The Contested Father: Sparda, Testimony, and the Construction of Dante's Agency
Dante enters Netflix's Devil May Cry without a stable sense of who he is. He runs from his past, avoids anything that connects him to his heritage, and carries his father's memory like something fragile in bad weather: carefully, and at a cost. This instability is not incidental but rather the show's central project. And nowhere is that project more visible than in how it handles Sparda.
In the games, Sparda is already mythic: A demon who turned against his own kind, sealed off the demon realm, and disappeared into legend. The show amplifies that mythic distance to an extreme: this Dante never sees his father in person. Everything he knows about Sparda arrives secondhand, filtered through the interests, wounds, and self-conceptions of whoever is doing the telling. The show essentially stages a Rashomon around Sparda's legacy.
In Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon, a single event is recounted by multiple contradictory witnesses. The truth of the event becomes impossible to pin down, but the truth is never the point anyway. The point is that each version is shaped by the teller's relationship to what happened, simultaneously self-serving and partially credible, and that the truth about the event becomes irrecoverable as a result. What survives is not a verdict but a set of portraits — of the witnesses themselves, revealed by what they need the story to be. Netflix’s Devil May Cry does something similar.
Enzo and Eva give the heroic reading: Sparda is "the good demon," a brave warrior who rebelled for love and freedom, something worth being proud of. The White Rabbit and the Makaian demons give the antagonistic reading: a traitor, someone whose selfish action brought catastrophic consequences to the demon realm.
Season 2 compounds the contradiction. Arius offers the evolutionary rebel reading — Sparda turned against Mundus because he recognized Mundus as devolution, and would have wanted Dante to continue that work. Vergil offers the bitter, abandoned son's perspective, shot through with resentment: he's not here to tell us himself.
And Mundus offers perhaps the most destabilizing account of all — that Sparda's actions were never betrayal but loyalty of a different kind, that his interest in humans was never love but something closer to a naturalist's curiosity, that demons of Sparda's calibre simply do not have the capacity for what Eva represented.
None of these versions can be fully reconciled. The show doesn't try. It simply keeps adding perspectives, creating deliberate irresolution.
This matters because Dante's sense of self depends on who Sparda was. If his father was genuinely good, then Dante's demonic heritage can be a source of pride rather than shame. If Sparda was flawed or ambiguous, then Dante himself is implicated. Every contradictory story about his father becomes an attack on Dante's identity.
The question of Sparda is, at its core, a question of attachment: Dante desperately needs his father's legacy to mean something because he has so little else to hold onto.
We can see what the contradictions do to him in practice. In S1E7, he hesitates against the White Rabbit after confronting the destruction Mundus brought to Makai in the wake of his father's sealing — the guilt of inherited consequence briefly paralyzes him. The Mundus reading in Season 2 strikes even deeper, undermining the idea that his parents' love was real. These aren't just plot twists. They are load-bearing parts of Dante's self-narrative being removed one by one.
This is where I think the common critique of Dante's agency in the show misreads what's actually happening. The complaint — that he lacks agency as a protagonist — takes his indecision and overwhelm at face value and reads them as characterization failures. But his hesitation and overwhelm aren't bad writing — they are the natural response to living in epistemic quicksand. Sparda's ambiguity destabilizes his lineage. Lady's betrayal destabilizes his attachment. Vergil's choices destabilize his understanding of what it means to be a twin, a brother, a shared survivor. Any one of those would be substantial, and the show stacks them in rapid succession. When the ground keeps shifting, decisive action becomes almost impossible. The show isn't portraying a passive protagonist. It's showing someone trying to find solid footing while everything he believes about himself is being questioned.
What the show does give us, consistently, is evidence that Dante can locate a value even mid-overwhelm and act from it.
In S1E7, his resolve returns not because the guilt resolves but because he remembers what is actually at stake — human lives, which he can act to protect regardless of what his father's legacy ultimately means. In S2E6, when Arius attempts to recruit him by holding up Dante's own destructive potential as justification — framing his "unbridled primal fury" as exceptionalism, as kinship with chaos, as something that licenses burning the world down — Dante does something more interesting than simply refusing. He acknowledges it. He doesn't deny what he's been. He just rejects the conclusion Arius draws from it: that capacity justifies use, that power is its own permission.
These small assertions of choice are the beginning of real agency. Not clean and heroic, but forged through uncertainty.
In the end, the show seems to be leading Dante toward a different relationship with his father’s legacy. Not the resolution of a factual puzzle (that may never come), but a structural parallel he can work with. If Dante can acknowledge what he is and still choose to act against destruction rather than toward it, then Sparda can be read the same way: not "my father was a good demon" as a claim requiring evidence, but "my father may have been deeply flawed and still made a choice that mattered."
