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Devil-May-Who Cares What These Games Are About Anyway
The Devil May Cry franchise is sprawling and meandering, covering five main games, one of which most fans pretend doesn't exist, a reboot game which practically all fans pretend doesn't exist, a pretty decent anime, and some novels and manga that most on the English-speaking side of fandom haven't read, but may have glanced at the wiki for. The canon is at times self-contradictory, and you can clearly see the creative direction of the writing jumping all over the place. The worldbuilding doesn't make sense, the timeline has been switched around. And let's face it: it was originally just supposed to be over-the-top action Resident Evil.
You would be forgiven for just assuming that Devil May Cry is about smokin' sexy style and nothing else. And that is in fact the impression that many casual players walk away with: aww man, these games are so cool! Dante's a badass! Woohoo!
But there is a thematic through-line of the franchise as a whole, even though the series seems to forget about those themes much of the time. But the parts of the franchise that are the most beloved by fans are the parts that wander back to these themes, and they form the core draw of the ongoing narrative.
I'm not going to shock any fans here by saying Devil May Cry is really a story about family, but my main thesis here is that it's not only about that.
Devil May Cry is about family and transgression.
Dysfunctional Family May Cry
The first Devil May Cry game is almost like a prototype of the series, it's not quite sure what it wants to be, yet. The portent of the narrative to come kicks in the door first thing with Trish, who looks just like Dante's deceased mother, and her arrival immediately makes the story about Dante's family, and also sets a certain tone. Trish smashes into Dante's business on a motorcycle wearing sexy black leather, guns blazing. She's transgressing on his space, violently so, and her attire is transgressing in another direction. With this cheesy action-movie aesthetic, the game has announced that it's about sex and violence, about being bad, or perhaps badass, and it expects that you should be excited about those things.
But also, Trish is a clone of Dante's mom. And this is a family-based revenge story.
It's not controversial to say that Devil May Cry really hit its stride with Devil May Cry 3, which was for a long time considered to be the best game in the franchise. The (excellent) gameplay aside, the core narrative about familial conflicts—between brothers Dante and Vergil as well as between Lady and her father Arkham—is really what tugs at our heartstrings.
The parts of Devil May Cry that people actually care about are those that circle back to the family drama. We're interested in Nero in the fourth game because he's implied to be related to Dante, and we're eager to know the story there. The most interesting part of Devil May Cry 4 is the interactions between Dante and Nero, with the narrative surrounding Kyrie and Credo—Nero's family—a distant second. Nobody actually gives a damn about the demon pope. He's a flat villain, just like Mundus or Argosax. We're here for the family drama.
Devil May Cry 5 succeeded because it delivered exactly what all the fans wanted: family drama, family drama, family drama.
And damn, this family is nothing but drama, huh?
Taste the Blood
Nobody in Devil May Cry gets to have a happy family; we established that straight out of the gate. Dante's father is an deadbeat (or possible just dead) demon, his mother and brother are dead. A clone of his mom shows up, and her family is pretty shit, too: she participates in the murder of her father-creator Mundus at the end of the first game.
And that's only the beginning of the patricide. The second game imitates the plot outline of the first in many ways, with Lucia participating in the murder of her father-creator Arius in the same way Trish did with Mundus. And then we go for the hat trick in DMC3 with Lady, who's seeking revenge against her father Arkham for the death of her mother.
That's three games out of three that feature getting revenge against awful father figures. And the protagonist of the series has been abandoned by his father, who is/was literally a demon. Three out of three games about patricide.
sniff sniff – Is this...daddy issues I smell?
The series doesn't stop there. The most interesting conflict of the series is the ongoing clash between brothers Dante and Vergil—chalking up for a total of nine (...I think? There's a lot) fights over the course of three games, if you're counting Urizen. Their relationship is, in a word: conflict-based.
It seems that families in Devil May Cry fulfill none of the purposes we would expect a family to fulfill; in fact, they're exactly the opposite. Parents use and abandon their children, children turn around and murder their parents. Brotherly rivalry is taken to the point of murder. Any familial relationship that was actually of the ordinary sort is severed by death. Every sort of violent transgression that can be made against the family is made.
If there's any sort of message we can take from the first three games, is that's family fucking sucks and is a source of lifelong suffering. Family, what is supposed to be a source of love, repeatedly and reliably twisted into hate and murder.
