Is The Devil May Cry Netflix Show Really That Bad?
I watched the entirety of the DMC animated show (and I still insist on not calling it an "anime," as the anime premiered back in 2007, and actually fits inside the canon of Devil May Cry as a whole, after DMC5 completely canonized it.)
I watched it in good faith, as I believe in the sincerity of a good critique. My notes from each segment watched are here, from episode 1 through 3, and here from episode 4 through 6. There is no post with notes for the final episodes, as I was so tired and flabbergasted from watching that season finale was, that I couldn't type those to post.
However, in the following segment of this post, I will include my final notes, as well as my final thoughts regarding the show, fan reactions and some context regarding my own opinions. Will also try to include the basis of my opinions, with segments from the games and 2007 animated show.
Yes, there are spoilers ahead, but we already knew that!
1. The boring recap of the final two epsodes
(If you already know what happens, and don't want the extra commentary, you may skip to the next section.)
Episode 7 opens with Nelo Angelo giving his blood to the Rabbit. Let's put a pin on this for later!
Dante saved Mary and in return, she punched him, after having an awkward, "will they have a romantic connection later?" moment. The punch was overkill. They could've made her just not blush at all.
In this canon, the devil trigger is fed by rage and hatred, which implies that Dante's "makaian" (I still cannot get used to the term, and I'll keep thinking it's pretty silly) heritage is inherently negative, as those two emotions are perceived to be as such.
Magic, demonic power and such concepts are nonexistent in this Alternative Universe.
I kept a tally of the times Mary swears in the two episodes. It was 9, however, I did not count "shit" or "dickhead."
We see Mary try to face a group of demons by herself, and I believe it to be exclusively because she feels like receiving help from Dante is the end of the world. She is a seasoned federally funded demon hunter, she should definitely know better than to fight beings who are much powerful and resilient than her, even with all the equipment she had at hand.
Noting that Kalina Ann is just a military issue weapon, no customization or real meaningful connection to Mary. That is fine, I guess it comes with the fact that this is an interpretation of the DMC story.
Yes, as expected, she is defeated because she seems to "care" about Dante.
Chuck E. Cheese mentioned. What does this have to do with my friend Charles Entertainment Cheese?!
Hell is a homeland to Sparda. Did we forget already that Sparda is a baddie?
Mundus is a dictator btw, not Satan himself, just a political figure, cartoonishly affecting absolutely everyone in "Makai," indiscriminately
Dante bargains to selflessly help Mary, because yes, he is a good guy to a fault. Yes, seemingly Dante is a better person than all of us, because I would not give a fuck about a brutal cop who actively antagonized me.
This segment is a fight between cartoon Cavaliere Angelo and Dante. Since at this point we know that Rabbit created all the abomination-looking demons with mutations, there is no way that this particular demon did not come from Vergil's blood, as we know, all the angelos in the games are constructs based on him. And because mutated demons are created by DNA editing, the Rabbit would have needed Vergil's DNA to mutate a makaian into Cavaliere Angelo.
We cannot make sense of a lot, but that´s ok because Dante is cool!
Surprise! darkcom has been abusing power this whole time, and you have been murdering innocent people. She acts like she's surprised. I am sad for Lady, because Mary is completely ruining her good reputation. There is no way that people can sincerely like Mary, because right now, she is just plainly unlikable, irredeemable and corrupted. I guess that is ok because we all have tragic backstories and traumatic childhoods.
Vice President Wesker calls Lady an attack dog that needs to be brought to heel? Girl ok.
My next note says "the eventual romantic angle is shit." Yes, I agree with me from the time I wrote the note.
Also, the VP being a christian zealot is commentary. Like OK WE GET IT CHRISTIANS ARE BAD!!!
The Rabbit mutated to a behemoth, is rampaging but the anti-demon bullets cannot harm him still. OK all the basis of DNA and mutations stopped being logical as soon as we needed an extra tough guy. Let us also put a pin on this.
The fight with mutated Rabbit was borderline unwatchable, from how bad and stupid it became.
Oh, he seemingly killed Enzo, and Dante is rightfully upset. This actually checks with Dante, and one of the few instances where he is close to his canon personality.
Mary calls Dante the slur again, inviting him to team up. Let's just imagine how this would look if this was a real life scenario.
In this universe, Vergil did not disappear, Dante watched him die.