That relationship to legacy doesn't require resolving the contradictory testimony. It requires finding the one thing that holds across all the accounts — Sparda acted — and building identity around the act rather than the man. Legacy, in this reading, is not something Dante simply inherits. It's something he must actively author.
Which makes the eventual stabilization, whenever the show arrives at it, something that will have been genuinely earned. Agency built through that much destabilization means something different than agency that was always just there. The games give us the finished product. The show is making us watch the cost of producing it, and the cost, it turns out, is this: having to decide who you are without the ground ever quite holding still long enough to be certain.
This is the best description I’ve heard for this method, I always thought it was bullshit because I never heard a description that actually explained how to do this other than “tap your head 20 times”.
I have anxiety-induced hissing, which sounds/feels different from sound-induced tinnitus (which I have also experience). Sound-based tinnitus actually sounds like you’re “hearing” something in your ears, whilst the hissing I have feels like it’s “inside my head”, if that makes sense. But this technique still helps!!
Talking to allo people who haven’t really interrogated how society has told them to view sex feels like that bit in SpongeBob where Patrick keeps failing to put his hand on the lid
Sex is just a thing. No it’s just an activity. It doesn’t have to be… no listen it’s just an activity. An activity. It’s just a thing. A thing. No it’s not the same for everyone it’s just an activity. No it’s a value neutral activity. An activity. An activity.
I’ve been experiencing this lately with people trying to argue with me about my views on sex work.
“You can’t compare sex work to other types of work because having sex you’re not enthusiastic about is really traumatizing”
I’m sure for a lot of people that’s true but for me sex and masturbation occupy a similar emotional space to brushing my teeth or doing the dishes and I certainly don’t feel traumatized about it and I know for a fact that I’m not the only person who feels this way.
Also I think that someone physically and violently forcing me to brush my teeth might end up being traumatizing.
Sex is so taboo and mythologized that people have forgotten the mechanics of it.
Yeah sex might be sacred and important to you. To me it’s a chore I’ve gotta do sometimes. Like cooking. I love cooking and put great importance on it and who I do it with. A lot of people just cook to live though.
Yeah if to you sex has a lot of emotions caught up in it I’m not gonna tell you that you’re wrong for feeling that way. That’s normal. It’s not a universal experience though. And if you can’t accept that, then too bad. Other people’s personal realities don’t exist to confirm your personal worldview.
So he said it can't be a Black. So I said, "For God's sakes, Judge Murphy, that's the whole point of the Goddamn story!" So he said, "No, it can't be a Black". Bill just called him up and raised the roof, and finally they said, "Well, you gotta take the perspiration off". I had the stars glistening in the perspiration on his Black skin. Bill said, "Fuck you", and he hung up.
Just to add context for those not aware of the impact of this story.
The reason it was so important for narrative purposes, was that the plot concerns the visit of the Astronaut, in his completely opaque spacesuit, to a planet populated entirely by self-aware robots (originally from Earth) who have built their own society and are petitioning to be allowed to interact with Earth again as equals.
They have a democratic government and free choice of careers etc. as the orange robot serving as guide tells the Astronaut.
The Astronaut notices that there are two different types of robot on this world; the orange ones, who are in charge, gifted access to all information and facilities. and the blue robots, who are seen as more limited in function, have less access to information and resources, and are not allowed positions of power or as wide a choice of employment opportunities. Even transportation is segregated.
The Astronaut investigates further and discovers that the blue and orange robots are actually structurally identical, there is absolutely no difference between their potential or capabilities, and it is only because the orange robots are instructed by their Educator system to consider themselves superior, that the difference exists.
The Astronaut tells the robots they are not ready for re-alignment with Earth, until they come to terms with their own unfairness, and how Earth had had to deal with this issue themselves. When that time comes, the robots will be able to ally with Earth.
Then he leaves in his spaceship, and it's only in that one final panel that we see the Astronaut is black.
Not subtle, nor should it be, but for 1950 this was a breathtakingly powerful statement, perhaps the first of it's kind in the genre.
The black character was not a caricature, or comedy relief, he was a main character in his own right, a human who "simply" was black.
Ok, but this story is sadly revolutionary even now.
That is not just a human who happens to be black, as far as every other character in this story is concerned this is the most important, maybe even the only human they ever see, who happens to be black.
As depressing as that is, but a black person just casually representing the entirety of humanity is a breathtakingly powerfull statement even today, a quarter of a century later.
