#giving ryuk a cool backstory because he just wasnt cool enough for me in canon 😔

[grimalkinmessor]

Hello! I am very intrigued by your headcanons towards Death Note characters since I read your post about your Light's ones. So I wanted to ask what are your headcanons about L and Ryuk??

Ooo I haven't thought much about those two in terms of headcanons.

I'll start with Ryuk because I have a few more on hand for him, just because they tie into my Shinigami lore hcs :3

☠️ -Ryuk used to be human once! All Shinigami save for Nu and the King used to be human. Now my personal headcanon for that is that you have to kill a certain amount of people before you can become a Shinigami, and the Shinigami realm is rotten and dying because they just don't make killers like they used to :/ Ryuk is the youngest of them, and he made the cut because he was an arsonist! :D As a human Ryuk was a punk, a highly insane anarchist with a taste for gunpowder and blood. He blew up so many buildings with people inside that he made the cut for Shinigami-dom.

☠️ -An add-on to the above and a slight spoiler for Cosmic Entities, Ryuk the Human was killer on the guitar. His riffs were fucking amazing, and he rocked with a lot of underground artists before he overdosed and died. Of course when he became a Shinigami he forgot about all of that, but if he ever, say, regained a human body, he might remember a bit of it :3

☠️ -Ryuk's highly addictive personality is half a leave over from his human life, and half because of how young of a Shinigami he is. The older a Shinigami is the more apathetic they get—which is why I headcanon Kinddara as fairly young too, because she has a LOT of bloodlust rattling around in her. A lot. Gelus and Rem aren't young, persay, but they're definitely not as old as they others given that they both fell for Misa. Whiiich brings me to my next headcanon!

☠️ - Ryuk is asexual! :D And aromantic. He was ace when he was human too, but they didn't really have a name for it back when he was alive so he never labelled it. And as a Shinigami, he just assumed that other Shinigami ALSO didn't feel those urges because, you know, they're Shinigami. Ryuk still gets attached to people even as a Shinigami (I headcanon his relationship with Light as queerplatonic in every universe and you will pry that from my cold dead hands) and he's not really sex-repulsed, he would just honestly rather have an apple.

☠️ -Case in point: Ryuk gets depressed after Light dies. He gets the reputation as a storyteller because...well, that's kind of all he does after that whole Kira mess ends. (That Shinigami from the relight is NOT Light I will fight you on that—) He reminisces about it like a war veteran and tells anyone that asks anything they want to know about the various Kiras and Light. Especially Light. He's very proud of Light. Ryuk doesn't seem to even be interested in the human world afterward, nor in playing or gambling with his fellow Shinigami. He seems more resigned to his boredom than before. Almost like he's grieving someone. Huh...

🍰 -L'S TURN: I have multiple contradictory headcanons for how L ended up with Watari, but my most realistic one is that his mother died directly after giving birth, but she was a bit of Jane Doe. The only thing she had with her was a messenger bag with a worn French book and a map of the area in it. Since she died before she could name her child, the hospital staff looked through her stuff and found the initials L.L. written on the inside of the book, so one of the nurses just wrote that down on the birth certificate, along with the first word she found on one of the pages. It was in the woman's bag, so it was obviously important to her, right? Maybe she'd like her child named after her favorite novel. Buuut half of the first name smudged and left the kid with a singular letter L instead of actual initials. Oops. The matrons at the orphanage don't have time to worry about shit like that so the singular letter stuck. Congrats kid, that L no longer stands for anything, you're a part of the alphabet now 🫡

🍰 -L definitely pulled a Tom Riddle in his first orphanage and stole literally everything he could get his hands on. If a kid argued with him or tried to tell on him he would beat them up. He was that quiet kid in the corner of the room, eating everyone's candy from that generous man that passed by the day before because they didn't defend it or hide it well enough. And L was definitely a biter as a kid, so get to close to his little thief corner and you'll walk away with teeth marks in your fucking arm or leg or face. Around the matrons, however, L was—well, not normal, but he definitely didn't bully the other kids around them because they'd grab him and drag him around and crack his hands with a ruler, and even at a young age he knew that he couldn't win in a fight with someone that much bigger than him.

🍰 -L also knows plenty of foraging hacks from his time as an orphan. His original orphanage was on the outskirts of the city, so he got very good at learning which plants were edible by watching the forest animals and identifying them on his own. So when winter came along and food got scarce, L had little pouches and cups of dried flowers and berries and roots hidden in his room to eat. Like hell this little glutton is going to stick to his assigned rations—are you nuts? It's survival of the fittest out there 😤

🍰 -As a consequence of the above, L grew to really like rabbits. He watched them a lot to learn which plants he could eat and eventually got really hyperfixated on the idea of the idea of trying to catch one. He'd go out and hide and wait for the rabbits to show up, and then chase them. He had to get more creative when they proved to be faster than him, and eventually he set up a trap and caught one. L managed to keep it as a pet for about a week before the caretakers found out and made him get rid of it. Which was honestly just as well; L was nearing his limit with his rabbit fixation and eventually he would've started to neglect it.

🍰 -The book L's mother brought into the hospital was one of his only non-stolen possessions growing up, but because it was written in French, L had to learn French in order to read it. And he did. By the time L was seven years old he was pretty much bilingual—one of the reasons he caught Quillish's attention as a little prodigy. L learns languages quickly, but only when he's interested, so he might learn five languages in rapid succession or he might procrastinate learning another language for two years. By the time he hits sixteen he's fluent in nine different languages. He stalls at around thirteen when he's twenty and doesn't really see the need to pick up anymore.

🍰 -At one point, Quillish attempted to force L into healthier eating habits by only giving him healthy foods, but this backfired spectacularly because L threw a fit and refused to eat any of it. Quillish didn't want to back down though, so he told L that if he didn't want to eat what was in front of him then he could go hungry. And because is L is a petty bastard and runs on quick fuel sugar, it didn't take him long to pass the fuck out after a day of refusing to eat the bullshit Quillish locked him in with. Quillish tries this three more times before giving up and just sneaking vegetables into his sweets. When L is older, they have a long conversation (argument) about it and eventually L begrudgingly agrees to replace at least a quarter of his sweets with fruit—sweet enough for him to tolerate but healthy enough to appease Quillish. Hence the banana scene that everyone loves :)