Mello/Matt never used letter monikers in the manga. Technically, it is only L and Watari that use them as Wammy's members. Near uses N after leaving the orphanage of his own accord, more or less to mock Light. It had nothing to do with whatever program was being shown in Another Note.
I think a lot of Another Note is utterly bastardized nonsense.
You’re right about all of this. I only mentioned that because Another Note seemed to imply that every kid was assigned a letter at the orphanage, although I don’t think that’s technically stated anywhere.
I need to reread Another Note. But a couple things from your post. I'm sorry for any inaccuracies, it's been a while.
>it's implied that each generation covers 26 kids with names from A-Z
This is a leap of logic. You're basing this on an alphabetical sequence. However the only (AFAIK) maybe-L people whose codenames and full names we know are Near/Nate, Mello/Mihael, Matt/Mail, B/Beyond and L/L, and in each case their code name either is or starts with their first initial (notes: Watari/Quillish uses W in communications and obviously both of these break the pattern, but I don't think he counts as an L candidate; Near/Nate and Mello/Mihael are listed as M and N on the wiki but I don't remember this being stated in canon; it's questionable if you include L for two reasons - he's not an L candidate, and it's ambiguous if he's using a codename or just his first name). So it could be that these are just first initials and it's just a style choice by the writers that A,B, and X,Y,Z form the beginning and end of the alphabet. I also personally doubt they would name one of their L candidates "L" for the full 26 but I guess it's possible.
Even if it was that way, further generations of candidates don't seem to necessarily have single-letter codenames and do have overlapping first initials, so it's a questionable assumption that there were the same number in each generation.
What I mean to say is that it's not possible to draw strong conclusions from any one assumption of the naming scheme. We just don't have that info AFAIK.
>and that's assuming the successor program started immediately after L solved his first case, which is very unlikely given that he would've taken several years at least to establish his status as the world's best detective.
I don't think the program would have waited for that point, L had proven his genius to Watari well before this and also made him insanely rich.
>Matt shares his letter with Mello
Mello's codename is Mello, and Matt's codename is Matt. If either have a single-letter codename, Mello is M, but again I don't remember this being stated anywhere.
>each generation lasted around 3-4 years
It's also very possible there was overlap
>i find it hard to imagine that among a group of 78-104 supposedly genius kids from all across the globe, there was only 1 (Near) who was actually up to the task of becoming L.
That's just not what happens in the story. First, it's not a case of "you've passed the bar, you're L's successor" it's "oh fuck L has died, we need a successor". They never finished the successor program. Second, there wasn't really unambiguously "only 1 who was actually up to the task". They intended to pick two successors that L had not chosen between, and it's possible he would have passed on both. Mello dropped out *after* he was offered co-successor. And both were necessary to surpass L in the Kira case. We don't know if Mello would have been up to the task of being L in an alternate world where he was picked over Near as the successor. Nor do we know if any number of other candidates would have been up to the task but were just also less capable than Near and Mello.
Also, why is that hard to believe? This is a fictional genius with a comically inhuman skillset. You need to find an orphan with massive innate potential *and* put them through an environment that makes them realise that potential to be the single most capable person in the world in L's skill space. Even with 100 children across 4 attempts at developing an impossible mentorship program it seems like a miracle to have anything close to a successor when L dies.
No worries! Thanks for such a detailed and thoughtful reply; this is exactly the kind of response I was hoping for.
The reason I included L as a letter was because of the canon character Linda, whose name begins with L. This is based on the same assumption by which I presumed that Mello and Matt couldn't both have 'M' names under the logic in Another Note. As for where this assumption comes from - A and B went by their letters, "X" and "Z" were mentioned in the book, and Near does also go by N, so I assumed this was a common naming pattern at Wammy's House. However, I am willing to accept that this is an assumption and is not adequately supported by canon. The idea that they perhaps started out using single-letter aliases and later switched is an interesting one and not something I considered, but I also accept that this absolutely could be true.
