Meowdynasty

The most common complaint about Netflix's Devil May Cry is that its Dante doesn't feel like Dante. He tolerates mistreatment, struggles to access his power, and carries an emotional openness that sits awkwardly against the franchise's iconic image of effortless cool. These complaints, however, share a common premise: that the show's Dante should be read against the finished version, the stable endpoint, as though any deviation from that image is a failure of characterization. What the show is actually doing is more interesting and more demanding — it is constructing, piece by piece, the psychological conditions that eventually produce that endpoint. To watch Netflix's Devil May Cry critically is to read it developmentally rather than statically, and once that frame is in place, the characterization stops looking like a departure and starts looking like an origin.

The foundation of that origin is a specific psychological bind. Dante's relationship to his demonic power is not a simple conflict between human and monster — the show is careful to establish that demonic energy is not inherently evil. What it is, however, is affectively contaminated. Dante accesses his Devil Trigger primarily through states of overwhelming rage, grief, hatred, and emotional rupture. From his subjective perspective, this means that demonicity becomes psychologically entangled with the most unbearable parts of his inner life. The power itself may be neutral, but his route to it runs directly through everything he has learned to fear about himself. His own words make this explicit: turning demon showed him "what his power truly is," and forced him to "feel the rage and hatred that feeds it." Power and pain share the same access route, and Dante, predictably, responds by compartmentalizing both.

This is why he describes DT activation as "a thought that's always there in the back of my mind until suddenly I'm living inside it" — a formulation that suggests not a skill but an intrusion, something that bypasses rather than responds to conscious control. His mother's scene in episode seven frames the stakes precisely: his hurt, she tells him, is not "some monster that he can fight" but something he has to accept as part of him. This potentially destabilizes his entire interpretive framework, because if his emotional intensity is not evidence of monstrosity but evidence of humanity, then the contamination runs the other direction — it is not that the demonic poisons the human, but that the human, for Dante, has never been experienced as purely human at all. Every intensely human experience — grief, rage, fear, loneliness, attachment — arrives already entangled with destructive potential and instability. His humanity itself becomes the site of contamination. That is a genuinely painful bind: he cannot cleanly separate the thing that makes him feel human from the thing that makes him feel inhuman.

This internal bind does not exist in isolation. It actively shapes the world around Dante. As his awareness of his demonic heritage deepens — as the compartments crack and the denial gives way to confrontation — the tone and texture of the story itself darken in response. Season 1 presents a lighter, more episodic feel while Dante is still hiding and compartmentalizing. By Season 2, with his brother revealed as alive and aligned with Mundus, with panic attacks, brutal confrontations, and fresh losses, the series shifts into a heavier, more melancholic register. The world doesn’t merely backdrop Dante’s development; it reflects and amplifies it. This is not accidental escalation but a structural choice: Dante’s psyche functions as the engine that modulates the story’s aesthetic climate.

From this foundation, the show constructs its second major argument: a developmental trajectory explaining how this Dante becomes the more emotionally guarded version familiar from the games. The key is that the construction is not announced — the puzzle pieces are distributed across scenes, behavioral tendencies, and relational dynamics that have to be held in suspension before they converge into a coherent picture.

Consider the Lady dynamic, which has attracted the most criticism. Dante tolerates asymmetrical treatment, minimizes retaliation, and attaches quickly despite ongoing relational imbalance. Read statically, this looks like passivity or poor writing. Read developmentally, it looks like the behavior of someone whose attachment history has produced scarcity — someone for whom rare moments of mutual recognition override the usual signals of self-protection. The conditioning is explicit in the show: his mother's lesson that he should never use his full strength against those weaker than him, because it wouldn't be fair, gets recycled into a framework that lets him absorb Lady's behavior without retaliation. He rationalizes it the same way: she's not superpowered, he is. He should make it a fair game. The fairness logic is doing real psychological work, but it's covering something simpler — he has almost no one, and the few people who were with him are dead, and so he latches onto small moments of being understood even when the larger relational structure is imbalanced.

