#but like. even with the start of dmc3. he seemed to be fully aware of his demonic side

[whyamiherewhosummonedme]

As a bona fide DMC enjoyer for about however long it's been since DMC4SE released. Gotta say. Not sure how I feel about the new anime?

Spoiler alert below, some thoughts

Objectively, this series is fucking amazing. The team behind it very clearly love and adore DMC. This whole show is a loveletter to the games, the characters, and the world. But it felt... I don't know? Maybe it's just because it's a new universe. An animeverse as an alternative to the gameverse. And like. The characterization is all incredibly on point. Like. Yeah, Lady would join the military if Arkham died there and then. Yeah, she is fucking racist as hell. Yeah, Dante is a disaster in every single way and she even points out his usage of humor to cover his insecurities. Yeah, Vergil is the storm that is approaching (WHICH IS SO FUCKING FUNNY. HE SAYS THE FUCKING LINE. IT'S BEYOND FUNNY.) Yes, I WOULD fuck the White Rabbit in every single form.

But. Idk. I see people talking about the ending being off and I agree very much. It throws Lady's characterization, which has been great so far if not my preferred kind of Lady (and not my preferred Dante at the beginning but that's just because I am a demonic Dante enjoyer). Vengeful Lady is better than racist Lady in my humble opinion and I wish they had more of that. Could've just had Arkham involved somehow idk. But like. Her whole thing is learning to understand, but she... Doesn't. Instead, she condemns Dante to imprisonment and Hell/Makai to the full force of American colonialism (AMERICAN IDIOT BEING PLAYED OVER THAT SCENE CRACKED ME UP. PERFECT BTW. If it weren't for the butchering of Lady in those last couple, like, 30 seconds that allowed it to happen I would consider it one of the best parts). And then it's implied afterwards that Vergil... Joins Mundus of his own free will. Which. Yknow. Uh. Well. Erm.

(Also ngl I'm kinda pissed at using the fall scene for the White Rabbit. Like. No!!!! He has no personal connection there!!!!! I know it's a fanservice cameo but it doesn't mean anything like that!!!!!!!! THAT'S FOR VERGIL MAKING A DECISION THAT WILL HAUNT BOTH BROTHERS THE REST OF THEIR LIVES)

But yeah uhhhh. Mixed feelings about the animeverse. Maybe just because it's new and I'm not used to there being any kind of alternate DMC universe aside from the reboot that never happened fuck you, maybe it's because it left off on a cliffhanger and the story's nowhere near finished yet (still miffed abt the cliffhanger tbh. Like. DMC shouldn't end on cliffhangers, it should end on "and then everything was calm for a while" timeskips that let Dante get more wrinkles), maybe it's just me being confused as to why they gave Agni and Rudra actual heads

But yeah. Mixed feelings.

I'm gonna go play DMC5 again now

[noteofnaught]

Dante's memory of his mother

Fiddled with what I had written earlier.

The translation was done for me by deepl (translator).

Please let me know if you think it's strange or if there are any mistakes.

The above is purely a personal opinion

Feel free to discuss and exchange.

Dante's memory of his mother

Dante's memory of his mother, or rather that night, seems to have been formally depicted once in DMC5 since DMC1.

So let's start with the DMC1.

In the DMC1 novel, there is a scene depicting Dante recalling the events of his mother's death.

「母さん、母さん……ねぇ、母さん！」

幼子が、地に倒れ伏した母親の身体を揺さぶり続けている。母親の息がすでに絶えていることは、誰の目にも明らかだ。

だが幼子は──すでに自分でもそうとわかっているのだろうが──無

駄な努力を止める気配はない。

「兄さんもいなくなっちゃったんだ！ 母さん！ ねぇ、母さん！」

亡骸から��未だ、温かな血が地面へと広がり続けている。

幼子は半狂乱だった。

We can see in the description that Dante tries to wake his mother up next to her dead body, even though he realises that she is dead but he is still trying to wake her up. This is a reluctance to accept his mother's death, a normal emotion and attitude for a small child to have.