Can't believe we're here, but especially important for fandom accounts: DO NOT link your IRL, government ID to your fandom accounts! Not ever. Not for anything.
You will feel tempted by FOMO, you will feel bullied by Discord. You will be peer pressured to the ends of the earth. Do not do it. Do not allow them full access to you, and do not let them normalize this utter horseshit. We deserve anon spaces. We deserve the internet, it's ours.
Discord is announcing enhanced teen safety features rolling out globally that reinforce its long-standing commitment to creating a safer and
Like this shit is TERRIFYING.
Cancel Nitro and tell them this is why. Shit talk these assholes in public. Ridicule them. And do not budge an inch, do not let them have you.
Any way, things to try and do to make some noise about this.
Call Discord at 888-594-0085. All I had to do was stay on the line and leave a voice mail.
File a support ticket with discord. This will require you to create an account separate from your discord account.
If you have Nitro, CANCEL IT.
File a complaint with the California Privacy Protection Agency. You do not need to live in California to do this. I personally checked off "Right to Opt-out of Sale/Sharing" "Right to Limit the Use of My Sensitive Personal Information" "A business’s collection, use, storing or sharing of my personal information" and "Children's privacy" because like FUCK would they not be getting that in their efforts to protect them. When they asked for evidence of privacy violations, I shared the Discord press release.
It's also worth mentioning that Discord is headquartered in California.
If you live in a European country, this webpage has a list of all the countries so you can find yours and file a privacy complaint.
Canadians can file a complaint with the Privacy Commissioner.
Treat anything on Discord as media that will be lost
Do not use Discord to host your files. Do not rely on Discord to preserve your text. DO NOT RELY ON DISCORD FOR ANY KIND OF PRESERVATION OR HOSTING!!
It CAN be lost, it WILL be lost! You must consider Discord as a part of the Core Internet, controlled by one company that hosts the servers.
I thought it was impressive at first that it replaced IRC, but now I am horrified. If the company behind Discord went under today, how many friends would you lose?
How many relationships? How much writing?
You may think this won't happen, but I remember when AIM went down and along with it, entire novels worth of interaction with my oldest friend.
IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU. IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN. NO COMPANY IS INFALLIBLE.
Back up your files! Download anything you've saved to Discord NOW, before the API changes go into effect! And DO NOT RELY ON THEM FOR HOLDING IMPORTANT FILES!
Here is a program that lets you download any and all of your discord DMs, your servers, everything. You can set the format (raw text, html (dark and light), and others. You can even download the uploaded files not just the text, though that may be just for the command-line version not the GUI window version.
Exports Discord chat logs to a file. Contribute to Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter development by creating an account on GitHub.
Please back up your conversations, your stories. I have a backup of everything I care about that runs once a week, with full attachment backups every several months. I write stories on discord, and would be devastated if someone happened to them. You have to have your own local copies of every file you care about.
Especially with all of the age verification bs rolling out right now, I feel like this is still relevant even more. If you decided to or couldn't use discord tomorrow, who and what would you lose access to?
sharing seasons & episodes of "she-ra and the princesses of power" for download on google drive so that you don't have to give money to netflix (which you should stop doing anyway, really): s1 / s2 / s3 / s4 / s5 / intros
credit to instagram user catrasluvbot via these posts: x / x / x / x / x / x
as with most pirates, it is asked for your own (and others') benefit that you save this media on a physical device; i.e. hard drives, DVDs, SD cards, etc. this way, it's yours forever and cannot be taken from you by a greedy streaming service.
EDIT SEPTEMBER (READ): please be warned that the first episode of season one is ~6GB compared to just a few hundred MB, probably related to the frame width being 3840x2160 instead of 1920x1080 like the rest. this may be a concern for some individuals due to storage space. i can confirm it is not malware as i have had it saved since the start of the year without affecting anything. if you need or prefer to find a smaller file size, i recommend skipping that one in the gdrive when going through it and torrenting just the single. ↓
EDIT OCTOBER (UPDATE): @grahminradarin has changed the file size of ep1 down to 800MB! here is the mega link for download. i can’t tell what the frame dimensions are but the quality appears to be the same.
in the meantime while my other blog is currently suspended and/or terminated indefinitely, i'll go ahead and add a google drive link i found that is a full collection of OST soundtracks (.mp3) from all five seasons of the show! it was ripped & reuploaded by waterwitch, who also made a playlist on youtube (.mp4) that you could download instead!
janainaart
andulkaphoto
vaporwave
germansingergirl
prguitarman
