Never ready, so let's do this!

Only critique I got is The White Rabbit being a human, made him a lot less fuckable

It was hyped up ad nauseam as a faithful adaptation of the games that would keep the spirit and core essence of the games.

This ended up being a complete lie; the core theme of DMC is that humanity is defined by love and compassion, and that these are more powerful than anything that could be gained by sacrificing them. That is why the series is called Devil May Cry, because caring about something enough to cry about it is proof that you have these core traits of humanity, and why Dante says "Devils never cry", it's a condemnation of evil because they're lack the ability to care about others and that makes them weak. Dante takes pride in his ability to cry, because it proves that he has humanity.

The show however completely flips this. Now humans are defined by cruelty and selfishness, and demons crying isn't a profound and meaningful sign of goodness but instead just something they can all do now. Rather than having a series that has an optimistic message about love triumphing over evil, instead it's made into a cynical message where every human character that expresses the values of love and compassion end up killed or having their world view destroyed.

The characters are a mess too. Dante while a goof in the games isn't an idiot, moonlighting as a private eye and owning his own office before he was even 20, but the show makes him completely incompetent dumbass. He's hyped up as an unstoppable force, but the only fight he actually wins is against the human mercenaries in episode 2 of season 1, the rest of the show he only ever wins because he had someone helping him out. His humour is also a parody of himself, no longer someone so confident in his own ability or coolness that he'll perform with a new weapon for an audience of no one but himself, instead he's always trying to impress other people and rather than being under whelmed by even the most absurd situation he's now struggling to keep up with other people and ending up embarrassed. You know that scene where he's put in a dress and acts upset? In the 2007 anime Lady takes a jab at him cross dressing and his reply by asking for her clothing suggestions. If game Dante were put in the same situation putting on dresses, he wouldn't be embarrassed, he'd joke that the dress didn't compliment his eyes. Dante needs to be 100% sincere and committed to whatever he does, that's what makes him cool even when he's embarrassing himself. Dante should not care what other people think of him because he's the only person he's trying to impress.

And that lack of sincerity is really the thing that Netflix Dante lacks. It's not just the jokes, Dante is a deeply compassionate person. He hides it behind the jokes and laissez-faire attitude, but he's someone that practically adopted an orphan girl despite telling her he wanted nothing to do with her, and went out of his way to make sure she didn't see the violent bloodshed around her.

He's also someone that takes family very seriously. Again with Patty, when she opens up about wanting to see her mother she expects him to make fun of her but instead he says "Everyone wants to see their parents." His entire beef with Nero in 5 is because he's trying to protect his nephew from the pain he went through killing Vergil.

Lady is goes from someone motivated by trauma into taking responsibility for the actions of another person to someone motivated by trauma to ignore responsibility for her own actions. Game Lady is acting because her father is a monster and she feels she has a moral obligation to stop him despite the fact there's still a part of her that loves him, while Mary is blindly following orders that hurt innocents and when she finally grows a conscience she doesn't actually take any action to undo the harm she caused. Worse, she has no impact on Dante's growth. In 3, Dante was apathetic and resentful towards his father to the point he was ignoring the good his father did and the hard his brother was, but Lady's determination to stop Arkham simply because they were family shook Dante out of his funk and forced him to confront the legacy of his family and let go of his undeserved resentment of Sparda and become the hero we know that champions compassion and love. In the show Dante's already a decent person that wants to help people and Mary is just an attack dog lacking her own drive so she has no impact on Dante as a character. Also she kills innocents and we're supposed to feel bad for her. No, she's a war criminal now.

As for Vergil, he's just entirely whitewashed now. Nothing he does is his fault anymore, it's all because he was manipulated. Vergil is cool and has an aura of nobility, but at his core he's an asshole. He doesn't care about anyone but himself and considers anyone weaker than him worthless. I love him, but he's not an anti-villain, he's a villain. He reacted to tragedy by swearing to never be hurt again, and in doing so he obsessed over power and tried to emulate Sparda at the cost of upholding what Sparda stood for. None of that is in the show, he now cares about weaker beings and believes what he's doing is for the greater good. Vergil should never help someone, even in visions of V he only starts doing it because he's trying to emulate why Dante always beat him.

Then there's the politics, which completely mess up the series. Firstly, comparing real life refugees to demons is disgusting, especially when you make them eat humans or are biologically inclined to aggression and violence. And before you say "they're not actually demons" a reminder that Mundus says this

And the series wants to have its cake and eat it too. It says that these refugees are victims and deserving of compassion, yet that doesn't stop them from having Dante take one of the orphan refugees that was tortured and abused and turn them into boxing gloves and use it to fight the other tortured orphan refugees. It's made worse because Dante doesn't interact with the refugee demons at all, not in any of the episodes because it would break the message.