And the second half of his sentence [兄さんもいなくなっちゃったんだ!] It is as if he had searched for his brother, but his tone is one of powerlessness, of helplessness, of feeling negative about the outcome. So here I want to convey not so much that he has searched for his brother to no avail, but a sense of powerlessness about the situation. He tries to wake up his mother in this way.

It's close to one: Mom, wake up. My brother is not here/is gone and I don't know what to do/I'm scared, please get up Come on.

And then in the scene of Neal's death, Dante recalls this as Neal's sacrifice to protect him, just as his mother did that day.

After that he heard the voice of his father's sword, and out of fear and insecurity he was completely drawn to it, thus obeying its words and changing his name until he gained the power to fight against it.

Then, in the battle with Gilvi, when Gilvi stabbed Dante and was covered by the necklace, Dante's internal activity was as follows.

He credits his mother with protecting him (again) as a child.

Where the mother sacrifices herself to save/protect Dante this is consistent with the DMC1 in-game scene. In DMC1 Dante has a similar line after Trish sacrifices herself to save him. This is the diagram from Precious Tears, with Japanese and English, but both Japanese and English convey that Trish sacrificed herself to save him, as did her own (Dante's) mother.

This is in line with the content of the DMC3 comic.

In the DMC3 comic, Dante has a nightmare at the office after his encounter with Vergil, a dream that is not in fully recreated form but like a fragmentary form.

Here the mother has more dialogue than in DMC1, and it is obvious from the comic's footage that there are huge hands behind her that are about to crush her, and Dante reaches towards her as if to retain his mother, who is feeling very scared, while her mother shouts for him to hurry up and hide/hide and not come out no matter what happens. She is then crushed by the huge hand. In the next panel we can see that the demon looks like a bird and says the terrible words "all die". like it is glowing, and on the next page you can also see the huge three foot shadow on the ground, which also looks like the claws of a bird, and the door behind it is the image of burning, while a long shadow is drawn under his feet.

Of course, we know from the comic that Arkham says there was a fire that day, and Vergil's fearful recollection of the house being on fire makes DMC5 even more certain that it was indeed on fire. The glowing eyes, the long, thin shadows and the subsequent bloodstained house in the comic give the impression that something ominous, unsettling and alien is about to happen.

The cartoon after that also shows us Dante waking up with a jolt, his face covered in water, looking at his hand but with only a drop on his end finger, giving the illusion that he has pulled a hook with someone. There is no sweat on his body, however, and of course there are problems of expression in the painting, so it is not painted.

But it is also true that these same fragmentary memories and dreams give Dante unease and fear.

Well, the memory, the feeling of his mother in Dante's vision so far is the following: his mother told himself to hide and not come out, and sacrificed himself to save himself. It is the great selfless motherly love that belongs to Dante.

Although it was a great mother's love, the memory of that day still makes Dante feel uneasy and afraid. The last memory his mother leaves Dante with is the one that tells Dante to hide, and implicitly the will to let him live. If we add the DMC1 novel to the mix here, it is at this very moment that he is drawn to his father's sword.

Again within these memories and fragments, the mother is rendered unknowable to Vergil, meaning that we do not or cannot see in Dante's recollections that the mother ever went looking for Vergil, if not for the presence of the phrase [兄さんもいなくなっちゃったんだ!] we would not even know in this recollection of Dante that he knew that he had a brother. What we can see or what Dante perceives in his vision is that his mother loved him so much that she died in the process of protecting/saving him.

However, it is also a writing device that can be lifted off as suspense.

But again, this doesn't do any damage to the image of Eva as a great mother, because based on what happened that day, the great mother had to choose to save/protect (potentially the closest to her or that she could find) one child and had to give up the other in the face of force majeure. Dante also never said before DMC5 whether his mother loved Vergil or not, whether she ever sought him out or whether she cared for his brother as well.

