Like many of us here I’m sure, I watched the new Devil May Cry Netflix series the day it was released and I binged all the way through in one sitting. It was a fun ride but, in the end, I was left somewhat underwhelmed by the number of changes to the established DMC lore such as Dante getting very little screen time compared to Lady (“Lady May Cry” sounds apt indeed) and the obvious War on Terror commentary. After I digested it for a few days, I went back to watching the original games on YouTube, particularly Devil May Cry 3 to see how much better Dante and Lady were handled back then.
After hearing so much from other fans how displeased they were with how Netflix and Adi Shankar handled Devil May Cry, I felt I want to share my own take on the franchise for feedback over how it compares with both the canon games and Adi Shankar’s DMC. Admittedly, I’m not the biggest fan of the franchise. I only played Devil May Cry 2 all the way through and that was my introduction to the series; watched cut-scenes fro the rest of the games on YouTube, watched the 2000s anime, read the DMC3 manga but nothing else. I did recently watch EruptionFang’s Complete, Unabridged Devil May Cry timeline video which helped me understand the characters better.
So yes, I’m working on my own Devil May Cry fanfiction… of sorts.
In actuality, I’m working on a massive crossover anime fanfiction. It’s a black comedy that, without going too deep into the premise, takes place in modern day Tokyo and follows a ragtag group of high schoolers who form a club to investigate urban legends and supernatural phenomena around the city. The first of their discoveries is that their school teachers are secretly a group of interdimensional travelers who got whisked away from their worlds via time-space disturbances and banded together to find their way back, using Tokyo as their home base. Their leader is none other than Ghost in the Shell’s Motoko Kusanagi.
From then on, my OCs meet characters from other well-known anime and game titles – some hailing from other worlds and others native to theirs. Such titles they cross over with will include Elfen Lied, Sailor Moon, Full Metal Panic, Persona 5 and, of course, Devil May Cry.
To begin with, I hope to keep it as true to the original Capcom games as possible but, given the Japanese setting, of course some changes are going to be a given to justify why our favorite characters are there to begin with.
We first meet Dante in his teenage Devil May Cry 3 incarnation – with his immature, cocky and thrill-seeking attitude and anti-social aloofness to human society, going by “Tony Redgrave” and running his demon hunting business. However, the collateral damage he leaves in his wake gets him in trouble with the police who put him on probation wherein he’s sent to the high school my OC’s attend.
He lives in a cheap apartment with his godfather Junpei Moritaka or “Uncle Mori”. In case you haven’t noticed, Mori is based on J.D. Morrison, Dante’s agent from the Capcom series. In my story, while he still serves as his agent, he is also a former Yakuza who turned to life as a Christian minister and one day befriended Sparda and Eva and became Dante and Vergil’s godfather. When the Sparda household was attacked, resulting in Eva’s and (allegedly) Vergil’s deaths, Mori took the young Dante away to Japan and now we have a reason why he’s living there. I wanted to give young Dante a father figure with a dynamic similar to Bruce Wayne and Alfred (at least as depicted in Matt Reeves’ The Batman, to be specific).
You probably had hairs standing out when I said Mori is a Christian. Don’t worry. He would be a complete foil to VP Baines from the Netflix series who was basically a modern day Judge Frollo who used God as an excuse to justify his own narcissism and atrocities; whereas Mori, in a similar dynamic to Hellboy and his adoptive father Trevor Bruttenholm, also a man of faith, unconditionally loves Dante and Vergil like his very own sons and cares for their well-being to honor his late friends Eva and Sparda – no matter how wayward either of them are.
Being the rebellious fellow he is, Dante doesn’t ever bother following Japanese etiquette – he would always wear his shoes indoors and he hates Japanese food, always preferring pizza and strawberry sundaes. He always skips out on school to go about either hunting demons or just lazing around on the rooftop which would get him expelled from several schools throughout his life in Japan.
The OC’s of my story would take an interest in “Tony Redgrave”, whose real name isn’t disclosed to them yet, but he brushes off any and all attempts by anyone to get to know him until he finds out they deal with aliens, demons and other otherworldly stuff and are friends with other unusual individuals like him such as Elfen Lied’s Lucy though he is still aloof and only gets involved in their antics if they cross paths from time to time.