The one notable exception is Matier's care of Lucia in DMC2, but it must also be noted that she's specifically not Lucia's blood mother.
This pattern of a mother figure who is not blood related to those she cares for is repeated in Kyrie in DMC4, who is described as a mother, big sister and lover to Nero (...and let's put a pin in “lover”). The most positive relationships in the series are entirely voluntary ones, and Kyrie in particular is portrayed as practically angelic.
Four is a turning point in the series, however—Nero is pitted against his adoptive brother Credo, but in the end, their familial bond is affirmed when Credo dies for him, and Nero is reunited with his sister-lover Kyrie.
Wait...sister-lover?
Lord Have Mercy
Speaking of transgression...
Thus far, I've spoken of the family being transgressed through violence, and that's certainly what the first three games are about. Killing your family sucks and it hurts and now you have to spend the rest of your life being an emotionally-stunted demon hunter because nothing else gives your life meaning.
But when Trish crashed through the wall into Devil May Cry in the first game, she brought with her both halves of the B-movie sandwich: violence and sex.
Dante is a cool badass power fantasy for the player, and Trish is a sexy femme fatale who your (probably straight male) assumed audience wants to fuck. She's in black leather, she's got big tits and she's showing them off, and she betrayed her master for that hunk of man with a heart of gold. And they probably-sort of kiss at the end, in classic action movie style.
And she's a clone of his mom.
Dudes, is it incest to want to fuck a clone of your mom?
By the way, “step mom” is the seventh most popular search term of 2019 on Pornhub.
The games kind of dance around exactly what is the relationship between Dante and Trish. She's his “partner” for an unspecified number of years before they part ways, probably just so they can introduce a new girl for DMC2. The writers probably have that vague awareness that it would be weird for them to get together, and yet, they kind of are implied to have already done so.
Devil May Cry 3 certainly doesn't stop smacking the incest drum: it's all about Dante and Vergil. The writers certainly knew what they were doing here—pandering to the fujoshi crowd is old hat in Japan, as if that wasn't obvious enough from Dante strutting around shirtless for the whole game.
Exhibit A: Lady's narration in the opening scene describing their “twisted pleasure” from their rivalry.
Exhibit B: the sword, the classic phallic symbol, thrust from Vergil's hand into his brother's body—an action which triggers the latent demon in Dante's soul and transforms him into a demon (and put a big-ass pin in that).
Exhibit C: Have you ever seen any shonen anime rivalry, people? The Narutos and the Sasukes? The Gokus and the Vegetas? Have two seemingly-polar opposites share hostile eye contact once, and bam a week later there's at least twenty doujinshi. Dante and Vergil are a standard red oni/blue oni dynamic, color-coded for your convenience. Thus it is ordained that they must fuck. So it is written.
DMC4, however, really drops the other shoe with Nero dating his stepsister. We are no longer dancing around the subject of incest at this point: we have now clicked the “stepsister” tag on Pornhub and we are browsing around freely.
And what is the appeal of stepsister porn, ladies and gentlemen? Of course, it's the transgression. It's the forbidden fruit. The real apple of the Qliphoth, here... While taking a step back, of course, and saying, “Sh-sh-sh-she isn't really my sister, so it's okay!”
The sister stuff is fairly downplayed in the game, like they don't want to say it too loud or you'll notice you're wanking to a stepsister fantasy and not just a Catholic schoolgirl (speaking of sexual transgression, mmmmm), but it's never erased. Nero is never like, “No, you're not my sister, I'm in love with you” (though I might come back and correct this once I'm done reading Deadly Fortune, hold me to that).
In the opening scene of DMC4, Nero is coming to church for a religion he doesn't believe in—a religion that be believes would damn him for his demon arm—to watch a performance by his sister, a Catholic schoolgirl-figure who probably isn't allowed to have sex before marriage, who he has a big ol' crush on, and he's there to give her a romantic gift. This is transgression layered on transgression layered on transgression, but it's treated as purely a sweet, romantic scene.
About Nero wanting to bone his sister.
Pull My Devil Trigger
But enough about killing your family and fucking your family, and other family-based transgressions. Just what the hell is this devil stuff all about? It's right there in the title, Devil May Cry, right?
