Okay but why though: on getting weirdly invested
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" β 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 β that this Dante's relationship to his power felt structurally different from the games β 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 β 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 β Toward Paradiso β 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 β 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.
Turns out the form really was the argument all along π€·
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