#like i'm fine with them putting her in pants. she almost had them in dmc5. but don't put her in a mecha suit come on

[mariyekos]

For those of you (like me!) who missed it, there was a Behind the Scenes video released for the first Devil May Cry Netflix Anime back in November 2023, which includes a few scenes that aren't in either the old or new trailer!

This is where we got the shots of the female character who might(?) be Lady but didn't appear in the trailers. It's also where we got shots of a fight that doesn't appear in the latest trailer...unless it's an old version that's since been changed. Putting some screenshots and thoughts below the cut!

"Lady", or the Woman in the Behind the Scenes Video

Above: 1) Dante and the woman running on a rooftop, 2) The woman falls off rooftop, Dante sprints to the ground past her, 3) The woman continues falling and Dante gets prepped to catch her (note: there's something on the right that at first I thought might be Kalina-Ann, but on re-watches looks like a broken pipe).

My thought is that this could be Lady because it mirrors their encounters in DMC3 to an extent. The first shot makes me think of running through the library during her fight. The second and third shot of her falling and Dante catching her is reminiscent of when she fell off the Temen-ni-gru and Dante caught her (by the leg).

However...I hope it's not Lady, because other than the hairstyle, she doesn't look like Lady to me. This DMC is clearly going for a more modern aesthetic than DMC3 (and most of the DMCs, with 5 having the most "modern" look in terms of the city), but this woman's outfit reads very techo-futuristic to me and I would rather not have Lady dress like that. It just doesn't feel very Lady-like to me, y'know? That and I just think it was cool when Lady decided to shoot Dante and save herself when falling in DMC3. Please don't damsel in distress her like this :(

(Related: While I know the real reason Lady dresses like she does is that it's cute/hot, I like to HC that she typically doesn't wear armor because she needs to be able to move, and she figures any demon who'll be able to hurt her will be strong enough to make it through armor anyway so she might as well something mobile and comfortable.)

Now I will say, this woman doesn’t have the Kalina-Ann on her, just two pistols(?), so one possible story-line I’m thinking of is that this is Lady, but in a point early in the story where she’s working for some mercenaries or some sort of group to establish herself while she’s hunting Arkham. Then, later on she might split from them and don something more akin to her usual outfits while she runs around with the Kalina-Ann we all know and love. Another option is that this plain isn’t Lady. That’s my ideal.

Another reason why I’d like if this isn’t Lady is that I really do enjoy the young/schoolgirl aesthetic Lady has going in the original DMC3 and DMC3 Manga, because it sells just how messed up Arkham and his actions are. The scene of a teenager being the one to end her father's life and crying over him feels so much more chilling than it would if she was, say, 25. Lady’s a teenager who’s had her mother and her life stolen from her, and that’s tragic. This woman doesn’t read like a teen to me. And while Dante also reads as a little older and anime is notorious for making 17 year olds look 30 and 30 year olds look 17, that doesn’t eliminate the fact that I think an older looking Lady would lower the impact of certain scenes, even if the show says she’s 16. I like when Lady is younger than Dante, because Dante’s this teenager who’s so irresponsible, but then in comes Lady who’s even younger but seems to have it together…until eventualy you come face to face with the idea that oh, oh boy, this is all terrible and no one should be having to deal with this, Arkham what have you done (both with essentially orphaning Lady and partnering with the teenage Vergil (and screwing over the teenage Dante) as part of his evil plan. Which Vergil agrees to and helps with, so he's far from innocent, but still).

Comparison between Behind the Scenes and the New Trailer

It's also possible that the show might've changed aesthetics a bit between the previous trailer and this one.

See these shots from the new trailer (which I will refer to as NT)? I wonder if they're updated variants of this scene from the Behind the Scenes (BtS) video below.

Now I'll admit this is kind of a stretch. Buuuuut I'm going to stretch to make it anyway. In both scenes, Dante is being attacked by a group of humans. Yes, he fights humans across different media, but if the DMC anime is mostly Dante vs a bunch of humans with human weapons, I'm going to be very bored, so that's why I'm hoping this is just storyboard vs Final version of a scene. And yes, I know that's a lot of work to redo...but maybe reception was bad and they pivoted, and that's part of why we went a year without any news.

Other big things: the arcade cabinets.

I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be Dante's shop in both shots, and again, if Dante gets jumped by a bunch of humans in his shop multiple times, I'm going to be upset/bored because really? That's such a basic thing to reuse. Please don't do that. Thus I'm banking on the BtS version being the original idea, with the NT version being what the animators/director pivoted to.

And the thing I caught onto before I noticed the arcade cabinets: the guy(s) on the floor.

Again, it's entirely possible these are different scenes. A guy getting knocked out is one of the most basic things in any show that includes any kind of fighting. But...if they were redoing a scene, why not keep a few of the elements like the guy(s) Dante has knocked out? Are we going to have multiple scenes of people jumping Dante in his shop, Dante knocking them out, and the shop being partially destroyed? Seems excessive.

Lastly, these two shots:

Now the Rebellion thing is deeeeefinitely a stretch. The other stuff I mentioned in regards to this two scenes is stuff I'm pretty sure of Rebellion nah, especially since it doesn't come right after the other scenes in the BtS video (which are all together), whereas all the shots I included of the NT are in sequence. But the reason I included it is because it feels like a very good establishing shot of Dante, where they might have initially wanted to have him fight some people and pull up Rebellion on its own, but later changed their mind to having the zoom happen mid-fight. The way the walls are messed up in the BtS video makes me think that shot's in Dante's shop, and as I've said a million times before, I think it would be boring/lazy to repeat the same events in the same place.

Closing Thoughts

If the fight scenes above ARE the older and newer versions of the same scene, this does give me some hopes that if the woman in the top shots is meant to be Lady, they might've gone back and fixed up her design to make her more Lady-like. I don't want techno-futuristic outfits. I want someone who's in more traditional combat gear or otherwise at least in more cloth. The thing I love about Lady is how she looks like a teenager whose life veered off the road into the realm of demon hunting, and I think the whole "high school uniform paired with guns and belts and so on" does a great job of visually expressing that.

I will say that the military does seem to get involved at some point due to some shots of a gatling gun, armored truck, and missile, and the guys in the BtS video look more military than the mercenary types of the NT, so they still could be two different fights... but I hope not. The modern tech stuff doesn't feel very DMC to me. I want to keep the spirit of the games, even if we go for new things. (And yes, I know the military shows up in DMC5, but they're there for all of two minutes so if they do show up in the Netflix DMC, I hope they're only there for a short while.)

If you've made it to the end, thank you for reading! If you want to see me break down the new trailer, I made a post about it here.