Devil May Cry does what you see in a lot of anime—lifting Christian mythology with little care for the actual meaning of the original. Where Western-penned media like Supernatural or the Lucifer comics have a more intimately familiar view of Christianity, and you can assume they're just playing the mythology (somewhat) straight, Japanese writers bring their own cultural influences to the table when they portray a Christian-esque hell and demons.
Emphasis on the esque. What exactly is hell in Devil May Cry? It's interesting that a heaven isn't really mentioned, or a God. The only god you see worshipped is actually Sparda, a demon. Though Mundus has an aesthetic that is definitely reminiscent of Zeus or the Christian God, he's definitely evil and also a demon. There isn't any mention of Lucifer or rebellion against heaven, either. When angelic-seeming foes appear in DMC4, they all turn out to be demons, in a move more reminiscent of Berserk or Devilman than any Western media or myth.
When hell is featured in the games, it looks like—well, like you'd expect hell to look—and most of the demons featured are flat evil villains. But the waters are certainly muddied by the existence of Sparda, as well as some of the demons featured in the spinoff anime, who are shown to be capable of falling in love or having honor and loyalty.
If we're talking about the history of Christianity, demons and devils are often just pagan gods rebranded as being evil. This is most apparent with the popular vision of the Devil being basically the Greek god Pan. In Christianity, evil is specifically about turning your back on God, which is why a lot of the more modern edgier interpretations of Christian mythology (or many forms of Satanism) position Lucifer as a cool rebel who resists authority (and on that front, shoutout to Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. You may not be aware of this, but it's Featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry Series!).
But absent a God in heaven, what is evil, in the Devil May Cry universe? What makes a demon a demon? What makes them bad?
The general answer that Devil May Cry presents is “humans have the power of love.” Humans can love, and that's what makes them okay. And if the odd demon can join in and feel love too, then maybe they're okay, too. Very Saturday morning cartoon.
But...that's not quite all there is about demons. It's not just that they're lacking in love—and given by the demons shown in the franchise who can feel love, I'm left wondering if that's really all that's going on, here.
Demons in Devil May Cry come from all sorts of sources. It seems some are born, like Dante and Vergil, or made, like Trish and Lucia. Lusachias are said to have “evolved themselves.” A Hell Judecca is a “high priest in the choirs of hell.” Wait, do demons have art? Some demons seem to have come from humans, such as Malphas or the members of the Order of the Sword, while other times, demons could develop to become human-like and exhibit compassion.
It seems to me these demons are what happens when you take the aesthetic of Christian demons and collide it with the Japanese concept of yokai. Yokai are often, perhaps usually categorized malevolent, but often slide into the harmless or trickster category. Sometimes an animal or human can become a yokai through unfortunate events or the accumulation of power.
It's notable that the underworld in Devil May Cry is called a makai (魔界, lit. magic or demon world) and not jigoku (地獄 lit. earth prison). Both can be used to refer to hell and have Buddhist origins, but a makai is more commonly used in fantasy stories to describe a general world of magic and spirits, where jigoku is more explicitly a bad place.
The DMC3 manga gives a very Taoist-sounding (or perhaps Final Fantasy-sounding) shpiel on how the world was born from darkness, and that demons are creatures of darkness and humans are creatures of the light. If this were Final Fantasy, I'd be expecting some nonsense about the balance between light and darkness—but instead we have Sparda showing up to divide the two worlds. Sparda, the hero, very deliberately draws a line between light and dark and says do not cross.
Demons in DMC are generally portrayed as cruel and power-hungry, but we also get a big helping of humans who are like that, too (see: Arkham, demon pope). It sort of leaves you in doubt as to what demons are really supposed to be. It's vague. Perhaps deliberately vague. And it's unclear how bad demons are really supposed to be. They're positioned as ultimate evil, and yet Sparda is also demon Jesus, the man who saved humanity 2000 years ago and is worshipped by a Latin-spouting Catholic-looking religion.
Demons are from darkness. Demons are dangerous. Demons are from the other world, they are the true other. Seeking demonic power is a transgression, it's a bad bad bad thing that leads to bad things. That's why the demon world had that boundary line drawn there! Demon world bad.
And these games are all about becoming one of those demons, because it's awesome and fuck yeah.
