Timeline Changed - DMC 2 Now Takes Place Before DMC 4

[Morgan]

We don't know that, though. We don't know about the events that led Vergil this way nor why he left whoever she was. In the original Japanese version Vergil doesn't say 'I don't care about my son.' He basically says 'Son? I don't know of any son.'

You know the reason Vergil left to cut the tree down was for Nero, right? Even if he was able to keep fighting and just decided to stop and go was for him. Even if he fought him beforehand Vergil's actions at the end have to do with Nero.

Of course we don't know; they didn't think enough about it to write it. I base the "Not much" on how the Material Archive artbook has an entry attributing Vergil's quest for power to his desire to protect his mother and what he valued about Sparda's legacy, and then DMC5 bastardized the quest and two halves of Vergil's character down to nothing but a toxic sibling rivalry because Dante had everything Vergil thought he wanted including his mother's love and protection, and it was given validity with outside-POV blurbs about how Vergil would frequently leave the house by himself to read, the Visions of V manga where Eva apparently hasn't taught Dante the basic meaning of boundaries and coddles him, and in the game Dante recounts the flashback of Eva's death in which Eva apparently can't tell when Vergil is in the house or not, even though the manga shows she should know since he was attacked shortly after he left the house in a huff because he couldn't read his book and she let him abandon the book and "self-soothe" instead of running after him. She somehow thought one eight-year-old child as more self-reliant than the other. So yeah, they can say that Vergil loved Nero's mother, but if it's going to be treated in the same way as Vergil's love for Eva (and hers for him), then no, no he doesn't.

He said something different in Japanese. Okay, and? I still take issue with the idea that he wouldn't even know he had a son, given all the steps that would involve for what's "meant to be" commitment/love. So he'd just have sex with a woman and not know it left her pregnant? He'd pass off his union with a woman as something that "happened a long time ago"? They only needed to change a line or two to express a different idea with Vergil's mindset than what they did.

"Vergil cut the tree down for Nero"? Vergil cut the tree down because he already reaped the benefits of having the tree around, gained more by Urizen reuniting with V, then got his ass kicked twice in a row. Instead of immediately fixing the Qliphoth as soon as he was reformed (or while he told Dante to "heal his wounds and become stronger") he kinda just stood around like a bonehead patiently waiting for Dante to come and fight him to the death, and only pivoted to Nero within a minute or five of Nero showing up to body him. If he cared about Nero's existence or even the tree interfering with the fight, he wouldn't have continued the fight with Dante while the Qliphoth remained standing that then prompted Nero to break it up, and then pick a fight with his kid, he'd have just cut the tree. You're free to read into the drivel the games provided complete with shoddy dialogue and rapid "developments" in character where others don't matter all in the name of subtlety but that's not what I'm seeing with the material that's actually there.

 

[berto]

I still take issue with the idea that he wouldn't even know he had a son

He's not the mother. It's not like he had to be there for it to happen. Babies don't work that way. They do it once, peace, she pregnant? Ah, who cares. We don't know how long that relationship lasted, who she was, if she knew why he left, did she decide no to tell him or any of the details. It's not as dry cut as you want to make out to be. People part and children happen when they will, not on the first, last or intended try. If it was that simple every man would know they were a father and we all know that there are cases when they don't.

Vergil cut the tree down because he already reaped the benefits of having the tree around

So why not leave it be? Who cares? let it eat the planet. He got what he wanted. He did it for Nero and Dante left for Vergil's sake. Go see it again and the way things work out make this evident.

 

[Morgan]

He's not the mother. It's not like he had to be there for it to happen. Babies don't work that way. They do it once, peace, she pregnant? Ah, who cares. We don't know how long that relationship lasted, who she was, if she knew why he left, did she decide no to tell him or any of the details. It's not as dry cut as you want to make out to be. People part and children happen when they will, not on the first, last or intended try. If it was that simple every man would know they were a father and we all know that there are cases when they don't.

Would you like to read my post two posts ago again? It might help if you did. I wasn't disputing the overall presence of a father in childbirth proper, because obviously he isn't the one carrying the baby to term or anything, not that that means anything because Dante didn't have Nero either and he still sussed the kid out as Vergil's son and cares for the guy. This is a series where blood relation to a demon 2000 years removed can be determined by scent on top of obvious physical characteristics, which makes Vergil's inability to figure it out himself stupid.