What the show appears to be building toward is a crystallization event. Losing both Lady and Vergil — the two primary attachment figures whose loss the show has been carefully preparing — would constitute precisely the kind of repeated attachment rupture that produces what Dante eventually becomes: emotionally distanced, self-protectively isolated, performing lightness as a way of not having to access the underlying affect. The tragic continuity the show is constructing is this: the very openness that makes this younger Dante more emotionally available eventually contributes to the formation of the more closed-off Dante of the games. His desire for connection is not incidental to his later guardedness — it is its cause.

What makes this adaptation genuinely compelling, then, is not that it simplifies the tension between Dante's human and demonic sides into something more psychologically legible. It is that it refuses to mechanically contrast them at all. Instead, the two become entangled through lived experience — through the specific conditions under which Dante learned to access power, through the losses that taught him what openness costs, through the bind of a humanity he can never experience as uncomplicated. The show is not asking whether Dante is more human or more demon. It is asking what psychological process produces a person who, by the time the games begin, has already learned to treat that question as unanswerable — and has chosen performance over exposure as his permanent settlement with it.

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Just some personal observations on the netflix adaptation 😁 I enjoy the games too and wrote some fics about it. You can find me under the username Pucchanchan on AO3!

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He hit the ground rolling and came up with blood at his hairline, a warm line of it running down toward his eye, and got cover again, and in the half-second the cover bought him his mind did the thing it always did when his body was too busy to stop it. It went looking for who to blame. It found him.

How. That was the part. Not why — he was done with why, why was a mug's game — but how, mechanically, step by step, did a man end up underground fighting a thing the size of a cottage for a stranger he'd never met.

He could trace it. That was the worst of it; it traced clean. Cyclops because the catacomb. Catacomb because the grandchild. Grandchild because the deal — find the grandchild, we'll leave Gresit, no more trouble — and the deal because Trevor had stood in that decrepit building they had dared to call a dwelling, and offered it, mouth running ahead of sense, like he had coin to spend on other people's families. And the offer because—

The eye fired and he moved, and a corner of his cloak caught the edge of the gaze and went to stone, dragging at his shoulder, and he had to shake the dead weight of it off mid-stride and get behind the next column before the thing could correct. The grey figure stood at the dead center of the ring through all of it, the petrified thing he'd come down to dig out, and Trevor worked the floor around it the way you work around any fixed thing in a fight — one more piece of the room that wouldn't move.

Chapters: 1/? Fandom: Devil May Cry (Gameverse), Castlevania (Cartoon 2017-2021) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Characters: Dante (Devil May Cry), Trevor Belmont, Alucard | Adrian Tepes | Arikado Genya, Sypha Belnades, Dracula Vlad Tepes | Mathias Cronqvist Summary:

It had been supposed to go down. That was the whole point — down, after, through the gap while there was still a gap. The way down had taken one look at where he wanted to be, made a decision he wasn't consulted on, and put him here instead. The wrong hell. A cold backward country a few centuries shy of the fork, with a demon problem, a body count, and the one man who might know how the doors worked sitting at the center of all of it like a spider — the lunatic who'd torn the sky open over the local town and let the dark pour through.

So: find the lunatic. Simple enough, except finding him meant falling in with a drunk who killed things for a living and a woman who threw fire, and the drunk had a third one stashed somewhere, pale and blond and allergic to conversation, who turned out to be the lunatic's son. Which was how a man ended up hunting the worst thing in the country shoulder to shoulder with its child and two people whose whole family trade was putting things like him in the ground.

Have you ever followed a random habit or preference down a chain of questions and suddenly realized you've ended up somewhere far upstream?

I have this weird ritual I do sometimes. I'll open Google Maps, pick a pretty river somewhere in Europe, and trace it backward to its source. Along the way I'll pause at random spots — watch the river branch, notice where it widens, zoom in on some tiny town or a restaurant sitting right on the bank — and just take in the scenery. Then I keep going until I reach the beginning. There's something oddly satisfying about landing at the source and thinking, huh, that's where it all starts.

