Calling Misa Amane 'Light's lovesick sidekick' is both wrong and lazy. Her parents were murdered, the courts gave her nothing, and when Kira started killing criminals it wasn't a slogan to her — it was a personal debt. Becoming the Second Kira isn't romance. It's gratitude.
Character traits
What's dangerous about Misa isn't her naïveté — it's that she's willing to take the shinigami-eyes deal. She trades half her remaining lifespan to read anyone's real name from their face. Light himself never risks the bargain. Misa does it without flinching, because cost doesn't matter to her, only target does.
That same nerve gets sublimated into her pop-idol public face — cute on camera, calmly using a notebook behind the curtain. It isn't two-facedness, it's compartmentalization. She breaks herself into pieces for the person she loves, and puts every piece to work.
Role in the story
Her tragedy is that she's handed real power and treated like a toy. Light manipulates her, she half-knows it, and she chooses not to see the rest because the alternative is being alone again. Ohba's portrait is unkind on purpose: Misa isn't stupid, she's exhausted enough to put love ahead of everything else.
Her truncated arc is one of the show's quiet wounds. When Light falls, no one comes back for her. The girl behind the idol stays invisible — the most honest casualty of the Kira experiment, and the one Death Note never bothers to mourn out loud.
Tracking Death Note on Episodo
Misa enters around episode 11 and shifts the show's center for most of the back half. With the Episodo Chrome extension your watchlist updates per-episode no matter whether you stream on Crunchyroll, Netflix, or 20+ other supported sites.