Taste the Blood
Why are you playing Devil May Cry?
Maybe you're honestly and purely in it for the story and you're just surfing by on easy mode because the game bores you, but if that's you, you're probably the exception. The clear intention of these games is to be about killing demons and having fun doing it.
That's Dante's whole persona: killing demons and having fun doing it. There's blood on the walls and you're going to add more by banging out some sick combos and killing everything in the room, guilt-free, because violence fucking feels great.
And who are you, the player, to judge Dante for having fun with this when you are, too? The soundtrack is there to urge you on and make you feel like a badass. You're getting ranked on how much violence you can dole out, with the announcer crowing when you lay it down particularly hard. It's enough to cause a 1990's-era moral guardian to clutch their pearls over the state of kids today.
Video game violence is so normalized now, it's funny to think back on an era when this sort of thing was absolutely scandalous. But there's a reason that a video game of that era would automatically get rated M if blood spurted out when you smacked an enemy—a rating that, by the way, means children aren't supposed to be allowed to purchase it. 2001, the year the first Devil May Cry was released, was also the year of the notorious Grand Theft Auto III, and if you're too young to remember that moral panic, well then, lucky you.
I grew up at a time when it was absolutely not uncommon for a parent to forbid their child from playing something as tame as the original Resident Evil because it's too violent. That game was fucking edgy in 1996.
Devil May Cry 1 was absolutely made with the knowledge that at that time, the demographic of American adolescent boys wanted to buy the baddest, bloodiest game on the shelf, specifically because that's the sort of shit they weren't allowed to touch, and they were 100% pandering to the adolescent desire to play a violent video game my parents won't let me touch.
Here's this game: violent, downright Satanic, you can be a fucking badass DEVIL, how cool is that?? Look at all these bad things you're not allowed to do!! Cooooome, little onessssss, join usssss on the altar of violent transgresssssssion........
No Respect for the Demons in My Head
And speaking of adolescent boys, let's talk about Dante and Vergil.
I don't think it's going out on a limb to suggest that these men are...hmm...a little emotionally stunted.
The thing about Devil May Cry is that it absolutely has its cake and eats it too when it comes to developing our woohoo pizza man and his stoic rival. Dante is cool, admirable, a power fantasy for the player—but also kind of lowkey implied to be a gigantic fuck-up.
I was originally inspired to write this essay after reading a rather shallow and low-quality review of Devil May Cry 5 that criticized the game for being a straight cis male fantasy—and even if there were something wrong with that, which there isn't, I feel like that assertion does dirty to the sort of narrative DMC5 is (...and we'll get to the “cis” part later).
Dante is absolutely supposed to be a power fantasy for the player, and you're supposed to think he's cool. This actually struck me the hardest watching the Devil May Cry anime, where it's quite apparent that various women are attracted to him, such as the server at the roller diner, or Patty's girlish crush on him—and his cool attitude and heroism certainly merit that.
But the anime also seems to portray Dante at a low point. It's never really said outright. But Dante's life kind of blows.
One of the first episodes features a scene where Dante is sitting in a train car, and he tells the guy opposite him to watch out. The guy does not watch out, he's killed moments later, and Dante doesn't bat an eye.
This is the headspace where Dante is at, at this point. He makes a token toss at doing the right thing, but he's absolutely disengaged from the world around him. He doesn't really hang with his friends, Lady and Trish—him and Trish have gone their separate ways at this point. He doesn't take care of his place, and the person who spends the most time on him is Patty, of all people—until she's reunited with her mother, in the end. All he ever does is lie around alone. He sleeps a lot—he's shown napping at the front desk often. The show is sprinkled with the odd shot of empty beer cans around Devil May Cry. And the ending of each episode is him drinking alone to sad music.
But he's totally cool, guys. Absolutely a cool dude.
Devil May Cry never really quite takes Dante to task for what is, if I might say so, a bad case of toxic masculinity—the variety that hurts himself, rather than other people. He literally never talks to anyone about anything, and takes everything on himself. The most emotional he ever gets is “I was supposed to fill your dark soul with liiiiiiiiight!” (which is admittedly, the best line in the whole series, don't @ me)
If you peel a few payers back, you see that Dante clearly must have a million Feelings swirling around in there, so where do they all go?