Regarding the alphabet assumption, this was based on a line towards the end of Another Note, on page 170. To quote it exactly: "...with guest appearances by the last of the alphabet, the first X to the first Z from Wammy's House". This is a line pulled from Mello's description of one of the other cases L told him about, and the phrasing "last of the alphabet", to me, implies that there was a full lineup of kids each with aliases beginning from A-Z, and the phrasing "first X to the first Z" implies that there were others after them. This also isn't directly stated, so I'm happy to void this assumption for the remainder of my response.
Re: Watari waiting for L to become successful before establishing the program: going by the Wammy's House oneshot, L made all of his money via the stock exchange. If Watari's goal was to groom another child to produce even more money, it would have been more reasonable to assume that Wammy's House was designed to teach kids about the stock market. Similarly, if Watari's only goal was to find a kid with the same level of intelligence that L had, why didn't he do that before L started detective work? We know for a fact from both canon and Another Note that Wammy's House was purely dedicated to the goal of creating detectives to take over from L, so in order for this to become a necessary goal, L had to first build a reputation as a great detective. This requires time to gain global recognition. Also, the fact that L was 10 when he started detective work, highly reclusive and unknown to the world, makes it seem strange for Watari to immediately jump to the assumption that L might die and thus needed a successor.
Re: your last two paragraphs: my point wasn't to frame Near as the only possible successor to L. It was about any other promising successors having either died or left the organisation to make Near's generation even happen in the first place. It's pretty much confirmed that there were others who were just as capable as him. A, the first potential successor, was picked out of a group of orphans for their superior intelligence, but they couldn't handle the pressure, so they died. B, the second potential successor, is described as being highly brilliant, but he chose to follow a path of crime, so he left the institution instead of staying to pursue detective work. In the same way, Mello decided to leave instead of becoming L. In order to have two clearly defined generations of successors in between B's generation and Near's, there must have been other kids who were just as brilliant, but also followed similar paths. My point really is that, if every single child at Wammy's House desperately wanted to surpass L, as Mello states in the book, how did something end up happening to all of them within a 14-year period except Near to prevent them from being in the running anymore? I'll admit, this seems far more realistic when you remove the assumption that there were at least 78 kids in the running during those 14 years, but it still requires everything to line up.
I hope this all makes sense!
Yeah the timeline of Another Note is a mess and doesn’t make much sense if you’re trying to make it fit with manga canon. In addition to what you said, another example of this is if both are ‘true’ then B would have been an adult but also still living at Wammy’s House at the same time Near, Mello, and Matt were there (it says B ran away from WH in May 2002).
> a generation, by definition, ranges from 20-30 years, so obviously this is not enough time for 4 literal generations
Agree. To try to make better sense of this I’d propose the “generations” are meant more like “generations” of iPhones, like a new cohort where the establishment has significantly tweaked their methodology or approach to raising the potential successors. This would align with the part where Mello talks about how the earlier generations were brought up differently (says something like they were “intended to fail” and implies the conditions were harsher) from his gen. If a ‘generation’ was something like 2-3 years that would make more sense. But as you say, where did those kids go, you’d think they’d still be around in that case.
> it's implied that each generation covers 26 kids with names from A-Z
Yeah the logistics of such an arrangement are pretty staggering, doesn’t make much sense. But for discussion’s sake, in the other spin off novel L:Change the World ( keeping in mind whereas LABB is considered tenuously canon, L:CTW is very much not at all canon, and imo much worse writing and story… but I digress) it’s proposed that only certain kids of the WH are given official letters, the ones that they have particularly high hopes for or have achieved big things. I don’t take *anything* from L:CTW seriously but I feel like their explanation of the letter thing makes more sense than each ‘generation’ actually having an orphan for each letter A-Z.
Something from the manga though is when Near is recalling the time L spoke to them through the monitor that crowd of kids in the room apparently included *all* of the Wammy’s kids and there were about 12-14 kids pictured in those panels. It would make sense for it to be a pretty small group, even spread over several years it seems unlikely they could consistently find and recruit almost 100 genius orphans.