What we see in Dante's vision is basically what Dante can know, but it doesn't mean all of it. After all, comics or game scenes have an obligation to show us the scenes, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the characters actually see all the textures. We, as players/readers, are a kind of God's eye and we can notice things that are not right or different (also a storytelling technique) but as protagonists we are not necessarily fully aware or in the same position as us.

I think if you have seen suspense films, you will also often see that kind of bridge, we all know that this bomb is going to explode this person to kill that person, although there is that kind of explicitly shown in the footage, but the protagonist is still unaware of the appearance, many viewers are in order to pinch a cold sweat, for this reason anxious hope that the protagonist quickly realize.

And DMC5 gives us a formal depiction of that day, not through snippets like a nightmare, you can see in the game's overstory description that it says Dante dreamed of what happened before, which means this time you are shown real memories.

After all, a nightmare is not necessarily a real memory, it is a condensation of a certain memory. Sometimes we have a nightmare like dreaming of a giant cockroach because we are afraid, so we reproduce and amplify this fear in our nightmares, so that a small cockroach we see in the house becomes enormous in our nightmares, the giant cockroach is not necessarily real but the fear is real. Of course, we are not talking about the formation of nightmares here, but only about the fact that nightmares and some fragments of our memories with fear and anxiety may be a recreation of what we felt and what existed at the time, but not necessarily a completely real recreation.

In the DMC5 Eva process screen.

There is a slight difference between Japanese subtitles and English subtitles, or even Japanese dubbing.

The overall meaning is actually similar to the DMC3 manga, Eva is all over Dante not moving and telling him to hide/hide, the only difference is that she says more words to make Dante forget his past and forget his name and start a new life from scratch/not being Dante but another person to start over. All also contain the mother's wish for him to live well.

The difference is that in the Japanese subtitles, Eva clearly expresses the possibility that she may not return and so tells Dante to listen well to what she says next, whereas in English it is expressed as I promise you will return.

In the English context, although the mother says she will come back, she immediately reverses the 'come back' in the next sentence, saying that she knows it will be difficult, but you're old enough so you'll have to do this if I don't come back. They both mean the same thing, a mother who knows she might not come back and tells her child what she will do if she doesn't come back, as if making a pact with her child: we agreed that if I don't come back, you will remember to do this, I know you can do it.

If you look closely at the animation of the process, you can even see Dante's hand trembling on the cupboard door, he is very scared.

And the BGM here also happens to be called: More Fear

And of course it is here that we first see Eva looking for Vergil, and it turns out that Eva has looked for Vergil! This doesn't exactly match the information we got on Dante's side earlier.

But are you saying that the DMC1 message contradicts the current message? The DMC1 novel only mentions that he cried next to his mother's body, not that she said anything to him before she died, after which he became obsessed with his father's sword out of fear and terror. And his father's sword statement is the same as his mother's deathbed statement but in a very different series.

The meaning of the mother's words is very clear, the words are all about the desire for her child to live well and to stay away from these things that will hurt him, a good expectation and blessing for her child and the expectation and belief that her child will be able to do so.

「今はその名を隠し、目を眩ませ、逃げ延びよ」

“Now go incognito, confuse the enemy and flee far away!”

The overall meaning of the phrase is that it is dangerous to hide the name, confuse the enemy and run away, and the phrase even takes the form of a command that the child must do what he says.

It's a phrase you'd put in the context of a superior to a subordinate, a captain to his teammates, and in the context of a tense battlefield man telling you to run fast is perfectly fine and appropriate. But Eva's words could only be said by a mother to her child.

When all the memories are linked together, our facts about Eva become a little more complete, and at the same time what effect does it have on Dante?

If his mother only died saving him and he hated his father for her revenge which is quite reasonable, this has to be a blowback from his father's enemies. What is necessary to mention here is what Dante's mindset was regarding DMC1 killing the Black Angel.

In the official publication of the 3124 collection, Dante is said to have killed the Black Angel with "no thought", a word synonymous with "remnant", which is generally translated into Chinese as: regret.