Anyway, I dispute the claim that he loved the woman he was with but apparently wouldn't give two damns what happened after they had sex, his human half didn't carry any memories of her either, and he wasn't interested in Nero's welfare until it got thrown in his face that that was his son, long after he cut off Nero's arm. If he up and left the woman, he didn't love her. If the relationship was just a fling, he didn't love her, and it's suggested Vergil did have a mere fling "a long time ago" with someone because he was young once, when they could have written the dialogue to show that a memory of her actually endured all the transformations and traumas he went through after their relationship if he loved her. It's okay to acknowledge that Vergil acted like a deadbeat and knocked up a random woman without care for her well-being or whatever her wishes were. It's not the end of the world here.

So why not leave it be? Who cares? let it eat the planet. He got what he wanted. He did it for Nero and Dante left for Vergil's sake. Go see it again and the way things work out make this evident.

He did it because the game was about passing the torch to Nero and "concluding the tale of the Sons of Sparda" thus they needed a contrived excuse to separate the twins from Nero to have Nero be the hero of the next game if there's a next game, while the twins continue a less-heated rivalry in Hell with no real stakes because Yamato can open portals to cross realms whenever. Unfortunately people slobber all over Vergil's inclusion in the story so much that no one questions the fact that even though Nero saved Vergil to protect what family he has left over "regretting Credo's death", he's immediately rewarded for his efforts by that family ditching him for what may be an indeterminate amount of time, and Vergil doesn't at all attempt "being there for his son" even when he can be there for his son, opting to escape sharing space with him the same way he left Dante in DMC3-- going to Hell after getting his ass beat and finding a dumb "family-related" justification for it. Doing it once was excusable, doing it twice turns it into a silly coping method for facilitating a genocide.

It's not that deep.

 

[BlackAngel]

Which is.... not much.

Unless you have a totally different definition of "caring" that includes

Not knowing he had unprotected sex

Not knowing he impregnated a woman given that he was having sex with her

Not knowing he had a son

Not caring he had a son

Assaulting his son and implicitly disrespecting the will of the woman he apparently loved who, considering she carried her child to term, would probably have wanted her son to keep his bodily integrity

It being passed off as "happened a long time ago" and "you were young once too", phrasing that suggests it was an impulsive teenage decision he doesn't consider himself obligated to honor and not one born out of commitment and love like an adult.

Not sure how you got "he cares" out of


Do you know anyone who forgets they have a child? We generally call those deadbeats, not maintain illusions that they truly loved their baby mama. That's like saying Nero cares about Kyrie and expressing that by having him cut off Credo's leg on purpose with no compunction. Even Bingo knew that Nero loving Kyrie meant that he would have to care for what she cared about, even if he wouldn't on his own, and that's why Nero refuses to fight Credo-- "I don't want to hurt Kyrie like that".

Like I said, you're free to write fic about it, but it's not in the game. They don't get credit for it because the woman or Nero weren't invented for 3 and Vergil didn't act like they existed (because they didn't), and then 5 had him not even care and in fact contributed to his son's harm when Nero is supposed to be an extension/product of his love for the woman he was with.

I knew it was written by the writers, but they didn't even explored the story of Vergil, after he was freed from the corruption of Mundus. If anything, Vergil needs a rewrite because he's the same person as he once was in 3. He didn't get a chance to look at himself from what he is, not even questioned himself for why does he seeks power, or time to reflect on the actions of his past. Vergil doesn't have any character development, whatsoever. And they've wasted it on the 5th game.

And it would be more believable if Vergil once cared for the woman he loved, but she died in his arms. So, he blamed and hated himself even more, that he's willing to forsake his humanity for power.

 

[Morgan]

@BlackAngel
He definitely needs a rewrite and natural introspection so his story doesn't sound so counterfeit. Unfortunately, Visions of V is the introspection the existing writers think Vergil needs for why he wanted power, to compound V's flashback exposition in the game. For whatever reason this introspection is focusing excessively on Dante over the tragedy they've been rehashing for two whole games and featured in 3 of them (1, 3, 5). Vergil asked himself why he wanted power, he immediately answered "to defeat Dante" and the rest of him went "Yeah, sounds legit" and accepted it with no further prodding. The man has tunnel vision about his brother.