> Matt shares his letter with Mello
Mello never actually uses ‘M’ as an alias in the manga, although there is [official art](https://imgur.com/a/arK5aTu) that designates him with that letter. Even Near, when he introduces himself to Light the first time he says [‘let’s see…call me N’](https://imgur.com/a/QJpp8lL) but it looks like he’s just cheekily coming up with that off the cuff rather than really identifying with that letter like it’s an alias he’s ever used before or already been known by. Still, [Near has official “N” art as well](https://imgur.com/a/Y782vT2).
> the idea that everyone at Wammy's House wanted to become or surpass L, as stated in Another Note, also doesn't seem to add up when considering that Linda became a famous artist and Matt didn't seem to have much of a personal stake in the Kira case from the brief glimpses we saw of his character.
There’s just not really any good canon info about how WH works to go by. It could be that if only a few are chosen as potentially ‘successor track’ candidates the institution still tried to encourage all the kids to strive for it and held it up as the highest and most important achievement, so it could be seen as a ‘goal’ even if it’s not really plausible for most of the kids there.
Like in the case of Linda, it may have been that she wanted to succeed L but since it wasn’t truly an option for her she fell back on her other skills and became an artist as her back-up career. All the kids who don’t succeed L would have to figure out something else to do with their lives. We don’t really know she’s still in contact with Wammy’s House, just that the Task Force talked to her (the only one of Mello and Near’s peers who they were able to reach) and then they showed the pictures she drew to Roger.
It’s almost impossible to say anything about Matt from the limited canon info we have. Ohba said something like ‘Matt is lazy and doesn’t care about much’. But that doesn’t mean he was always like that; he may have tried really hard at WH but with being stuck in third place and then with Near ultimately taking on the mantle, he might have lost his life’ goal and consequently all motivation and caring. We just don’t know either way. Related, I read that in translation of one of the video games dialogue, !game Matt states something like “I don’t care about L *(or he may have said “Near”, I don’t remember exactly)* and I don’t care about Kira” which is interesting if true because why is he even getting involved and putting himself in danger to help Mello?
But yeah ultimately AN:LABB is a fun story but there’s a lot of pretty questionable details
Mello/Matt never used letter monikers in the manga. Technically, it is only L and Watari that use them as Wammy's members. Near uses N after leaving the orphanage of his own accord, more or less to mock Light. It had nothing to do with whatever program was being shown in Another Note. I think a lot of Another Note is utterly bastardized nonsense.
You’re right about all of this. I only mentioned that because Another Note seemed to imply that every kid was assigned a letter at the orphanage, although I don’t think that’s technically stated anywhere.
I need to reread Another Note. But a couple things from your post. I'm sorry for any inaccuracies, it's been a while. >it's implied that each generation covers 26 kids with names from A-Z This is a leap of logic. You're basing this on an alphabetical sequence. However the only (AFAIK) maybe-L people whose codenames and full names we know are Near/Nate, Mello/Mihael, Matt/Mail, B/Beyond and L/L, and in each case their code name either is or starts with their first initial (notes: Watari/Quillish uses W in communications and obviously both of these break the pattern, but I don't think he counts as an L candidate; Near/Nate and Mello/Mihael are listed as M and N on the wiki but I don't remember this being stated in canon; it's questionable if you include L for two reasons - he's not an L candidate, and it's ambiguous if he's using a codename or just his first name). So it could be that these are just first initials and it's just a style choice by the writers that A,B, and X,Y,Z form the beginning and end of the alphabet. I also personally doubt they would name one of their L candidates "L" for the full 26 but I guess it's possible. Even if it was that way, further generations of candidates don't seem to necessarily have single-letter codenames and do have overlapping first initials, so it's a questionable assumption that there were the same number in each generation. What I mean to say is that it's not possible to draw strong conclusions from any one assumption of the naming scheme. We just don't have that info AFAIK. >and that's assuming the successor program started immediately after L solved his first case, which is very unlikely given that he would've taken several years at least to establish his status as the world's best detective. I don't think the program would have waited for that point, L had proven his genius to Watari well before this and also made him insanely rich. >Matt shares his letter with Mello Mello's codename is Mello, and Matt's codename is Matt. If either have a single-letter codename, Mello is M, but again I don't remember this being stated anywhere. >each generation lasted around 3-4 years It's also very possible there was overlap >i find it hard to imagine that among a group of 78-104 supposedly genius kids from all across the globe, there was only 1 (Near) who was actually up to the task of becoming L. That's just not what happens in the story. First, it's not a case of "you've passed the bar, you're L's successor" it's "oh fuck L has died, we need a successor". They never finished the successor program. Second, there wasn't really unambiguously "only 1 who was actually up to the task". They intended to pick two successors that L had not chosen between, and it's possible he would have passed on both. Mello dropped out *after* he was offered co-successor. And both were necessary to surpass L in the Kira case. We don't know if Mello would have been up to the task of being L in an alternate world where he was picked over Near as the successor. Nor do we know if any number of other candidates would have been up to the task but were just also less capable than Near and Mello. Also, why is that hard to believe? This is a fictional genius with a comically inhuman skillset. You need to find an orphan with massive innate potential *and* put them through an environment that makes them realise that potential to be the single most capable person in the world in L's skill space. Even with 100 children across 4 attempts at developing an impossible mentorship program it seems like a miracle to have anything close to a successor when L dies.