When the game series had good demons, it was always because they had gained humanity and shown the capacity to love and cry. Humanity isn't talked about as a species, it's a concept. Love is what defines humans, so if you have love you are a human. That's why when he talks with Brad in the 2007 anime he tells him "It's true, you are pretty pathetic… for a demon. But if you can love Angelina that much, you'll be able to live as a human." He's not literally a homo sapien now, but as far as Dante cares he's got what Dante believes is needed to be defined as a human.

Then there's the fact that the shows creator doesn't give a shit about the politics they're preaching. Adi Shankar, despite shoving this critique of the war in the middle east for profit into the show, has no problem supporting the man that just started another war in the middle east for profit.

Nor does he have any problem adding Asmongold into the show. The DMC fanbase doesn't want anything to do with those vile, racist bastards.

There's also the fact that he only wanted the rights so he could take credit for "saving" a dead franchise and got upset when DMC5 was announced because it meant he wouldn't be praised as it's saviour. And for all his claims for saving the series, DMC5 was already Capcoms best selling game that wasn't Street Fighter, Resident Evil, or Monster Hunter.

No one is asking for an adaptation that's 1 to 1, the only people that think fans want that is an idiot. What fans want is something that doesn't directly contradict what people like about the series. Where the games say humanity is defined by love, the show says they're defined by cruelty. Where the games say love triumphs, the show says it will lose. Where the games tell a story about family, the show tells a story about america. Just because we haven't had anything new since 2020 doesn't mean we should settle for something bad.

At the end of the day, I feel I can sum it up with one question... Why is it called Devil May Cry? I don't mean that like "why didn't they just make it a new IP", I mean what does that title mean for the series. A devil may cry when their family is killed in a concentration camp? A devil may cry when their home is invaded for oil? A devil may cry when their rulers oppress them? None of that comes close to the reason the games are called Devil May Cry.

edging him

happy 2 years of shin megami tensei v: vengeance!

Thinking about Baal's water goblet…

It's so funny how most ppl assumed that his goblet is filled with wine (same…), but Kazuma Kaneko revealed recently in a twitter reply that it's water lol

More power to fellow game-verse fans if you can enjoy it I guess; your taste buds and stomach are Sons of Sparda level. But the fact there seems to be no nod of acknowledgement of the source material genuinely rubs me the wrong way. It sorta feels like the aesthetics of DMC without the actual essence of it, and that the characters holding Dante, Vergil and Lady's appearances and names are parody actors.

And the most tragic shit, imho, is that they could STILL have done good with some of Netflix's premise.

Eva was more fleshed out as a character, since she had more screentime now. Giving her witch powers meant more potential angles to explore too. Introducing OCs like White Rabbit and demons as a people was a VERY bold move, but if handled well, the story also could have been like Lady's and Arkham's: a commentary that evil and good was not so clearly divided into demons and humans, that both could exist in either side.

Unfortunately humans turned out to be The Real Evil All Along and the demons were largely just victims of a genocide, which completely destroyed that nuance and message 💀

Also stripped Vergil of his redemption arc and character growth, since now it meant his actions in slaughtering humans was misguided but ultimately noble. Which, genuinely, what the ever-loving hell. His story was about a person being driven to do monstrous, inexcusable things because of his personal trauma and tragedy! Keyword being "monstrous" and "inexcusable". By making Vergil's starting point (and first appearance in the show) a protector of his people who targets soldiers, the optics of being an indiscriminate murderer gets lost (or at least muddied) by that justification.

Not to mention Lady's character arc and agency, which REALLY got removed by turning her into a hardhearted zealot and a government lapdog.

Where was the Lady who was hell-bent on stopping her monster of a father, but still shed tears for him when she found his ruined body in Temen-ni-Gru? THAT Lady had strength, principles and compassion. THAT Lady would have been a whistle-blower, or tried to sabotage things from behind the scenes the first instant she realised she was acting like and being used as an instrument to massacre a people. SHE would have been interesting to watch.

The writing in the Netflix series failed, because it introduced too many differing elements at once, and didn't stop to think about the ripple effects of those elements upon the world of DMC and how that would affect the story it was telling. More importantly, the script writers didn't carefully consider how they could use those changes to honour the IP and ADD TO IT.

Tbh, this whole thing reeks of an ego trip of a newcomer upstart stepping on the toes of their predecessors, thinking they could carve their own path and create an entirely new thing without paying respects to the original work. But that might just be me.

The girl from the ranch