their relationship. With Light no longer an evil monster, we’re deprived of seeing him monologue about how he’s going to become 'God of the New World', as well as amazing scenes like the death of Lind. L Tailor.

I’m of the opinion that the author can’t determine every reading of their work. They can give their interpretation, but it’s not the only one that’s valid. A work connects and engages with its reader on an individual level, and everyone takes something different away from it.

With that in mind I want to give a brief overview of how I interpret their relationship. I reject the homosexual readings of the series. This isn’t because it bothers me in anyway (one of my favourite TV shows is Hannibal, which has extremely obvious homoerotic undertones) but simply because I view Light as asexual. To me, Light represents a single minded determination towards one goal.

That’s not to say there isn’t some platonic admiration in their relationship, probably even a perverse friendship.

Light clearly has some respect for L. He’s actually angry when he sees Near wearing his mask, “You are far inferior to L. You have no right to be wearing a mask of L”. The last thing Light sees in the anime is L standing over him, a powerful physical representation of the influence L has over Light.

Light is shown throughout the series to be someone who had spent a solitary seventeen years of life. He seems detached from his friends and never once in the series shows interest in someone outside his family, unless it benefits his goals (such as in the instances of Misa and Takeda) with one exception - L.

Light is someone who has been deprived of an intellectual equal his entire life. The existence of L, someone who can keep up with him would be extremely significant to him; some form of validation that he isn’t alone.

On a purely mental level Light has probably understood that there are people as smart as him out there, but I doubt he truly comprehended it before he met L. To Light, I think he viewed L as the perfect obstacle towards his ascension to 'God of the New World'.

Light wanted a challenge, something to make his success more satisfying. L provided that.

Did L view Light as a friend?  It’s hard to say. It’s probably wise to differentiate between the manga and anime at this point. In the anime it seems to imply some form of affection towards Light, mostly during the scene where L washes Light’s feet, a fairly homoerotic action.

Outside of that?  Well, L is a liar and it seems probable that his comments about being Light’s 'friend' were designed to throw him off guard.  But that doesn’t preclude there being some truth in them as well.

A lot of what I have said about Light probably applies to L. This was undoubtedly L’s toughest case, he did lose after all. Like Light, he probably had met few people as intelligent as himself, and never interacted with them on the level he interacted with Light (Near never spoke personally to L).

One of the strongest arguments in favour of their platonic (or romantic) attraction is that other versions of the story portray as it as such. In the drama they have a heart to heart where they basically scream their love for one another (whilst trying to murder each other no less). In the musical there is a similar ending I hear (though it’s more from L than Light).

*  Disclaimer: No respected psychiatrist or psychologist has used the term sociopath or psychopath in many years. I just like it.