

Disclaimer because I’m about to start defending his intelligence: Light is a horrible person regardless.
Light’s first slip up is his temper, causing him to act without thinking to kill Lind L Taylor on live TV. In all fairness, until that point he had killed hundreds of people already with zero resistance and if you want people to “know of my existence” what better way to do so than to kill someone on live TV and get away with it.
The next “mistakes” he makes are in focusing on killing L instead of hiding from him. But really he would rather play a deadly game with L than anything else, and he does play that game intelligently and win despite many unforeseen obstacles.
Point is, light doesn’t get caught because he isn’t intelligent, he gets caught because he’s more obsessed with power and domination than not getting caught or actually saving the world.
I mean that’s literally why he’s evil: he’s not trying to fix the world.
He himself mentions that society just tends to decay and—knowing that he won’t live forever—he must know that killing evil people and trying to keep people in line with fear will not work and will not last. However, he does it anyway because fixing the world is just the excuse he uses to justify his god complex.
He’s not stupid, he’s just more entertained playing with death than he is doing anything else.
Unfortunately no, also I haven’t really watched much anime (I only know who three of the people on the chart are).
However, in the non-anime category, the tv show “Hannibal” has two very intelligent characters play this same kind of game of cat and mouse.
You know who the antagonist is, but the other characters… not so much. So you get the same kind of dynamic where people are talking with Light like he’s a normal person when you know he’s Kira.
You also get some seriously fucked up mind games between the antagonist and protagonist and get those same moments of “well how is he going to get out of this?” For both of them.
It’s also like a normal-ish crime TV show. Anyway, good stuff, idk if it’s what you’re looking for but you might like it regardless