Questioning my own patterns feels similar. You have a question that leads to another question and then to another, except every time you move you're going one level above. The difference from the river is that you're not following the current downstream — you're moving against it, toward whatever is feeding everything else. Each question opens onto a slightly higher vantage point until the original question starts to look like just one visible part of something much larger underneath it.

I noticed this process again recently while working on a piece. I had a rough sketch — a skeleton, really — and I tossed the same material at an LLM just to see what it would spit out. Not because I needed help writing it. I already had the whole thing in my head. I was mostly curious to see my own thinking reflected back at me, and where our approaches split.

What came back was competent and well-organized. It was also immediately, obviously not mine.

The most obvious difference was that the model started with a clean thesis statement. It told you upfront what the piece was going to argue. That's totally normal for a lot of analytical writing, but I find it almost impossible to do. My stuff almost never starts with "here's what I'm arguing." It starts with a question, or a random observation, or some specific thing I noticed. I want the reader to walk the same path I did and see it for themselves instead of being handed the conclusion first.

Forcing the ending upfront just feels like I'm imposing on the reader. And when I caught myself using that word — "imposing" — something clicked. Why force something that's already there in the material? If the structure is real, you don't need to argue it into existence. You just need to point at it clearly enough.

That realization felt connected to how I engage with stuff I care about.

I wrote about this before — the two rough ways people get attached to things. One treats the object like a screen: you project onto it, feel through it, use it as a surface for whatever you want to imagine. That can be intense and real, but the object itself is mostly just the occasion.

The other treats it like it has its own actual shape and logic. You can be wrong about it. You let it push back and correct you. The faithfulness isn't some moral high ground — it's more like a perceptual habit. You're trying to see what's really there instead of what you'd prefer, because the independent existence of the thing is what makes it interesting in the first place.

I realized the writing habit and the attachment style are running on the same underlying principle: don't impose. Let the thing be what it is. Whether it's a piece of writing or a show or a character, forcing your version on top of what's already there just feels wrong.

So if the same instinct keeps showing up in both places, what's actually upstream generating both?

My best current explanation is that my perception tends to go structural first. Before I even decide if I like something — a text, a piece of music, an argument, a show — I'm usually noticing how it holds together — the internal logic, the way the pieces fit, the topology. That early structural awareness makes imposition feels wrong before it even becomes a value judgement. Since you're directly tracking the object's own structure, replacing it registers as distortion at the perceptual level, not just as a violation of some principle you hold.

It also makes constraints feel generative instead of limiting. A blank slate has nothing to push against. Real structure gives perception something to engage with.

So maybe the writing habit and the attachment style are both just downstream effects of the same perceptual quirk.

At some point after I'd written what turned into this whole four-essay series on Netflix's DMC, I finally stepped back and asked myself, "...why the heck did I even do all that?"

It's not "why bother analyzing the show" — that part's straightforward. I think a lot of the "this is shallow, Dante's wrong" stuff is missing what the show is actually doing, and I got annoyed enough to want to push back. But "worth correcting" doesn't explain writing a couple thousand words. People are wrong on the internet constantly and I don't usually respond with a whole series. So the real question is why this show got that kind of reaction out of me.

The honest answer is that I wrote these essays to figure things out as I went. The first one started as me chasing one specific feeling — that this Dante's relationship to his power felt structurally different from the games — and I just followed where it led. One unexpected turn created the next question, which created the next essay. The whole thing built its own momentum. I was genuinely trying to understand something.

That tells me the investment was more about investigation than expression. And the fact that this show pulled that much looking out of me says something about both me and the material.

I've been thinking there are roughly two ways people get deeply attached to something.

One way treats the thing like a mirror or a screen. You project onto it, feel things through it, use it to be or imagine what you want. That attachment can be intense and real. The object mostly serves what you bring to it.

The other way treats it like it has its own shape and logic. It resists, it corrects, and you have to be willing to shut up sometimes and actually listen to what it's doing instead of what you wish it was doing.

Most attachments live somewhere in the mix, but the balance shapes the kind of engagement that follows.