And the DMC1 how-to book has a direct description of his ideas.

Dante is talking here about Mundus killing his mother and brother.

This is not the same as what we generally think of as objective perception. In the game we see over the course of the game, the Black Angel looks as if he still has a heart, so naturally we think there is still salvation, after all, he is still alive.

But here Dante does not think that it was his own hand that killed the Black Angel, but that Mundus killed Vergil.

Of course we can parse this to mean that killing the man who was Vergil means, but even so within this passage of Dante he is not one of the reasons for Vergil's death, he has no responsibility in Vergil's death and is not responsible for any act occurring in the process, but rather Mundus should need to take full responsibility.

In other words, it means that even if it was he who killed the Black Angel in the course of the battle, then he is not responsible for it, but Mundus is responsible for it, because it was Mundus who arranged it, and how could he have killed it if he had not arranged it there, it was not his problem, it was Mundus' problem.

than what we generally think of as objective factual rational logic going into the judgement: although Mundus turned Vergil into a black angel like that, he himself didn't recognise the killing, more or less he was responsible for it or felt particularly guilty that he didn't recognise it.

Dante's logic leans more towards total emotional logic: It's all Mundus' fault!

And in DMC5 just as Vergil used to think it was a matter of not having enough power, now it's a matter of having too much power, and now that Mundus is gone, not recognizing Vergil (V) for killing Vergil can only be his active choice, not a passive one, and it can only be that his responsibility has nothing to do with Mundus.

Returning to the mother, what arises is in fact the same question. If before it was his mother's great love for him, which was selfless and exclusive to him, now, at this moment, her love is equal, not just his but also his brother's. The "he" whose mother sacrificed herself to save him in the flashback (DMC5) is not really a "he". His mother's did not hesitate to rush out to save her brother, knowing the danger.

Of course we must also mention nell, arguably the designer of Dante's double shot.

In the novel, Thor wants Neal to commission and pay a deposit for a double gun for himself, one of which is a secret-made gun he stole from a robbery, and the other is the same type of medieval gun that Neal himself received.

nell is so good to Tony, as is clearly described in the DMC1 novel, because Tony looks so much like her child, and her love for her child is projected onto Tony, and she holds on to her job before she eventually dies, not only because of her love for Tony but also her love for her own child, and more so for the work ethic she has taken on this job and should complete.

But all the same, the person she missed most on her deathbed was her own child, something Tony could never replace, nor could he if he wanted to, which of course didn't mean that nell's love for Tony was false, nell's love for Tony was also real, indeed it was love, it was precisely because of the person of her own child that nell loved so deeply that Tony was loved by her.

Whether it is nell or the mother Eva, their love for their child is not solely Dante's alone and only his, or why they love Dante/Tony, it is because they both love their child, and if they were not such, then Dante would naturally not be loved by them.

His mother's protection and sacrifice is something he feels and desires, something that is personal and emotional for him. It also explains Dante's statement to Trish in DMC1 that "his mother died to protect herself", because Trish, like his mother in his feelings and understanding, has what he calls a "heart".

Of course, because DMC1 is entirely Dante's vision of storytelling (DMC1 is Dante's story), his mother is human in Dante's eyes, and Trish acts like his mother to protect him, or even Dante's ideal mother, so Trish is also a person with a "heart", as to how Trish feels or if that is the case. We will not discuss this issue here.

Surely the mother did not save Dante? This is necessarily a negative, but was it to save him that his mother died, or to hold back the demon who tried to kill him so that he could escape? Again, that is a negative. Wouldn't his mother have done that in that situation? That too is a negative. Wouldn't Dante have wanted his mother? No. Must Dante have never been afraid of not wanting his mother to stay by his side to give him security and protection? Did Dante only want to protect his mother and never wanted her to stay by his side to protect him? All the information above seems to be in the negative.

DMC5 is simply a reinterpretation and addition of information from the past, the only thing overturned is Dante's belief that his mother died to save himself.

