#I really wish dante had character development the way those two got in dmc5

[thephantomporg84]

As much as I love the trope of characters that hide that they have a lot of negative feelings by putting on an act, I really wish it was made more obvious Dante's cuhrayzee wahoo pizza man act is partly a front, since it kinda seems like people don't notice? Sure there was DMC2 but DMC2 is treated as barely canon by most, and Dante's characterization was one of many big complaints about it.

Oh god I totally feel this Anon. 1,000% agree, as someone who love love loves this trope, too. Lol. It’s why I devour a good DMC story on AO3, especially if the writer knocks this trope out of the park.

But yeah. That was sort of one of my bigger nitpicks about DMC5 as a whole. Like. While I do appreciate that the game (and series, really) can be played and the story does mostly work if you’re not invested in it and taking it at face value / just want a good action game — which is a super helpful tactic to bring new people in with such a gap between titles — I hate how it ruins the context of a lot of stuff.

Vergil (as V) all but looks directly at the camera and says ‘I’m a bastard and did what I did because I was afraid/wanted to be loved and protected’ but Dante’s internal conflict is wayyyy more subtle and it’s cheapened if you really have to spell it out, imo — because I feel like the ‘negative feelings behind a goofy exterior’ thing is easy to portray hard to give real depth to. As in, it’s easy to make Dante be cuhrayzee and swing his chainsaw motorcycle around, but hard to show that it’s an act to fool others (as well as himself, probably to some degree). Unfortunately, on top of all that, lot of people aren’t gonna wanna bend over backwards like you, me, and others have done to discuss and pick Dante’s (or any character from any series, really) personality apart.

That said: I don’t think there are nearly enough contextual clues present in any of the games to make this more apparent, either. I remember some guy made a pretty good video a few years back about how the anime proves Dante is actually depressed on YT, and that video blew up and got nearly 100-150k views (which is a lot, esp. when you consider how dead this series was ‘till E3 2018), and a lot of people were ‘shocked’ and ‘never noticed xyz indicator’ before.

Like... If you give me a scene and have given me all the clues I need, but they’re super vague and I miss it? That’s on me, and totally my bad — another reason to replay the game with a more watchful eye. But I feel like DMC has left way, wayyyy too much out about how Dante feels to even do that, now.

I think one of the best examples of that lack of any kind of solid clues about Dante’s personality is in DMC5: In game, Patty calls to invite him to her birthday, and is loud and chatty and kind of annoying. Dante just seems to cringe and brush it off/hang up. If you weren’t familiar with the anime, then you might just brush it off as a gag, or see it as a brief throwback/cameo if you were. Either way, you could chalk it up to ‘oh wow wrong number / what an annoying girl haha.’ But then if you look in Before the Nightmare, which isn’t even available in any language except Japanese, we see that Dante is incredibly uncomfortable at the idea of being around ‘normal’ people, and I believe it even mentions that he plans to make it up to her.

This ties back into my complaints about putting so much meat from the story in the side material, and then not even making the side material available with the game or even easy to access. I feel like putting that kind of interesting characterization in side material is almost criminal lol. Because that makes the whole scene have so much more weight — especially because it sets up that this man is clearly uncomfortable with what he is, possibly now more than ever, and is about to be asked to kill his brother, again... because of what they both are. You also lose that family dynamic of Nero experiencing the same type of isolation as Dante without even fully understanding why.

And if that wasn’t enough, you also lose some AMAZING bits of characterization if you never read Before the Nightmare like:

Dante still sending Grue’s (from the DMC1 novel) two living daughters / their other caretaker (Morrison looks after them, too) money. Dante also had to mercy kill Grue’s oldest daughter. He sends it to them from using money out of his own savings.

The former patrons of Bobby’s Cellar (re-named Grue’s Cellar) and those in the mercenary world immensely disliking Dante, and fully blaming him for the deaths in that bar, Grue’s death, Nell Goldstein’s death, and the hospital invasion/massacre that happened in the DMC1 novel. So, Dante is even hated in the mercenary world, and shoulders the blame for a lot of stuff that he didn’t do / has probably lost a lot of work because of this — and a lot of it is stuff that Gliver (👀) did or instigated.

The caretaker of Grue’s girls absolutely hating Dante, even though the sisters defend him, and he most likely knows and just says nothing. The caretaker even remarks that she thinks he’s a bad omen and she ‘Hopes he’s dead’ and that ‘If he’s alive, I’d love to stick a shotgun up his ass’.

Lady noticing that the qliphoth is growing in Redgrave City, and then noticing the name on Dante’s guns later — then wondering what the connection was there — indicating how little even people like Lady really know about him.

Like, holy shit that’s just a few things and it already adds so much depth to Dante’s character that’s not there in the games alone. I know I’ve said a million times not to take the series that seriously or in realistic terms, but... I mean... even ridiculously goofy stuff like JoJo’s has really well developed, layered characters that will surprise you / break your heart in the blink of an eye. So it’s not impossible for something like DMC to make some stuff a little more apparent.

Oh, and as for DMC2 — if it hadn’t followed the trend at the time of randomly making your protagonist into a dark/angsty/edgelord version of themselves, and had given the angsty turn some logical explanation, then I don’t think it would have been quite so hated (at least, janky gameplay and rushed design aside). Itsuno said that’s the one he’d remake if given a choice to do a remake, and I can’t help but think he wouldn’t say thay without having some ideas on what he’d do differently.

(SORRY I KNOW THIS IS SUPER LONG. But it’s something that really irks me a lot because it could be SO GOOD if handled a little better lol.)

[redqvccn]

Vergil (& family)

Did I just make a Tumblr account because I need to dump my thoughts on my most recent hyper fixation, Devil May Cry? You bet.