What bugged me about a lot of the Netflix DMC discourse wasn't the passion (I get that). It was the replacement move. When the show didn't match the Dante people already had in their heads, some just mentally swapped him out for their preferred version. The actual character and the structure the show built got flattened. And that felt like a waste. There's something interesting and careful there, and the replacement makes it easy to miss.

For me, the deepest pull is usually the internal logic — how the pieces hold together, how everything is doing work, how the shape holds even when you poke at it from weird angles. I like when something has its own resistance. That's what faithful attachment looks like to me: just trying to let the thing be what it is and trying not to break it while I'm figuring it out.

That kind of attachment naturally turns into analysis. You keep returning to the object, testing your read against what's actually there, and letting it correct you. The slight distance feels like respect. It leaves room for the thing to be more interesting than your first impression.

And here's the almost-too-neat part that amused me when I noticed it:

The final essay of the series — Toward Paradiso — argues that Dante's freedom isn't freedom from his messed-up condition. It's freedom inside it. His demon side, his dad's messy legacy, the way the world sees him — these are the given. The real question is whether he can inhabit that constraint so fully that it becomes the actual shape of his freedom. Reconciliation instead of something cleaner.

And that's… actually pretty much how I relate to making things in general. I don't do well with total blank slates. I need structure. I need something that pushes back. That's where the good stuff happens.

So of course the argument I got most pulled into making was the one that already made sense to me from the inside. Not because I was projecting myself onto Dante (the essays actually required the opposite), but because the show's structure clicked with how I work.

That's probably why this show hooked me the way it did. Its way of working felt familiar. And that recognition made four essays feel like the natural response instead of something extra.

This is the final piece in a series of analyses of Netflix's Devil May Cry. The earlier essays traced the psychological architecture of this Dante—his deep affective entanglement with his demonic side, the slow developmental pull toward the game-canon version of him, and Sparda's contested legacy as the unstable frame that keeps fracturing his sense of self. The third showed how a purely bottom-up reading of the show lands on the same structure as the creators' Divine Comedy scaffolding, and it named the destination: reconciliation, not resolution. This essay starts from that destination and tries to describe what it actually feels like from the inside.

There is a question the show has been quietly circling since the first episode, surfacing in almost every scene where someone tries to recruit Dante, define him, or put him to use. It's not the flashy one viewers usually track — DT mastery, revenge for his mother, or whether he'll finally become the Dante of the games. It's simpler and more fundamental: what does genuine freedom look like for someone like him?

The show approaches this question obliquely, through the people who try to tell Dante what he owes, what he is, and what he should do with it. Each encounter applies a different kind of pressure on his agency — some denying it outright, some offering a corrupted version of it. His refusals, taken together, start to reveal the shape of what he is actually building toward.

Baines is perhaps the starkest case because he's not offering anything at all. In S1E8, he tells Dante that he is tied to the war by blood, that Sparda fought for humanity, and that Dante needs to choose. Dante's refusal is immediate, almost reflexive: he's "not much of a war guy." He tells Baines to call him when he's made things worse, which is both a deflection and a genuine statement of position: he does not accept that inherited lineage determines obligation. He will not be conscripted into someone else's cause, even a cause that claims him by blood.

Vergil offers something different: freedom through power. In S2E3, he lays out his framework with characteristic clarity — that beneath every system, beneath every false righteousness and moral posturing, there is only one real law: the might to take what is yours and protect it. Dante's response — that he doesn't care about power, that he is here for himself and not for any warlord — rejects the conclusion even while acknowledging the insight. Exposing corruption doesn't mean you have to embrace a cruder form of it.

Arius delivers what perhaps is the most seductive and dangerous answer, the one that actually cuts deep because it speaks directly to something real in Dante. In S2E6 — the episode titled, not accidentally, "Purgatorio" — he frames Dante's destructive potential as exceptionalism, his contempt for authority as the natural attitude of great men whom ordinary systems cannot contain, his capacity for chaos as something that licenses burning everything down and starting over. He's been around for six centuries. He's seen every society built by men. The pattern, he says, is always the same: rules, constraints, the suppression of singular talent. Argosax gave him the only real answer: embrace the flames.