As we flesh out Dante, he is too lazy to bother memorizing the names of his Japanese peers around him (with so many syllables to remember) so he decides to just give everybody mocking nicknames. For example, one of my OC’s has black hair, red eyes and wears a black hoodie. His name is “Yuki” but Dante always calls him “Edge Lord” or “Discount Dracula” much to his annoyance.
Later on, we are introduced to Lady who is hunting demons herself across Tokyo. She and Dante accidentally cross paths on the same job and she opens fire on him, mistaking him for her quarry until my OC’s break up the fight and the teachers arrange for her to be enrolled in their school to keep an eye on her.
As we all know, in the Capcom games, Mary (as is Lady’s real name) renounced her name after her father Arkham killed her mother Kalina Ann in a ritual to become a demon. Because Arkham was the one who given Mary her name, she ditched it to distance herself from him as part of her vendetta. In the Netflix show, she still goes by “Mary Ann Arkham” (making Dante’s decision to name her “Lady” lack the impact it had in the games and felt more shoehorned). In my story, Mary instead goes by “Mari Amahagane”.
As part of his habit of nicknaming his Japanese peers, he calls Mari simply “Lady”. When someone asks him “Hey. You gave us all more relatively creative nicknames. ‘Lady’ is the best you got for Mari Amahagane?!”, Dante replies “Because I’m running out of ideas.”
Devil May Cry 3 revealed that Mary is the direct descendant of a priestess Sparda sacrificed in order to seal the portal to the Demon world in Temen Ni Gru so Arkham needed his daughters blood alongside Dante and Vergil’s to unlock it. Nothing else was expanded upon Mary’s lineage but I reckon the unreleased third volume of the Devil May Cry 3 manga was going to.
So I decided to expand on it myself and establish said priestess as part of an ancient Shinto sect called the “Amahagane”. When Sparda sacrificed the woman to seal off my fic’s version of Temen Ni Gru called the “Makai No Hashi”, the woman’s twin sister had the sect dissolved in order to conceal any knowledge how to unlock the hellgate and her descendants would go on to intermarry with foreigners to dilute their bloodline as much as possible so nobody, if by any chance they found out, would ever use their blood to do just that.
Long time Capcom fans will probably recognize ‘Amahagane’ as a term borrowed from the Genji series, a similar hack & slash series set in Feudal Japan.
The series would go on with Dante and Lady having a high school rivalry with some belligerent sexual tension here and there. Dante would frequently visit his gunsmith Nell Goldstein who somehow is able to run a gunsmith business in Japan of all places while Lady has one of her own in the form of Robert Kendo and both Goldstein and Kendo happen to be fierce business rivals, paralleling Dante and Lady’s animosity. While I’m at it, Dante doesn’t have his signature Ebony & Ivory handguns yet so he frequently breaks whatever pistols he buys from Goldstein just like the Devil May Cry novel (and the Netflix series, surprisingly).
One hijink I came up with between Dante and Lady is that Lady somehow gets Dante tied up in a chair and she interrogates him by threatening to eat a box of pizza he ordered. She takes a bit as he pathetically begs her to stop but then starts snickering. She asks “What’s so funny?” then Dante tells her that he already licked the entire pizza before she captured him. In horror and disgust, she rushes into his bathroom. She yells from the bathroom “Where the hell’s your Listerine?!” and he answers “What Listerine?”
As for Arkham, this version of him would be a scientist/occultist working for the Umbrella Corporation who dabble in not just bioweapons but multidimensional travel, alien technologies as well as the occult and thus take an interest in Sparda’s bloodline.
A proper arc following the “Temen Ni Gru” storyline doesn’t happen until much later wherein we first follow what seems to be a loose adaptation of Persona 5 and DmC: Devil May Cry. There is Masayoshi Shidou (the antagonist of Persona 5) who is running for Prime Minister of Japan. However, this version of Shidou is only the human guise of the Demon lord Mundus himself (similarly to how Mundus was depicted in DmC: Devil May Cry) and among his supporters is Arkham himself.