Mary besmirches the sanctity of "Jackpot" by uttering it herself. I was getting angry at this point.
WELL, they end up winning, and Dante invites her to come with him, in good faith. He still believes that this ruthles, racist cop is still a good person to team up with.
It seems like she has accepted, however... SURPRISE!!! SHE BETRAYS HIM IN THE WORST WAY POSSIBLE. Mary quite literally stabs him in the back.
The VP is an imperialist, and his god asks for a Holy War. A God, that judging the existence of Makai as a different world, does not exist, or at least is not as close to the thing they believe it to be.
The next note simply says "this shit is so ass bro..."
Operation Inferno starts! American Idiot plays! Because they think we are the idiots.
The US occupies and bombs the Middle East Makai! They are sacking their resources!
Final scenes include Dante being frozen in the timeskip chamber after Mary betrayed him.
OH VERGIL IS SHOWN! AND HE IS WORKING FOR KING MUNDUS!!!! What exactly did Mundus free him from? His own humanity?
MUNDUS IS ACTUALLY GOOD NOW!!! AND VERGIL IS VOLUNTARILY WORKING FOR HIM!! AND HE IS NOT FORCEFULLY TRANSFORMED INTO NELO ANGELO! IT'S ACTUALLY HIS DEVIL TRIGGER!!!!! AND YAMATO ALSO TRANSFORMS WITH HIM!!!!!!!!
Did we mention that Vergil IS THE STORM (that is approaching)?!?!?
2. Media insisting upon itself
One of the best expressions ever created to refer something that alleges to be earnest and profound, but in reality is pretentious, gaudy and self-absorbed. Used in Family Guy when Peter shares that he does not like The Godfather.
I truly believe this show insists upon itself, however, unlike what Lois refers to as "language of subtlety," the Devil May Cry Netflix series, is not even close to being fluent in it. They are Big in the fact that this is just an adaptation of the decades-long DMC lore, an adaptation of a beloved main character, an adaptation of a beloved deuteragonist, whose story in her first appearance, ends up being the true heart of the story. It is Lady, abandoning the name that her father gave her, realizing that "there are humans as evil as any devil, as well as kind and compassionate demons in this universe." She tells Dante that even a devil may cry when they lose a loved one.
We know this is just a one-in-a-million occurrence though. Demons are mostly evil, single-minded perverted souls that will not stop until everyone is dead. Demons and Hell, were always unequivocally forces of evil, and they manifest themselves in the human realm through sand, dust, electricity and even by possessing corpses. Majority of them are not in any way sentient, most of them don't have blood and they are magical beings. Only the high-level apparitions, like Phantom, Griffon, Echidna, Berial, etc., have the capacity to speak and rationalize. However, they are still hostile and single-minded in killing anything that comes in their way.
Some of these demons however, recognize the power of the player character and they offer their souls to their fight.
But no, in the Devil May Cry Netflix Show, the beings crossing through random tears in reality are NOT any of this. They are innocent beings, oppressed by a cartoonishly evil tyrant, polluting their ecosystem, pushing them to live in encampments, indirectly killing little children and ruining everyone's life.
They are humanoid, the main difference being that they have horns and they cover them with hoods or head wraps. Your thin veil for middle eastern peoples was too on the nose, Adi.
After episode 5 and 6, the show insists that you HAVE to feel bad for the makaians, because they are innocents, they are just immigrants to the human realm, looking a better life for themselves and their descendants. I think the allegory started allegorizing a little too much at this point.
The product wants you to believe it is good, because it showed refugees (makaians) might seem evil to us but they are actually not. However, they used literal evil, perverted and degenerate beings to be representations of the oppressed. The story tries to manipulate your emotions to convince you that, if you hate the makaians you are a bigot motherfucker yourself.
This is the way the show could probably get shooters to defend it. "You did not like it because it is commentary and gives visibility to the struggles and horrible experiences that refugees and immigrants go through."
Not really. I don't find political commentary from someone who attended the current US president's inauguration and addressed gratitude for the invitation publicly to be sincere or valid. His thoughts and feelings about the current humanitarian crises happening around the world, or in the past, become self-serving ways to appoint himself as a visionary.