The argument shakes Dante not because it's abstractly clever, but because it names his actual experience — being pushed to the margins, constrained, feared for what he is. The "unbridled primal fury" Arius sees in him is no exaggeration. And yet Dante still refuses. He doesn't deny the fury; he denies that its existence gives him permission. "Doesn't mean I'm gonna let you set this world on fire and feed its people to your demon god."

The show quietly underlines the parallel between Arius and Baines: both invoke Sparda, both treat Dante's blood as destiny, both try to conscript him into their own cause. Both are wrong for the same reason — they see him as a product of his origins rather than someone who gets to decide what those origins will mean.

This refusal is the first clear outline of the freedom Dante is actually moving toward. It isn't the absence of constraint. It isn't the rejection of all order. It isn't chaos dressed up as liberation. It's something more difficult and more sustaining: the clear-eyed recognition of his own destructive potential, paired with the stubborn refusal to let that potential become a license.

The positive shape of that freedom — what he's walking toward, not just what he's rejecting — comes through most clearly in the Lucan flashback of S2E5. There, Dante is still trapped inside his "false, cynical shell," using his power carelessly while chasing revenge as some kind of cosmic balancing act. Lucan tells him the truth he isn't ready to hear: he will only reach his full strength on the "path of the light," when he starts living for something beyond himself. Dante rejects it. He is stubborn, Lucan notes. Just like his father.

That scene now reads like a before-image. Dante's realized freedom, the show suggests, will not be freedom from the larger order. It will be freedom within it. His demonic nature, his father's fractured legacy, the world's reflexive suspicion of what he is — none of those inherited facts are going away. What changes is how he carries them. We already see the shift happening in scattered, imperfect choices: protecting human lives not because blood demands it, but because he decides they matter; rejecting Arius not just on principle, but because he refuses to buy his revenge at the price of the world's people. He is choosing the path of the light, haltingly, while the ground keeps moving under his feet.

And then Season 2 ends. Lady and Vergil are lost to him. He is left alone with the choice he made and no reward for having made it.

This is where the original Divine Comedy becomes the most illuminating lens. The poem begins with the loss of the "straight path." Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, midway through life's journey, the direct road gone, a dark wood instead. The entire ascent through Inferno and Purgatorio is not about finding the old road again. It is a transformation made possible by the loss. You cannot reach Paradiso by going back. You can only reach it by going all the way through.

In the original Paradiso, the deepest tension between individual will and divine order does not vanish through escape or submission. It dissolves because the self has been reshaped. The souls there are not free from the order; they are free within it and gladly toward it. Will and order become the same thing in experience. The friction is gone. What remains is something like perfect voluntary alignment — the quiet discovery that the order and the self have finally become one.

Netflix Dante is standing at the threshold. The purgation is mostly complete; the transformation is not. After Season 2, the will and the order still feel separate, still costly. He has made the choice. He has paid the cost. He is not yet someone for whom that choice feels like home.

Season 3 will likely ask whether he can become that person. Not by receiving some tidy revelation about Sparda. Not by "resolving" a contradiction the show never treated as a puzzle in the first place. His humanity and his demonicity were always going to remain entangled—because that entanglement is simply the condition he was born into. The real question is whether he can inhabit that condition so completely that the tension itself becomes the shape of his freedom.

That, I think, is the arrival the show has been walking him toward all along. He will get there — if the show delivers on what it has been building — not through resolution, but through reconciliation.

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Final part of my NDMC analyses

Part 1: Trauma, Integration, and Developmental Identity in NDMC

Part 2: Sparda, Testimony, and the Construction of Dante's Agency

Haha, it actually gave me a deep satisfaction when Shankar dropped this statement saying the whole thing was essentially Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso. It's not because I needed him to validate my reading or anything, but because of what the confirmation actually meant.

I'll admit this one is a bit self-indulgent, but bear with me — it's still mostly about the show.