When Sparda defeated Mundus, he pierced him through with the Force Edge to keep him weakened. However, Mundus was able to project himself to the human world and still command a loyal following of demons to do his bidding while he hid in the shadows to regain as much strength as he could. In the present day, he would take on the alias of Masayoshi Shidou and infiltrate the Japanese government to run for Prime Minister so he could use his position to excavate the Makai No Hashi, unlock the hellgate and use Dante and Vergil’s halves of the amulet to finally pull the Force Edge out of his real body and restore himself with Sparda’s power.
Yes, this also means I’m reducing Arkham from the Big Bad who wants Sparda’s power for himself to simply Mundus’ loyal servant though, unlike his Netflix counterpart, he is still a sociopath who wants demon power for himself and manipulated Karina Amagahagane (Kalina Ann) so he could father another Amahagane whose blood he can use and so he could sacrifice his wife to become a demon.
You’re probably wondering about Vergil. What role does he play in this?
He would be traveling to Japan, seeking a way to obtain Sparda’s power which eventually leads him to join Arkham and Mundus in releasing Makai No Hashi. While, yes, he knows Mundus killed his mother and would want nothing more than to kill him for it, they realize they need each other to get what they want so they form a temporary alliance with Vergil intending to double cross him at the last second once they find the Force Edge.
During one of Dante and Vergil’s skirmishes, however, Vergil would berate Dante on how Eva “favored” him over himself, prompting Dante to correct him and tell him how their mother died trying to find and save him which gives him pause. So ultimately, Vergil would realize the errors of his ways much sooner than he would in canon. He would join Dante in saving the world as the hellgate opens, leading to a demon invasion and, after killing Mundus for good, Vergil actually volunteers to cross into the underworld and seal it off with the Yamato from within and even gives Dante both halves of the Amulet along with the Sparda sword so he can use it to take care of the demons remaining on Earth. Vergil cuts his way up Makai No Hashi, destroying the tower so it can’t be used to open another hellgate and crosses into the underworld and seals it from within.
In the aftermath of the demon invasion, while Dante and Lady team up to form Devil May Cry and start hunting demons across the country, the invasion itself on top of numerous other attacks from other villains, has gathered worldwide attention setting their eyes on Japan as the sole source of everything going wrong so the United Nations dispatch a military peacekeeping force to quarantine the entire country.
Obviously, there’s still a lot of work to be done here but overall, what do you guys think of it?
After hearing so much from other fans how displeased they were with how Netflix and Adi Shankar handled Devil May Cry, I felt I want to share my own take on the franchise for feedback over how it compares with both the canon games and Adi Shankar’s DMC. Admittedly, I’m not the biggest fan of the franchise. I only played Devil May Cry 2 all the way through and that was my introduction to the series; watched cut-scenes fro the rest of the games on YouTube, watched the 2000s anime, read the DMC3 manga but nothing else. I did recently watch EruptionFang’s Complete, Unabridged Devil May Cry timeline video which helped me understand the characters better.
So yes, I’m working on my own Devil May Cry fanfiction… of sorts.
In actuality, I’m working on a massive crossover anime fanfiction. It’s a black comedy that, without going too deep into the premise, takes place in modern day Tokyo and follows a ragtag group of high schoolers who form a club to investigate urban legends and supernatural phenomena around the city. The first of their discoveries is that their school teachers are secretly a group of interdimensional travelers who got whisked away from their worlds via time-space disturbances and banded together to find their way back, using Tokyo as their home base. Their leader is none other than Ghost in the Shell’s Motoko Kusanagi.
From then on, my OCs meet characters from other well-known anime and game titles – some hailing from other worlds and others native to theirs. Such titles they cross over with will include Elfen Lied, Sailor Moon, Full Metal Panic, Persona 5 and, of course, Devil May Cry.
To begin with, I hope to keep it as true to the original Capcom games as possible but, given the Japanese setting, of course some changes are going to be a given to justify why our favorite characters are there to begin with.
We first meet Dante in his teenage Devil May Cry 3 incarnation – with his immature, cocky and thrill-seeking attitude and anti-social aloofness to human society, going by “Tony Redgrave” and running his demon hunting business. However, the collateral damage he leaves in his wake gets him in trouble with the police who put him on probation wherein he’s sent to the high school my OC’s attend.