Anyways, let's get right to the point and talk about none other than, you guessed it, Vergil. More specifically, him and his relation to his family. There is a lot to unpack here so strap in for a long post after the cut!

Eva & Sparda

There really isn't much to say here, those were his parents and it's out of question that they meant a lot to him.

Dante, while also showing respect, holds a sort of resentment towards Sparda (see; "I don't have a father", said by Dante in DMC3), but Vergil shows no such things. Let's be honest, Vergil most probably held more fascination for how powerful he was.

And Eva? Well, apparently she had to have given him the impression she didn't love him as much as she loved Dante (which may or may not be a purely subjective feeling, we don't know), but after all she was still his mother who provided the love and protection a mother should give.

Until the incident happened.

And this is where we get to Vergil's motivations; The pursuit of power Vergil was so lost in stemmed purely from that day and the inability to protect and save his own mother and brother, believing them both dead at only 8. He never wanted to feel weak again, so he started to gain power to be able to protect what's important - or at least himself. Yes, the methods he ended up using in this pursuit are very much not right a lot of the time, but the roots of everything have always been something so...genuine and deeply reasonable.

Dante

There'd be a crazy amount of things to unpack in their bond, especially Dante's side of things, but that would make this post longer than the list of reasons why I wish to perish, so we'll leave that for another time.

First things first, it's quite obvious that, despite all the fighting and their very different morals, they do care about each other a lot. They're brothers, they need each other, they deserve each other after going through hell and back (quite literally) separately all this time.

However, there is one thing that struck me especially lately.

Vergil almost never is the one to initiate a fight when they meet. It's always Dante, who definitely also has his very own (and valid) reasons of pointing his weapon at Vergil first thing, but also not the point, safe for one instance; After the fight with Arkham in 3, it's Vergil to attack Dante first in an attempt of retrieving Dante's amulet again.

Take DMC3; On top of the tower it's Dante who first points his gun at Vergil. In the ritual hall it's also Dante holding his sword against his brother.

DMC5? Dante charges at Vergil the second he has returned. On top of the Qliphoth it is also Dante initiating a fight.

And then there's the encounter with Nelo Angelo - a corrupted Vergil, a seemingly mindless demon. Nelo Angelo is the one to hunt down Dante, wanting to fight him, as ordered by his master Mundus, but as soon as Nelo Angelo catches sight of Dante's amulet, memories kick back in and Vergil, who's still in there, recognizes his enemy.

Then he stops fighting and runs away. It's only because Dante keeps following him that they end up fighting until Nelo Angelo is eventually defeated.

I feel like Vergil doesn't necessarily want to fight Dante. Never has. He never showed half the hostility than the other way around, but it goes easily unnoticed because - of course - he'll defend himself and fight back when attacked.

I don't know, but it is a little detail I think is quite overlooked.

Nero

So this one's gonna be very interesting.

Again, first things first; Vergil most certainly did not know about Nero's conception. He didn't spend enough time in Fortuna to actually develop a sort of bond with a woman. I'm not sure he would have been able to at that time, anyways. And even if he knew, it's not like he had much of a chance being at his kid's side, considering he threw himself into the underworld roughly a year after Fortuna and spent years there under Mundus' hand.

Technically....seeking out his child was the first thing he did after returning but...obviously we ain't counting that as quite the best of bonding moments.

Anyways.

I don't want to go into too much detail about V, but here, too, is something I thought was very interesting about V.

Because he talks about his regrets and fears and feelings and all that he considers a weakness with exactly 2 people.

Trish and Nero.

With Trish it makes quite a lot of sense, after all, she was created to look exactly like Eva. Naturally so, Vergil would find a sort of comfort and trust in her, despite the fact that they never met before.

And with Nero, I think, it is a similar sort of comfort and trust, even though he doesn't know this boy and isn't aware of his actual connection to him. It's something purely subconscious at that time.

Now, let's actually get on to Vergil and Nero.

When Vergil returned and was about to leave again through a portal, he says "Thank you, Nero". One could argue he simply thanked Nero for taking care of the Yamato while he was gone and....letting him "retrieve" it once he was back, but I like to believe something else.

I like to believe Vergil thanked Nero for helping him. For helping V. It's quite obvious V had needed Nero's help to reach what he desired and it is also rather obvious that Vergil shows more of his human side at the end of 5, with the little screentime he has. (Capcom...Vergil dlc when?)

And then there is the scene before Vergil jumps off the Qliphoth. The scene in which Vergil gives Nero his book. And I don't think we have properly grasped the gravity of this action for two reasons:

1. This isn't just any book. This is the collection of poems Vergil has been keeping since he was a young boy. It's his most valued possession - quite frankly, his only possession and keepsake - along with the Yamato and his half of the amulet (of which he does no longer have the latter). This book means a lot to Vergil, and he wouldn't just throw it at anyone just like that. He entrusts this to Nero.

2. It's a sort of promise. Vergil wouldn't go and say "I promise I'll come back for you. I won't leave you behind again", but that is essentially the meaning behind this action. He wants Nero to keep the book and take care of it until he is back, this meaning he wants to come back to Nero.

I definitely do think Vergil would want to get to know his son and try to right his wrong.

And Nero, having heard V ("The truth is, I wanted to be protected...and loved.") and being someone who cares about family, would not oppose.

TL;DR:

Vergil cares about his family more than you'd think at first glance and I really want to see where his character will go from here on.

(Since I'm still relatively new to this franchise, I'm not 100% educated in every detail of each game, so if there's anything I missed or somehow got wrong, feel free to add and/or correct. You immediately deserve my whole soul if you read this whole thing. Took me like an hour and a half to write, jeez.)