It's Mello's 26th birthday today
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?
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?
In Death Note Canon, Where Did Mello Come From?
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.
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.
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Why my Canon Stated Mello Came from Yugoslavia
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.
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).
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?
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?