Dante warped into his reason for being and Vergil has done the same for Dante, which reads tremendously like bait for fujoshis and yaoi/twincest fans that salivate at the idea that these brothers have some deep, irreplaceable, borderline-romantic bond that makes them forsake other bonds. Like Vergil with the woman he impregnated. Or Dante with Nero. Or Dante with Those Crazy Bi-- I mean, Trish and Lady. Even though Dante and Vergil have spent more time out of each others lives than in it, so they ought to be no more knowledgeable or intimate with each other than random strangers that met on a bus a few minutes every morning and afternoon for a straight year. In fact, it's more like estranged siblings where one is borderline homeless and the other is a drug addict murder hobo and they haven't talked in ages and don't have each others phones or addresses a great deal of the time. Dante has found bonds with other people that should matter more to him as they're his Found Family, but both twins are willing to abandon who else they know in order to spend time with each other, putting Bros Before Hoes a bit too literally.

That's great and all but those fans can write that nonsense on their own time.

Vergil's actually worse than he is in 3. At least in 3 he was a 19yo and may or may not have been fresh from losing Nero's Mother. But he's doing the same thing beyond the age of 40 even after what he's been through because his writing is not natural. Start with the part where his only victory in 3 is against Dante in Mission 7, a Dante who hadn't awakened his power yet. Vergil said cryptic stuff, got away with the amulet, yadda yadda. But in Mission 13 he ties with Dante and then gets defeated by his underling that he left for dead and didn't even confirm the kill, because he's stupid. Arkham straight up says "You have lost, because you underestimated humans". He's then shown that human blood is the missing key to unsealing the Temen-ni-Gru. Falls. Comes back. Passes by Lady at a point where he honestly shouldn't be seeing her if she were as weak or foolish as he thought she was. Regardless of my own opinions on DMC3 in general, in-universe it should be a big deal to Vergil that some teenage girl got further in her quest while he very visibly hit a low point and started his ascent from a literal lower level than her. I mean, that's on the nose. The game ends with Vergil fighting Mundus in an impaired condition and being enslaved. He only defeats Dante once in DMC1 as well, but what defeats Vergil in turn is the amulet and memory of his mother/lingering tie to humanity, then Dante outright beats him two more times then proceeds to attain the power of Sparda and save the world.

Now, for a naturally progressing character, they would take stock in their wins and losses and realize humanity in some form has defeated him in all the places where he otherwise had none of his own to speak of and couldn't brute force a victory just by being more outright powerful. This is a moral Dante shares in 4. Demons may be physically powerful but humans have something that demons don't. Which should be something like, determination or bonds or whatever.

Instead Vergil continued to underestimate humans, literally discards his human side, reforms only because his human side refuses to die (and also his human side is shady and Dante is dumb), but even though he threw away his own humanity for power he still reaped the apparent benefits of "human blood being the source of demonic power" by sitting on a throne created by a demonic murder tree and handily defeating the heroes for a while, and later nomming on some blood-harvesting fruit from said demonic murder tree and defeating Dante some more, then reforming, and beating Dante again? .... Then Dante defeats him and Nero defeats him.

So I guess he really doesn't have to learn anything, according to the writers of the series. They can easily retcon when and how humans matter in terms of "power over demons" and hand Vergil his victories as long as it serves the plot they want to tell. He can get his power by eating blood fruit while his other half does the pesky character development, Dante can get power by unintuitively stabbing himself for the fifth time in this series, and Nero can get power by talking into a phone booth and getting in his feelings. Win-win-win!

It would not have been that hard for V to talk to Trish about how he wanted to protect someone close to him without the whole "mommy's love" Freudian text, with V talking about a past girlfriend/wife both establishing him as a separate identity to the Vergil they knew in that moment and also a stealth parallel to Nero and Kyrie once they cashed in the Vergil reveal. Or Dante remarking that Vergil lived up to Sparda's deeds in a way that mattered. Or even Vergil having a quick dialogue on how he gave his own half of the amulet to Nero's Mother as a gift to her and opened up to her about Eva and why that means something, but both their deaths reinforced his need for power to "control everything/protect anything". That would recontextualize a bit of what snaps Nelo Angelo out of his brainwashing in 1. Then add some line about how the memory of Nero's Mother still stuck with Vergil/V even though he expected it to take the form of one of his trauma-demons like Griffon or Shadow etc, proving the good of her presence outweighed the bad.

But for the writers it's easier for them to have the "eternal sibling rivalry" thats more like "sibling rivalry herpes" considering it goes away for a while then comes back to wreck everything.

 

[berto]

It's okay to acknowledge that Vergil acted like a deadbeat and knocked up a random woman without care for her well-being or whatever her wishes were. It's not the end of the world here.

That's funny because it can just as much be ok for the situation to be far more complicated and that we don't know what happened. That not every case where the father is absent is a matter of being a dead beat.