He lives in a cheap apartment with his godfather Junpei Moritaka or “Uncle Mori”. In case you haven’t noticed, Mori is based on J.D. Morrison, Dante’s agent from the Capcom series. In my story, while he still serves as his agent, he is also a former Yakuza who turned to life as a Christian minister and one day befriended Sparda and Eva and became Dante and Vergil’s godfather. When the Sparda household was attacked, resulting in Eva’s and (allegedly) Vergil’s deaths, Mori took the young Dante away to Japan and now we have a reason why he’s living there. I wanted to give young Dante a father figure with a dynamic similar to Bruce Wayne and Alfred (at least as depicted in Matt Reeves’ The Batman, to be specific).
You probably had hairs standing out when I said Mori is a Christian. Don’t worry. He would be a complete foil to VP Baines from the Netflix series who was basically a modern day Judge Frollo who used God as an excuse to justify his own narcissism and atrocities; whereas Mori, in a similar dynamic to Hellboy and his adoptive father Trevor Bruttenholm, also a man of faith, unconditionally loves Dante and Vergil like his very own sons and cares for their well-being to honor his late friends Eva and Sparda – no matter how wayward either of them are.
Being the rebellious fellow he is, Dante doesn’t ever bother following Japanese etiquette – he would always wear his shoes indoors and he hates Japanese food, always preferring pizza and strawberry sundaes. He always skips out on school to go about either hunting demons or just lazing around on the rooftop which would get him expelled from several schools throughout his life in Japan.
The OC’s of my story would take an interest in “Tony Redgrave”, whose real name isn’t disclosed to them yet, but he brushes off any and all attempts by anyone to get to know him until he finds out they deal with aliens, demons and other otherworldly stuff and are friends with other unusual individuals like him such as Elfen Lied’s Lucy though he is still aloof and only gets involved in their antics if they cross paths from time to time.
As we flesh out Dante, he is too lazy to bother memorizing the names of his Japanese peers around him (with so many syllables to remember) so he decides to just give everybody mocking nicknames. For example, one of my OC’s has black hair, red eyes and wears a black hoodie. His name is “Yuki” but Dante always calls him “Edge Lord” or “Discount Dracula” much to his annoyance.
Later on, we are introduced to Lady who is hunting demons herself across Tokyo. She and Dante accidentally cross paths on the same job and she opens fire on him, mistaking him for her quarry until my OC’s break up the fight and the teachers arrange for her to be enrolled in their school to keep an eye on her.
As we all know, in the Capcom games, Mary (as is Lady’s real name) renounced her name after her father Arkham killed her mother Kalina Ann in a ritual to become a demon. Because Arkham was the one who given Mary her name, she ditched it to distance herself from him as part of her vendetta. In the Netflix show, she still goes by “Mary Ann Arkham” (making Dante’s decision to name her “Lady” lack the impact it had in the games and felt more shoehorned). In my story, Mary instead goes by “Mari Amahagane”.
As part of his habit of nicknaming his Japanese peers, he calls Mari simply “Lady”. When someone asks him “Hey. You gave us all more relatively creative nicknames. ‘Lady’ is the best you got for Mari Amahagane?!”, Dante replies “Because I’m running out of ideas.”
Devil May Cry 3 revealed that Mary is the direct descendant of a priestess Sparda sacrificed in order to seal the portal to the Demon world in Temen Ni Gru so Arkham needed his daughters blood alongside Dante and Vergil’s to unlock it. Nothing else was expanded upon Mary’s lineage but I reckon the unreleased third volume of the Devil May Cry 3 manga was going to.
So I decided to expand on it myself and establish said priestess as part of an ancient Shinto sect called the “Amahagane”. When Sparda sacrificed the woman to seal off my fic’s version of Temen Ni Gru called the “Makai No Hashi”, the woman’s twin sister had the sect dissolved in order to conceal any knowledge how to unlock the hellgate and her descendants would go on to intermarry with foreigners to dilute their bloodline as much as possible so nobody, if by any chance they found out, would ever use their blood to do just that.
Long time Capcom fans will probably recognize ‘Amahagane’ as a term borrowed from the Genji series, a similar hack & slash series set in Feudal Japan.