Where do all the feelings go?
Devil Trigger.
As a...storytelling device, the devil trigger isn't about literal demons or anything like that. It's about suppressed emotional turmoil. It's about all that shit you went through in life turning you into that thing that's just like your father. That's what this is about. Dante hates his deadbeat dad who ran out on him as a kid, but now he finds out he's become the thing he hates.
DMC5 really leans hard into this, with both Devil Trigger and Subhuman being explicitly about both demonic transformation as well as emotional turmoil. The demonic transformation is a release, giving over to the emotional self; an emotional transgression.
Remember when I said “put a pin in that” about Dante's demonic awakening by Vergil's sword? His demonic awakening there is a very unsubtle metaphor for an emotional reaction. Dante is extremely Not Happy about his relationship with his brother, and getting stabbed and mocked and rejected, and his demonic awakening is one hundred percent purely emotional turmoil regarding that. He's giving in to what he hates because his brother fucked him up just that hard.
Consider that Dante's awakening in DMC3 comes with a scream, after which he passes out in a pool of his own blood. When he wakes up, he staggers to the edge of Temen-ni-gru and punches a statue in anger. Noticing that he ran a crack up the statue, he grins to himself—he's pleased with his strength. And then he jumps off the fucking tower.
The DMC3 manga states explicitly that Dante has a inferiority complex for being neither demon nor human, and that it leads him to be reckless and disregard his own life. This scene is precisely that, a wild dash down the side of Temen-ni-gru that Dante has no guarantee of surviving, on an adrenaline spree killing demons. Like a lot of subtle story beats in DMC3, the game doesn't tell you outright what's going on in Dante's head. You're just supposed to infer. But this is one of the most emotional moments in the game for Dante, barring Vergil's fall at the end, his demonic awakening.
The moment of Vergil's awakening is only alluded to in the DMC3 manga and Visions of V, but it's safe to say his awakening came in childhood, from being threatened by demons, in a moment of intense fear—a fear which, by the way, later became a driving factor in his life and his ambition for power, despite his dedicated repression of it.
This isn't a subtle metaphor here. Dante and Vergil were both turned into demons by trauma. The devil trigger is a reaction to all of that.
With Vergil, the “suppressed emotional side” of the Devil Trigger also shows itself in a lighter way, funnily enough, with Vergil's EX taunt in DMC5, where his doppelganger just starts dancing, and Vergil is embarrassed by it. It's a silly little extra, but it's basically shoving in your face that “the demonic self is the suppressed emotional self.” Vergil is a hardass, he doesn't want to show anyone that he likes to be silly or have fun.
Of course, this is complicated by the whole Urizen-V thing. I can't remember where I read this, so please someone correct me if I just absorbed some fanon here, but I believe Vergil wasn't necessarily purely dividing his demonic and human selves so much as cutting away things he didn't want—which is why he went out of his way to remove a bunch of memories and nightmares, for example. If Urizen had continued to possess all his memories of being Vergil, how would he behave then? (There's a fanfic premise!!) But I think it's a little simplistic to call the demon side just...the evil side with the power. I think fanfic writers have caught onto that, and they often tend to write the demon side as being more of a powerful "id" than anything else. ...Mostly for sexual purposes, but y'know.
Anyway, with Dante, I think it's not surprising that the “emotional self” here is overwhelmingly couched in terms of anger. It's the one emotion permitted within the bounds of traditional masculinity, but in this case, taken too far. It's about the absolute overload brought on by years of emotional repression. And I think it's important that Dante and Vergil are both so hard masc. The threat of and urge to violence is a big part of traditional masculinity. Both of them awakened to their devil triggers through traumatic situations. The devil trigger is necessary as a vent for all the shit that they are clearly not dealing with, as well as being something to fear. The metaphor about having a rough childhood and growing up to be violent yourself is pretty obvious, here.
Most of the supporting cast supports Dante's persona of masculinity and bravado—none of Trish, Lady and Nico are bastions of traditional femininity. The vibe is “we kick ass, period.” Hell, Nico absolutely gives Nero shit for being upset over Dante and Vergil fucking off at the end of 5, jokingly saying that “crying does make you a little bitch, though.” That's what we call reinforcing toxic masculinity.