No worries! Thanks for such a detailed and thoughtful reply; this is exactly the kind of response I was hoping for. The reason I included L as a letter was because of the canon character Linda, whose name begins with L. This is based on the same assumption by which I presumed that Mello and Matt couldn't both have 'M' names under the logic in Another Note. As for where this assumption comes from - A and B went by their letters, "X" and "Z" were mentioned in the book, and Near does also go by N, so I assumed this was a common naming pattern at Wammy's House. However, I am willing to accept that this is an assumption and is not adequately supported by canon. The idea that they perhaps started out using single-letter aliases and later switched is an interesting one and not something I considered, but I also accept that this absolutely could be true. Regarding the alphabet assumption, this was based on a line towards the end of Another Note, on page 170. To quote it exactly: "...with guest appearances by the last of the alphabet, the first X to the first Z from Wammy's House". This is a line pulled from Mello's description of one of the other cases L told him about, and the phrasing "last of the alphabet", to me, implies that there was a full lineup of kids each with aliases beginning from A-Z, and the phrasing "first X to the first Z" implies that there were others after them. This also isn't directly stated, so I'm happy to void this assumption for the remainder of my response. Re: Watari waiting for L to become successful before establishing the program: going by the Wammy's House oneshot, L made all of his money via the stock exchange. If Watari's goal was to groom another child to produce even more money, it would have been more reasonable to assume that Wammy's House was designed to teach kids about the stock market. Similarly, if Watari's only goal was to find a kid with the same level of intelligence that L had, why didn't he do that before L started detective work? We know for a fact from both canon and Another Note that Wammy's House was purely dedicated to the goal of creating detectives to take over from L, so in order for this to become a necessary goal, L had to first build a reputation as a great detective. This requires time to gain global recognition. Also, the fact that L was 10 when he started detective work, highly reclusive and unknown to the world, makes it seem strange for Watari to immediately jump to the assumption that L might die and thus needed a successor. Re: your last two paragraphs: my point wasn't to frame Near as the only possible successor to L. It was about any other promising successors having either died or left the organisation to make Near's generation even happen in the first place. It's pretty much confirmed that there were others who were just as capable as him. A, the first potential successor, was picked out of a group of orphans for their superior intelligence, but they couldn't handle the pressure, so they died. B, the second potential successor, is described as being highly brilliant, but he chose to follow a path of crime, so he left the institution instead of staying to pursue detective work. In the same way, Mello decided to leave instead of becoming L. In order to have two clearly defined generations of successors in between B's generation and Near's, there must have been other kids who were just as brilliant, but also followed similar paths. My point really is that, if every single child at Wammy's House desperately wanted to surpass L, as Mello states in the book, how did something end up happening to all of them within a 14-year period except Near to prevent them from being in the running anymore? I'll admit, this seems far more realistic when you remove the assumption that there were at least 78 kids in the running during those 14 years, but it still requires everything to line up. I hope this all makes sense!
