#ndmc analysis

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