The series would go on with Dante and Lady having a high school rivalry with some belligerent sexual tension here and there. Dante would frequently visit his gunsmith Nell Goldstein who somehow is able to run a gunsmith business in Japan of all places while Lady has one of her own in the form of Robert Kendo and both Goldstein and Kendo happen to be fierce business rivals, paralleling Dante and Lady’s animosity. While I’m at it, Dante doesn’t have his signature Ebony & Ivory handguns yet so he frequently breaks whatever pistols he buys from Goldstein just like the Devil May Cry novel (and the Netflix series, surprisingly).
One hijink I came up with between Dante and Lady is that Lady somehow gets Dante tied up in a chair and she interrogates him by threatening to eat a box of pizza he ordered. She takes a bit as he pathetically begs her to stop but then starts snickering. She asks “What’s so funny?” then Dante tells her that he already licked the entire pizza before she captured him. In horror and disgust, she rushes into his bathroom. She yells from the bathroom “Where the hell’s your Listerine?!” and he answers “What Listerine?”
As for Arkham, this version of him would be a scientist/occultist working for the Umbrella Corporation who dabble in not just bioweapons but multidimensional travel, alien technologies as well as the occult and thus take an interest in Sparda’s bloodline.
A proper arc following the “Temen Ni Gru” storyline doesn’t happen until much later wherein we first follow what seems to be a loose adaptation of Persona 5 and DmC: Devil May Cry. There is Masayoshi Shidou (the antagonist of Persona 5) who is running for Prime Minister of Japan. However, this version of Shidou is only the human guise of the Demon lord Mundus himself (similarly to how Mundus was depicted in DmC: Devil May Cry) and among his supporters is Arkham himself.
When Sparda defeated Mundus, he pierced him through with the Force Edge to keep him weakened. However, Mundus was able to project himself to the human world and still command a loyal following of demons to do his bidding while he hid in the shadows to regain as much strength as he could. In the present day, he would take on the alias of Masayoshi Shidou and infiltrate the Japanese government to run for Prime Minister so he could use his position to excavate the Makai No Hashi, unlock the hellgate and use Dante and Vergil’s halves of the amulet to finally pull the Force Edge out of his real body and restore himself with Sparda’s power.
Yes, this also means I’m reducing Arkham from the Big Bad who wants Sparda’s power for himself to simply Mundus’ loyal servant though, unlike his Netflix counterpart, he is still a sociopath who wants demon power for himself and manipulated Karina Amagahagane (Kalina Ann) so he could father another Amahagane whose blood he can use and so he could sacrifice his wife to become a demon.
You’re probably wondering about Vergil. What role does he play in this?
He would be traveling to Japan, seeking a way to obtain Sparda’s power which eventually leads him to join Arkham and Mundus in releasing Makai No Hashi. While, yes, he knows Mundus killed his mother and would want nothing more than to kill him for it, they realize they need each other to get what they want so they form a temporary alliance with Vergil intending to double cross him at the last second once they find the Force Edge.
During one of Dante and Vergil’s skirmishes, however, Vergil would berate Dante on how Eva “favored” him over himself, prompting Dante to correct him and tell him how their mother died trying to find and save him which gives him pause. So ultimately, Vergil would realize the errors of his ways much sooner than he would in canon. He would join Dante in saving the world as the hellgate opens, leading to a demon invasion and, after killing Mundus for good, Vergil actually volunteers to cross into the underworld and seal it off with the Yamato from within and even gives Dante both halves of the Amulet along with the Sparda sword so he can use it to take care of the demons remaining on Earth. Vergil cuts his way up Makai No Hashi, destroying the tower so it can’t be used to open another hellgate and crosses into the underworld and seals it from within.
In the aftermath of the demon invasion, while Dante and Lady team up to form Devil May Cry and start hunting demons across the country, the invasion itself on top of numerous other attacks from other villains, has gathered worldwide attention setting their eyes on Japan as the sole source of everything going wrong so the United Nations dispatch a military peacekeeping force to quarantine the entire country.
Obviously, there’s still a lot of work to be done here but overall, what do you guys think of it?