But. Big BUT.
Nero isn't like Dante and Vergil.
His devil trigger has always been about the power of love. The Devil Bringer awoke to protect Kyrie, he got his faux-awakening to protect Kyrie, and he got his full awakening to protect Dante and Vergil from each other. Nero is just a big bundle of love...wrapped in anger, sure, but love. And what makes him that way is his relationship with a woman, and her feminine influence. Nero loves Kyrie absolutely, and she's the impetus that leads him to change to a more emotionally open direction. It's her phone call that empowers him to go to Dante and Vergil at the end of DMC5.
And it's notable that he's from a younger generation, compared to the twins. He's still a dude. He's still a manly guy into manly things, but he's also ready to admit when the macho bullshit is macho bullshit. Nero is the nu-masculine.
For Nero, the transgression is not necessarily one of violence and emotional turmoil, like Dante and Vergil (though that's certainly in there). His transgression is taking a step away from an older, 2001-era version of masculinity. He's the kind of guy who's willing to scream about his feelings to his dad and uncle as he says “violence isn't the only way to solve your problems!” He's kinda low-key telling them to “hug it out, man.”
Of course, it ends with a fight because this is a video game and we want a big boss fight, but the intent is there.
That's a hard turn away from “Devils Never Cry.”
Trans-gression
Picture this. You're on top of a large, phallic tower, fighting in the rain with an extremely sexy man who you love-hate. Both of you have large, phallic swords.
Rain dripping down his sexy cheeks, he asks why you deny who you are—and he says so long as you don't accept yourself, you can never hope to be his equal and have a proper sexy fight with him on equal terms. And then he sexily stabs you with his large, phallic weapon. In the rain. You're not crying, it's the rain, okay.
Because damn, yeah, you've known for a long time you're not like other people, you're a bit of an outcast from society, so to speak, you have these desires you've never spoke of to other people—and sometimes, you think there is...another figure inside of you, a different identity, so to speak, who is your true self, but you're scared to make the change. Scared of the changes to your body, even if that's what you want.
Yeah I'm saying it's a big fucking transmasculine metaphor.
Not a deliberate one, I don't think. It's just trans in the way a werewolf story can be, or how The Little Mermaid can be. Transes love stories about monsters and transformation, that shit is just relatable. That's the reason why so many furries and monsterfuckers are trans.
There's something nice about stepping away from the...loaded nature of the human body into an avatar that is fully unrealistic and not something you have to compare your own body to. It's hard to look at a dragon and feel dysphoric. It's giving you an absolute freedom of form: forget gender, let's just smash the bounds of humanity and be whatever the fuck we want.
And I think the Devil May Cry fandom has noticed this, too, judging by the popularity of the “fantasy hybrid genitals” tag. That particular piece of headcanon has just slid right in like it was there all along, to the point where I frankly tend to assume devil trigger means demon pussy, at this point.
As a bit of overshare, I've always had a red-hot loathing for trans content for basically dysphoria reasons (and don't even TALK to me about mpreg), and this fandom has been the first where I could just sit back and enjoy the demon pussy. Half of it is because the fics are specifically not involving transition or dysphoria, it's just bam! The genitals are there, and that's how it is! And part of it is how absolutely, inarguably masculine the Sin Devil Trigger forms are. Adding some other genitals does not feminize them at all. The power of monsterfucking!
“Transgression of the body” may not really be an intended reading on the Devil May Cry franchise, but it's certainly an angle that the fandom has run with, and please do keep running with it.
I Am Omega
Devil May Cry is a story about demons, but it's really just about humans, just like many monster stories. In Devil May Cry, any human has the potential for the demonic, and said demonic is rather vaguely-defined in a video gamey way. It's something that we're not supposed to do, but we want to do it, and in fact, that's the reason we're playing this game in the first place. That's even the title of the series. The demon, or the devil, can represent any number of things, but in all cases, it's transgressive.
It's also a story about family, but not the fun happy kind...mostly because it tends to intersect with that “demon” category, and the family gets transgressed in every direction: violently, sexually. And yet, still, there's a sort of light of hope presented, especially with the ending of the fifth game, that there's something there worth salvaging in the ashes of this dysfunctional demon family.
Can the dark souls of these poor devils be filled with light, in the end...??!