This message provides us with an explanation of the origin of Dante's hatred for his brother, as is often the case in many films and novels, in which he blames the child for the death of his beloved wife, even though it was not the child's fault, and believes that if it had not been for him, his wife would not have died. He stubbornly believes that his mother died to save him, not to save his brother, and not because of this he is unable to love his brother; he acts as if he wishes he could have the mother's love all to himself.

For if we are to acknowledge the fact that his mother died to save his brother, we also have to acknowledge something else, and that is that he equally did not want to be left/abandoned by his mother.

Of course, this is not a contradiction or a conflict; it is only natural that a child should be afraid and want to protect his mother, and it is equally natural that he should want to protect her.

The above is purely a personal opinion

[durativo]

The Disparity of Dante and Tony Redgrave:

(A Useless Meta about Dante’s Character and the Character of Tony Redgrave from Devil May Cry Volume One)

Tony dodged and parried, yet still suffered a number of direct hits. But finally he annihilated his attackers and paused for breath. The dizziness and nausea dissipated, replaced by exhaustion. Tony found it difficult to lift his sword. His spent pistols were little more than dead weights. He realized with a start that if he sat down, he probably wouldn't have the energy to stand back up. 

Tony figured he was becoming more and more ensnared in the demons' encroaching reality.

When I initially started writing this I set out to talk a bit about how Tony Redgrave and Dante act and appear as characters. As DMC5 makes quick note of, Tony Redgrave was simply an alias that Dante went by for ‘an unknown reason’ (we  now know the reason is because his mother Eva told him to rid himself of his name and start a new life) but Tony Redgrave knew deep down inside exactly who he was. He knew himself as Dante, but only to himself, and seemed to be pushing that down.

To make it short, Tony Redgrave hated Dante. And Dante envied Tony Redgrave.

That is definitely a more dramatic explanation, as I don’t even believe that Tony Redgrave and Dante are something severe; like say a split personality or even a personality disorder, but they are, in fact, personas of each other. There is thankfully a passage in the book that explains easily the inner turmoil Tony was dealing with.

Tony paused to recover his breath. The lack of an audience afforded him a rare moment of honesty. His ironic smile and theatrical red coat were mere props, protective masks, to put his enemies on the defensive and himself at ease.

This is of course, not really just a description of Tony. We can easily infer that this is Dante’s personality too, which is what I mean by the two really not being far enough apart or drastic enough that they warrant a title like a ‘personality disorder’. Tony, in essence, became a part of Dante.

But for a very rare sliver of Dante’s life. Dante was a part of Tony Redgrave. Dante was the persona that was buried away, pushed down, forgotten, hidden, and overall tried to lock away. As Dante built a new life with the name Tony Redgrave, he hoped to put away his anger and frustration and hatred into his old self. Dante attempted to bury his worst attributes, so that he could truly start anew, unbridled from his worst emotions and memories.

It was a pipe dream, of course, because the bad parts always bubbled up to the top, but for a while, he truly did believe he could bury the past, lay it all behind him. At night he would still have nightmares about the life he’d lived and been through. He buried a lot of his emotions into drinking at a young age and working to distract himself.

When Tony Redgrave loses everything, that is when Dante finally resurfaced, and came to face the music. It was all intentional, the suffering Tony Redgrave endured at the hands of Gilver, because that is what Gilver wanted. Evident here:

“Does this not upset you? All your friends...disappearing one by one?”

“I never had any friends,” Dante said coldly, trying not to think about Grue. “I don't care for any.”

“I can read your soul like an open book. You might push those worthless emotions away, but you can never fully escape them.” Gilver cocked his head. “The one you're experiencing right now is called despair. Limitless despair at having everything around you taken away. Your place in the world. Your friends. Your partner. Your substitute mother.”

Dante smiled dryly. “Don't make me laugh. Who's despairing?”

The Cellar grew cold.

