Near's finger puppets

Near's finger puppets are some of the various toys Near plays with. They represent characters in the Death Note series who play a significant role in his theories.

Appearance
The finger puppets usually have large, round eyes and are small enough to easily fit in Near's fingers.

Plot
Near is first shown working on the finger puppets when he receives a call from Aizawa, who has confirmed that Light and Takada are passing notes to each other during their nightly meetings. Though Near bluntly informs him that he and the other Task Force members are no longer relevant to his investigation, Near has created finger puppets resembling the members of the Task Force, among others.

Prior to the creation of the finger puppets, Near used LEGO figure-like toys to represent the characters in his theories. The toy used to represent Kira had "L," "Kira," and Light's given name in Japanese written on it, and the toy used to represent X-Kira had Teru Mikami's family name written on it.

Characters represented

 * Near
 * Mello
 * L
 * Kira
 * X-Kira
 * Takada
 * Rester
 * Lidner
 * Gevanni
 * Aizawa
 * Matsuda
 * Ide
 * Mogi
 * Misa

Never Complete One-shot
In the Never Complete one-shot manga chapter, Near has a Ryuk finger puppet, complete with a small, detachable Death Note. He also makes a finger puppet to represent Minoru Tanaka, whom he refers to as A-Kira. The A-Kira puppet looks almost identical to the original Kira puppet.

Conception
Tsugumi Ohba stated that the finger puppets used by Near in the final chapter did not exist in the thumbnails and that he felt the final scenes "looked cooler" with them. Takeshi Obata said that he felt he could express "negative" parts of Near with the puppets, adding that one could see "his dark side in his kind of puppets he used."

Trivia

 * Obata said that Near made the Kira finger puppet first and drew on it with a magic marker. Near must have created the other puppets afterward.
 * Obata notes that while Near respects L, he doesn't really like him as a person, so Obata had Near depict L as ugly. However, Near honestly likes Mello and worked hard on the Mello finger puppet.