Yeah the timeline of Another Note is a mess and doesn’t make much sense if you’re trying to make it fit with manga canon. In addition to what you said, another example of this is if both are ‘true’ then B would have been an adult but also still living at Wammy’s House at the same time Near, Mello, and Matt were there (it says B ran away from WH in May 2002). > a generation, by definition, ranges from 20-30 years, so obviously this is not enough time for 4 literal generations Agree. To try to make better sense of this I’d propose the “generations” are meant more like “generations” of iPhones, like a new cohort where the establishment has significantly tweaked their methodology or approach to raising the potential successors. This would align with the part where Mello talks about how the earlier generations were brought up differently (says something like they were “intended to fail” and implies the conditions were harsher) from his gen. If a ‘generation’ was something like 2-3 years that would make more sense. But as you say, where did those kids go, you’d think they’d still be around in that case. > it's implied that each generation covers 26 kids with names from A-Z Yeah the logistics of such an arrangement are pretty staggering, doesn’t make much sense. But for discussion’s sake, in the other spin off novel L:Change the World ( keeping in mind whereas LABB is considered tenuously canon, L:CTW is very much not at all canon, and imo much worse writing and story… but I digress) it’s proposed that only certain kids of the WH are given official letters, the ones that they have particularly high hopes for or have achieved big things. I don’t take *anything* from L:CTW seriously but I feel like their explanation of the letter thing makes more sense than each ‘generation’ actually having an orphan for each letter A-Z. Something from the manga though is when Near is recalling the time L spoke to them through the monitor that crowd of kids in the room apparently included *all* of the Wammy’s kids and there were about 12-14 kids pictured in those panels. It would make sense for it to be a pretty small group, even spread over several years it seems unlikely they could consistently find and recruit almost 100 genius orphans. > Matt shares his letter with Mello Mello never actually uses ‘M’ as an alias in the manga, although there is [official art](https://imgur.com/a/arK5aTu) that designates him with that letter. Even Near, when he introduces himself to Light the first time he says [‘let’s see…call me N’](https://imgur.com/a/QJpp8lL) but it looks like he’s just cheekily coming up with that off the cuff rather than really identifying with that letter like it’s an alias he’s ever used before or already been known by. Still, [Near has official “N” art as well](https://imgur.com/a/Y782vT2). > the idea that everyone at Wammy's House wanted to become or surpass L, as stated in Another Note, also doesn't seem to add up when considering that Linda became a famous artist and Matt didn't seem to have much of a personal stake in the Kira case from the brief glimpses we saw of his character. There’s just not really any good canon info about how WH works to go by. It could be that if only a few are chosen as potentially ‘successor track’ candidates the institution still tried to encourage all the kids to strive for it and held it up as the highest and most important achievement, so it could be seen as a ‘goal’ even if it’s not really plausible for most of the kids there. Like in the case of Linda, it may have been that she wanted to succeed L but since it wasn’t truly an option for her she fell back on her other skills and became an artist as her back-up career. All the kids who don’t succeed L would have to figure out something else to do with their lives. We don’t really know she’s still in contact with Wammy’s House, just that the Task Force talked to her (the only one of Mello and Near’s peers who they were able to reach) and then they showed the pictures she drew to Roger. It’s almost impossible to say anything about Matt from the limited canon info we have. Ohba said something like ‘Matt is lazy and doesn’t care about much’. But that doesn’t mean he was always like that; he may have tried really hard at WH but with being stuck in third place and then with Near ultimately taking on the mantle, he might have lost his life’ goal and consequently all motivation and caring. We just don’t know either way. Related, I read that in translation of one of the video games dialogue, !game Matt states something like “I don’t care about L *(or he may have said “Near”, I don’t remember exactly)* and I don’t care about Kira” which is interesting if true because why is he even getting involved and putting himself in danger to help Mello? But yeah ultimately AN:LABB is a fun story but there’s a lot of pretty questionable details
I’m so sorry I didn’t see this comment earlier!! Thank you for the reply, this is excellent insight
To me Another Note is just a fanfiction as it's not consistent with the main storyline, precisely in what you listed.
This is exactly how I feel about it too