“Demons feel no despair,” Gilver finally proclaimed. “You have our blood coursing through your veins. You're the mongrel half-breed offspring of a human and a demon. And you betrayed our side.”

Dante's smile left his face. “That's right. So you know I can't feel something as simple as despair.”

Now I could (and probably will) wax on about Gilver in the novel because he’s great -- but his intentions although unclear are very emotionally driven, and he’s clearly very angry at Dante, and Tony Redgrave in essence. He’s very ready to openly mock everything he just took away from Dante. Even stating he had taken away his ‘place in the world’ as he had been thoroughly ruining Dante’s reputation and workplace.

What made me realizing I was not so correct as I thought, as in the novel there are three locations which Gilver overruns with demonic passageways. A bank, a hospital, and Bobby’s bar. I initially thought by the third location, Tony, who had become Dante, was now unaffected by the situation, merely the presence of Gilver was what threw him off.

Instead, it appears that Dante still does feel the physical ailments that Tony Redgrave felt.

Gilver hefted his sword, seemingly recovered from Dante's last attack. “This place is a cancerous blight to incomplete souls like you. Do you know why? Can you feel instinctually?”

“You tell me.” Dante sneered, but he clutched his sword for reassurance. His breathing and heart rate were rising, just like when he descended into the basement below the hospital. He had barely been able to reach Jessica then, and he knew he would be unable to take on Gilver now.

Just holding his sword seemed to sap his strength, and every breath unleashed a new wave of fire into his lungs. (Calm down. Calm down. I can't show him weakness.)

Not only was he weakened by the presence of demons, while it strengthened Gilver, he was also blatantly aware he would not be able to take Gilver on -- and very clearly wasn’t, as he almost dies in the scene shortly after this.

That seems a bit interesting to me, considering Dante does not show this reaction to the demon world at all in the original game, and the book was written after or in accordance with the game. Of course, the game DMC1 takes place years down the line of the events of the novel. Still, Dante reacts fine to the presence of the demon world now, if not thrives in it.

Of course, this is probably with help of Vergil activating his ability in DMC3 (which of course, mostly retconned this novel out of existence) and helped Dante activate a Devil Trigger. In my eyes, Dante had been very far removed from his Devil/Demon side, and it caused any attempt to reconnect to that to utterly ruin him physically, as indicated in the passage above.

Tony Redgrave was so far removed from Dante that he was purely a human man. He had inhuman strength, because, of course Dante would not squander the potential in that. Dante still loved fighting, even if he didn’t love killing, although he showed little to no compassion for demons until later in his life as he encountered more and more.

Even now of course, Dante is aware that demons have a different lease on life and believe the will to live is a bad trait, one that is unnecessary so long as a demon has a greater will to die. To best, or be bested in combat is the one course of action all demons strive for. Dante can’t empathize with that, but he can definitely best them in combat, so he’ll take that trade off.

Tony Redgrave, is, of course, dead like the rest of his past. Very few people who knew him as Tony have really lived on, except for Enzo (the job broker) and Nesty and Tiki, Grue’s two surviving daughters. Nesty of course, was only a baby, and Dante has long since not seen them, hoping that the distance he kept from them would keep them safe.

I like to believe Dante would look back fondly of those memories of Tony Redgrave, Grue, Nell, and even Bobby and the others, but in the end, Dante really only meets them with contempt. Frustration and bordering on violence. It is very easy to set Dante off with mentions of his past. While the name Tony Redgrave doesn’t do anything to him, the mentioning of his lost friends will provoke a reaction out of him -- depending on the remarks of course. Dante was more than happy to hear Nico praise Nell, and to know that Nell had a surviving child -- but it also made Dante want to distance himself from Nico even harder, knowing the truth of what he’d caused to happen to Nell, and his fear that it would befall Nico too.

Other than small quips, Tony Redgrave is a very touchy subject for Dante because it is a constant reminder of all he has lost, and all he had done. All of it leading up to nothing, and scrounging around to finally pick up the scraps so that he could limp away and continue his life as Dante.