(On a side note, that post has comments from 10 weeks ago, calling him a bootlicker, and other users stating that they thought him to be better than that)
3. The misunderstanding of Devil May Cry's characters
People who liked the show, (after seemingly turning their brains off, or being completely new to DMC) allege that people who did not enjoy the show are purists, stupid and want always the same. They call out nostalgia, and that somehow, naysayers are trying to gatekeep the story of an old, neglected franchise to keep the, in their opinion, "lackluster and shallow story" pristine.
Might be the case, only if Devil May Cry had a story that could be described with those two adjectives - Capcom has never worried to include much backstory in the games, but through almost 25 years of history, we know the overarching story of Devil May Cry, which has always been a battle between good and bad. Not a lot of people are morally grey in this universe, and there are no anti-heroes to be had. Red is red, Blue is blue.
However, I believe V might have come close to being a little grey, since he was always Vergil's humanity - at the end though, he accepts that all he wanted was to be cared for, and showed guilt for all the genocides he caused. BUT... He goes back to Urizen and unifies into the old asshole we've always known (and some loved.)
Shankar not only showed that he did not understand Vergil from the beginning, calling him an "anti-hero," but shows that he did not truly understand when he was watching the games cutscenes, if he even played the games at all.
Which of the characteristics of an anti-hero does Vergil possess? Maybe idealism for himself, in his constant selfish chase for power - morality for a few seconds when he teams up with Dante to kill the perversion of Sparda that Arkham had become. That does not redeem him, because he did not save anyone but himself. He had already killed hundreds, if not thousands of people when he brought Temen-Ni-Gru from the ground. We could allege that he was being manipulated by Arkham... But truly, he believed he would just rid of him at the end and keep the power for himself only.
That was just the sidebar. Vergil is not an anti hero, he is by all means a villain. Which takes me to the first pinned note: Vergil would NOT give his blood to the Rabbit for experimentation.
We understand that the Dante seen on the show is just Nero in disguise, the voice to the jokes - I was a prophetess when said before, that he would never say that. Never thought that my gift of clairvoyance referred to a your mom joke. No hate to Johnny, because he did a good job. However, he is already a character that is notorious and loved, so we cannot separate his voice from Nero. It was not until the final two episodes that I kind of stopped hearing Nero, but I heard no Dante though, that's for sure.
But the most egregious misunderstanding of a character, reputation assassination and pseudo empowering happened to Lady. To quote the guy himself:
Well, he did NONE of this. He conveniently changed Lady's story to turn her into a character that only shares name and appearance with her. Arkham (father) was a cowardly bitch whose only resort was to turn into a demon after one single attack in which he was paralyzed in fear, he killed Kalina over seemingly nothing (because there is no priestess blood in this universe,) and then Mary burned him alive. I guess? He might come back for some reason, who knows.
I saw some opinions regarding her character on twitter, and one went something like "well she is better in the show because she's had about 2 seconds of dialogue in the games after 3," and when I know and agree that the women in Devil May Cry suffer from under-usage and poor writing, Lady's CANON story and personality are much better than the slop presented in the show.
I don't know what exactly they were attempting to accomplish, either she is a tough, strong, independent girlboss type, or she is being made into an example that even women can be shitty. Whichever of these options is the right one, both are tired, little strategies to attempt at making a deep, interesting character that fall really flat.
📌Among the nonsensical things within the show, what stood the most to me, as a biologist, is the fact that the demons we see are created through "nazi experimentation" (as told by Lady Mary.) All demons are forcefully mutated into more bizarre, warped beings with science, and Rabbit himself figured out a way to keep himself alive with consuming demon makaian blood. At the end of the season, Rabbit himself unmasks and shows that he is an abomination himself, and chugs the blood out a demon. It kind of reminded me when in Dragon Age 2, the First Enchanter Orsino transformed himself into a rampaging demonic abomination.
The problem here, was that the anti-demon bullets were NOT working on the guy, despite having MUTATED completely into a demon. His body was pumped full with blood, and he also CONSUMED the blood of a demon - these bullets worked on Dante, who is naturally human. But they did not work in a guy who committed to the demon bit in a last attempt to fight.
Did anyone care for continuity or scientific rationale?📌
4. Fan nostalgia and Elitism among fans
While every piece of content is sometimes up to the consumer's interpretation, there are some things that are intentionally misrepresented and misinterpreted by fandom, inevitably. Lately (and I am referring probably around the time DMC5 was announced) the Devil May Cry fandom has chosen to comply with a fanon interpretation of Dante which might be annoying to some of us. Yes, 40-something-year-old Dante is a kissless virgin, who loves pizza, jokes and strawberry sundaes. He has never felt the touch of another human being, and is incapable for being sexual.