I never used the Divine Comedy as a crutch. My whole analysis was built from the ground up, just from watching the show and connecting the pieces I saw: the psychological logic, the developmental trajectory, the way Sparda’s legacy keeps shifting under Dante. I arrived at the same basic shape completely independently, coming from the opposite direction.

Shankar's approach was top-down. He took the Divine Comedy as a structural framework, mapped the show's three-season arc onto its three canticles, and then built outward from that scaffold — designing the psychological and narrative content of each season to fit its corresponding phase. The structure came first. The story filled it.

My approach was bottom-up. I just watched the show, followed the characters, and tried to figure out what the hell was actually going on with Dante. No external literary framework was imported. The connective work was done entirely from the material the show provided.

Two independent methods, operating from opposite directions, converging on the same architecture. That convergence is what this piece is about.

If you can reconstruct a story's internal structure purely from its own material — without needing to borrow an external framework to make it hold together — then the architecture is genuinely in the text. The show has that kind of coherence. Shankar wasn't just talking when he said he'd been showing us the structure the whole time. It holds up even when you come at it from below.

In fact, the mapping is clean enough that it's worth spelling out.

Season 1 as Inferno makes perfect sense: it's descent and forced confrontation. Dante gets slammed with everything he's been running from — his demonic side, the messy truth about his father, the cost of letting people in. He doesn't choose the fall. The show just keeps piling on revelations until avoidance stops working. That's the function of Inferno — not punishment exactly, but forced exposure. You go through it, not around it.

Season 2 as Purgatorio feels even more precise. In the poem, Purgatory isn't peaceful waiting — it's active, painful, iterative transformation. The old ways no longer work. That’s exactly where Dante is at the end of S2. His usual coping mechanisms (compartmentalizing, performing lightness, latching onto people) are failing. Sparda's legacy becomes impossible to pin down. Lady is gone. Vergil chooses the other side. He's probably even lost his home — we don't know exactly what happens to Dante's residence after his cryo sleep (I'll stop now, otherwise thinking about this combined with how the show ends S2 is going to make me cry again). He ends the season stripped of almost everything he was using to hold himself together. That's purgation.

Season 3 as Paradiso feels like the natural endpoint my previous pieces (part 1, part 2) were already pointing toward. Based on the developmental arc — from affective contamination, through all the destabilization, toward something more integrated — what we're heading for isn't full resolution. It's reconciliation.

This is where the original Divine Comedy becomes most useful as a lens. The poem begins with the loss of the "straight path." What follows is not a retrieval. Dante does not find his way back to where he was. The entire journey is a transformation made possible precisely because the original path was lost. You cannot arrive at Paradiso by going back. You can only arrive by going all the way through.

That's where I think Dante is headed. He'll probably never get a clean answer about who Sparda really was. He'll probably never fully separate his humanity from his demon side, or ever fully undo what the losses cost him. The contradictions the show has built so carefully are not the kind that get resolved — they are the kind that must be lived with.

Reconciliation, in this context, means something quieter and harder: the contradictions stop having the power to break him. Not because they've been answered, but because he's become someone who can carry them without needing them answered.

That feels like a much more interesting psychological destination than a neat resolution. Resolution closes the question. Reconciliation changes how you live with the fact that the question stays open.

The fact that two completely different methods — one starting from a literary blueprint and building down, the other starting from scattered scenes and building up — independently produce that same endpoint is, I think, a pretty strong evidence that the show knows exactly what it is doing. The coherence runs deep.

This is why I find the common dismissal of the show's writing so frustrating — and why Shankar's statement felt so satisfying when it arrived. It's less about how it proved me right (though I won't pretend that part wasn't enjoyable), but more about how it confirmed that the architecture I'd been tracing was real. That the connective work the show asks from us is actually worth doing.

There is something there. You just have to be willing to look for the structure instead of demanding a straight path.

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Part 3 of my NDMC analyses

Part 1: Trauma, Integration, and Developmental Identity in NDMC

Part 2: Sparda, Testimony, and the Construction of Dante's Agency