Netflix/Adi Shankar's Devil May Cry: harmful agendas or meaningful commentary?
In particular scene in Netflix's DMC, the character of Mary Arkham, a cop by all means, runs into a group of demon "refugees" who give her shelter. Their only lines of dialouges are "we are just trying to survive" and "she's a spaien, of course she thinks demons are the same." This is of course quickly followed by Mary being chased by the violent evil demons who shapeshift, kill, brutalize and murder humans.
Why are there demon refugees? Because their king, Mundus is dictatator and Demon Land is stated to be a polluted arid "shithole" with no resources.
At one point, White Rabbit, the main villain, says this about the human world: "spetacle of prosperity built on the misery of an unseen world." He is referring to Demons by "unseen world"
Let's not beat around the bush: it's very clear what these scenes mean as Adi Shankar and his co-writer Alex Larsen have clearly never heard of the word "nunance". They used demons as an allegory for vulnerable real-life groups such as refugees.
Some context from DMC games: this concept doesn't exist in DMC canon. The Devil May Cry games, as the title implies, portray demons as mostly inhumane and evil to the point it's a shock and a rarity if/when a devil cries. Moreover, the games depict demons as highly powerful creatures to the point even a below average demon can destroy an average or even above average human. They see humans as sentient meat, their meal. They have a supremacist expansive empire that steals and uses humans and their resources.
Back to the topic of the Netflix 'adaptation': how does it handle this very clear overt metaphor between and real-life people?
Let's seek the answer in the showrunner's and co-writer of this show, Adi Shankar's interview:
If you look at Baines objectively, he’s not a villain. He’s a man trying to save his country, his world, from literal Armageddon. And here’s the thing: He was right. Hell exists. The genocidal, demon-powered rabbit was real and is trying to bring hell to Earth. And no one else was taking that threat seriously. Without Baines, the world would’ve fallen in five minutes flat.
Mr. Baines ends up bombing hell and killing demons indiscriminately is what he did. And he was right according to the showrunner.
And right here Adi Shankar explains why these metaphors and allegories fundamentally don't work. Because as he says, humans have every reason to fear, hate and kill demons. You cannot make a reasonable sensitivite metaphor for racism and discrimination if there is an actual justified reason to 'explain' the racism and oppression. That is not how it works in reality. Racism is not justified. Discrimination doesn't come with reason. It's inherently unreasonable.
You can't take a fictional species of demons who had tried and still try to wipe out humanity and use the fear and hatred they face as some sort of metaphor for racism. Because people actually have a reason to hate and fear the said demons.
What Adi Shankar has said is stark and evident within the show's own narrative:
For one it estbalishes that the more hatred and rage demons feel, the more powerful they become. We see this when Dante, the half-demon half-human character, becomes a destructive force of nature.
And Dante is understabaly so disturbed by the demon side of him that he says he needs to fight it and turn against thr darkness it came from. As in the demon side is the dark side.
In some scene, Lady's father turns into demon and his first course of action is eating his wife. Before trying to eat his daughter.
And it concludes that should they ever open the door of human world to demons (described as a wall in text), then the humanity will be subjected to genocide because bad evil demons come in with any demon refugee that might not be malicious...doesn't that sound familiar?
You see what I'm getting at here? Throughout the show, there is a consistent "humans vs othered non-humans" theme. It's not seen as critical, it is literally what it is. The main message is that demons cannot co-exist with humanity.
It is already questionable enough that you would attempt making demons sympathetic in a franchise about demon hunters but it's a step too far to attempt to use them as a metaphor real-life groups of people. Especially if they're already vulnerable and demonized enough in real-life. And it's extremely insensitive to validate the right-winger and bigoted things that's said about them in the setting of this narrative.
Almost like Adi Shankar and Alex Larsen introduced a concept into an established lore without actually bothering to change other things to accommodate it.
This show either took more than it could chew or it was deliberately setting everything up in such a vicious manner. The games don't, at any point, compare demons to refugees or any real-life groups of people. DMC demons are too powerful to be remotely threatened by the average human.
The main backstory of Demon Land in the show is similar to the games: Mundus, the evil king, has tried attacking and enslaving humanity. The show reiterated the same tale.
What the show depicts the demons as, aside from two scenes and one episode with refugees, this way: they are mostly an evil and invasive group of people who shapeshift into humans to creep into human world. They attack the humans regardless of if they're harmful or not. One of them kidnaps a baby. They all get names too: Echidna, Plasma, Agni, Rudra, Cavalier.
Remember when I said the "refugee demons" only get two lines? I wasn't exactly exaggerating. They don't even have names. Not even decent designs.
The truth is the narrative clearly does not care about these characters if you could even call them that. They are an entirely helpless characterless collective. They don't use portals. They didn't go with Sparda, the one demon that stood against demons' expansive empire. They simply exist as nothing but adjacent to the de facto protagonists of the show, White Rabbit (a white American) and Lady (the Cop). Put in concentration camps and experimented on and killed. They don't have any agency, personality or even lines beyond being "victims". They don't even have names. They are Victims. That's their entire role.
The truth is most demons that we see are evil. The lore of demons is still evil. The Victims have very little screentime do not get any significance, any world building or fleshing out or semblance of characterization. It could make one think the refugee metaphor exist in an attempt to avoid world building and make up for lazy writing, to emotionally manipulate the audience to care for these empty cardboards. By taking advantage of the plight and suffering of very real, very vulnerable people. It's exploitative and it's vile on the writers' part.
On the topic of White Rabbit: initially shown as a demon but turns out he is in fact a White American man cosplaying as a demon. As far as demon activists go, he's been their loudest champion by far...in words if nothing else. He puts the demons he claims to stand for in prison camps and performs violent experiments on them (one character compares him to a "Nazi" outright), and YET something that's very notable about his backstory is his role as being the Savior of Victim demons.
You see, demon world was separated from human world when a portal was blocked through advanced demon technology. For 2000 years, no demon, good or otherwise, was able to do something about this until Mr. Rabbit comes around and as a child, he manages to make a device out of nothing but scraps to breach the block. With the same scraps available to Victims. Let me say again, no other demon could do it, Victims are too helpless and stupid to understand their own technology and they needed this human to explain and do it for them.
Some funny tidbit from the show that gave me second-hand embrassment: at some point the narrative tries saying that vernacular like "demons" and "hell" are reductive terms made up by racist humans and what these creatures call themselves is "Makaian" from the land of "Makai" not hell...Makai is a Japanese word and it means Demon Land. This bit here encapsulates everything that's wrong with this show's writing. The blatant laziness, the lack of worldbuilding, the almost insulting parodying of racism and othering. They couldn't even come up with an original proper name because again, demons do not exist as anything but an othered dehumanzied group here.
Something to consider about Adi Shankar. He's a Trump supporter.
And he has positively interacted with Asmongold and even put him in DMC. He portrayed Asmongold as a streamer who was correct about everything he said...Asmongold who mocked Palestinians for coming from an "inferior culture".
I can't take any social or political commentary coming from someone like him seriously.
And this brings to the dogwhistling element of the show:
The demon world is bombed by AMERICA following a terrorist attack in New York (they actually use the word terrorist demons in the show) as American Idiot (the War on Terror song) plays and we get this scene:
Keep in mind Adi Shankar has said this show is about post-9/11 America.
What might seem like circumstantial ends up looking extremely vicious right-winger rhetoric.
This show is vile in every way.