Where the fuck did this come from? I theorize that it is from the fandom filling the void of almost a decade without any content of the mainline Devil May Cry games.
I have been part of this fandom longer than Tumblr has been around, from the time where forums were the only way to communicate with other fans, and it was probably never like this - I do not remember at what point in time Dante was flanderized into what some sector of the fandom considers him to be. And I am bringing this up, because Shankar seems to have liked this interpretation of Dante, and put him on the screen - also the fact that the amulet in the cartoon is the amulet from DmC, so he was definitely highly inspire to attempt to splice those two Dantes-but-not-really-Dante into one for his visionary work.
This tweet expresses just how I feel regarding the complete bastardization of Dante's character by a sector of the fandom:
Eventually, some will start to roll with it, because they believe it is a funny way to engage with content of a video game series that has been criminally neglected by Capcom, however, the creators in charge of producing actual, real, canon content for the game would pick it up and think it works.
This is kind of what happened with the DMC cartoon. Shankar believes that DMC is cringe, Dante is a little meme guy and that he is all laughs, pizza and crazy stunts.
Thank god that he is not in charge of making any real canon content for DMC because he did not understand absolutely any of the characters, their world, or the fandom.
We are not wrong for engaging with this content for a few laughs, and also not wrong for thinking of it as lowbrow and erroneous.
When DmC: Devil May Cry was announced, I was a teenager, creating fan content online. The announcement came out as a true surprise, as we had absolutely no content, not even a special edition to the successful DMC4... When I watched the trailer, I did it with an open mind, and I felt somehow alienated and, at times, ignorant for not absolutely hating it.
It's not my fault for liking edgelord shit!!!
I did not stop liking it, or treating it as a true, deserving entry in the DMC history - the story was OK, the character, enemy and world designs were very good, and one of the most important aspects, the gameplay was great. It was fun to play. The music was fucking great, both the original soundtrack, and the Combichrist songs that somehow perfectly fit the narrative of the game - and I am getting to the point here, which is that I always keep an open mind to the new things presented when it's Devil May Cry, because I want to give them a fair chance, maybe they would not be bad.
DmC, as I remember, was almost universally hated among the fandom. Years went by, and DMC4SE was announced, which was a glimmer of hope for the continuation of the franchise. I spent hours upon hours promoting the release, sharing gifs, links and screencaps to help sell the damn game, because we all knew that it was testing the waters, checking if there was still interest in Dante and DMC.
It was to NOT my surprise, that when DMC5 was announced, so many things from DmC were reused. Especially Nero's new edgy look. What a great moment for me.
But anyway...
Many people believe that the DMC fandom is overreacting to the shitshow that the show is. Some believe that having a mid product is better than letting DMC collect dust. That the most recent game was released too long ago, and content is needed - it was only five years ago. Like that's too long... Maybe to other fandoms, but time works different if you are a fan of Devil May Cry.
We don't dislike and rebuke the poor invention of Adi's because of nostalgia goggles. We hate it because it's tired, insincere, self-serving, and a poor interpretation of characters who are well known and loved. It is also a work that reinvents real-life oppressed peoples as "demons," as if they were not the victim of such slander in the real world already. It is not commentary, it is opportunism.
It also insists upon itself.
I have observed people using their fan card to defend the show - "I have been a fan since--" type of arguments. One Twitter user posted themselves laying surrounded by their Devil May Cry merch to reply to a tweet where someone called them out regarding the show. I don't believe in civil fandom war, but believing yourself to be above everyone because of the money or time you've spent on something is truly below adult conversations.
I have been hit with "pick-me opinion" simply because I am a woman. My tweets get replies which infer that the people engaging with them think of me as a man, despite my girly looking profile.
I have been a fan of these games for almost as long as I've been alive, and I am pushing 30. I have been posting on forums, this site and twitter since I got internet access in my early teens. I do not believe my opinion to be above anyone's, I just think that an informed, impartial opinion is better than anything. And I already tried to engage with the content in good faith.
And in good faith, I can say that the Devil May Cry show on Netflix is shit.
Read the plot on Wikipedia.