It's not that deep.

It's also not that shallow. What you said is true. The whole thing. But it's also true that they clearly put more thought behind their 'excuse' than what you're giving credit for. Just because they did it so as to have an excuse to have Nero being the new solo act doesn't mean they didn't think very hard about the reasoning behind their actions.

 

[Morgan]

Of course not every case of an absent father is sign of a deadbeat dad. This is a series with Sparda in it. But Vergil isn't Sparda, and every other absent dad in the plot who was still alive to theoretically care for a child they created and instead left to further their selfish ambitions, just happens to be a villain. I didn't write the story, I'm just observing trends. So whenever it is they do develop the relationship between Vergil and Nero's Mother to a complicated one where he isn't at fault for not knowing/caring he had a son, in a way that also explains why he doesn't just talk about Nero's mother in a substantial manner that doesn't suggest she's nothing more than a one-night stand (as in "that was a long time ago" and "you were young once") and why Dan Southworth himself had some objection to that implication, I'll be happy to acknowledge that they actually went somewhere with it, but that would still mean it takes more than one game to cover a topic that didn't need more than one game, they're sure as hell not going to get credit for "good writing" before they actually write well, and me not giving Capcom the benefit of the doubt with their track record of character writing isn't going to hurt them any because they earned that treatment on their own. I called Vergil a deadbeat, not a serial sex pest. A fictional character's reputation/honor can survive that accusation, I promise.

And... they didn't think very hard. That's how we got this plot to begin with. That's how we got the series post-3. Just because one thing comes across as slightly less of a mess doesn't excuse that a likely out-of-universe genesis for the plot is that Bingo just doesn't want to write "someone else's character" anymore and that Vergil is his OCC, and also Itsuno loves the reboot and some super robot anime he watched when he was a child, thus everything outside of those five minutes of "Vergil cares after all!" was kick-started with Vergil being petty enough to turn himself into a blood-harvesting tentacle monster willing to attack his own flesh and blood with powers he [and his sword] didn't have before, then constant timeline-hopping to keep gamers distracted and cover for Vergil's redemption and resurrection being unearned and unasked for in this way.

If they "thought very hard", we wouldn't have gotten the number of retcons to details big and small with the DMC1 Novel being sorta canon after years of 3 kicking it out of continuity but also ".45 Art Warks was a mistake" because Dante cares more about his guns than the memory of the woman who made them. We wouldn't have gotten "2 takes place in the far future and we leave Dante in a motorcycle" and the bait of a haggard-looking Dante in a motorcycle for 5's announcement trailer only to hear that "actually 2 takes place before 4, so 1, the Anime, and 2 all take place within a year, this and the setup to 5 is all explained in one novel, and so Dante looks like crap because Haha who cares, him being unintelligent and poor and ugly is cool, am I right", because the games apparently have so little cohesiveness between each other you can just pluck them from wherever they were sitting and shove them between any other game now. We wouldn't have gotten everything about Nero in as bad a quality as we're getting it just because the director/producer/writer/artist vacillated on whether "Nero" and "Nero Angelo" were connected or not, whether Nero is 100% human, how old he is, whether Vergil would be in the game, whether the 4th game has anything to do with him, etc. And the novel for that game introduced the profound plot point that Vergil may have had sex with a prostitute.

I'm not claiming to work for Capcom and know what's in each employee's brain to suggest that they used 100% of their brainpower, poured their heart and soul, and spilled blood, sweat, and tears to animate Vergil throwing Nero a book and saying some nonsense about the Qliphoth interfering with business and how by God that was some brilliant and deep character writing they were building up to for 3 whole games. Because they didn't. And it isn't. And they didn't. I'm going off of what they've actually said in art books and interviews and how often Bingo and Itsuno mention they're influenced by admittedly simple media and simple stories, and if Itsuno was inspired by a super robot anime he watched when he was four, where an absent dad comes back with a giant robot to save his son but then twists it so in the game "Dante was the famous robot getting attacked and Nero was the new, powerful robot that came to stop the fight" even though Vergil as the absent dad is right there to emulate the "father saves son" dynamic that left such an impression on him, then the plot is about as dumb as whatever it took to turn his inspiration into that.

 

[Devil Player]

DMC 2 is basically a side mission set after DMC 1. Dante got famous, got a call from Lucia, went to meet her and get the briefings about Arius.

It was a job, so it makes sense he didn't care about anything. There was nothing personal to Dante, no stakes. So, it was only for the pleasure to kill demons.