The Best Thing About The New Titans Show Is That, Once It Becomes Popular, I’ll Be Able To Say “I

No, it's not cringy it's fucking genius.

Tumblr staff understands its fucking userbase in a way Elon Musk will never understand Twitter.

Beating a dead horse into the ground is a supernatural reference.

Oh my god.

It's so fucking good.

This is just good.

This is speaking the language fluently.

Twitter is not fucking prepared.

I love and hate you all.

Be happy and DIE.

ppl who are shy at first but become obnoxious and loud once theyre comfortable around you r awesoem. hold on  a sec wait pt this text ost on hold. theres pirate ship outside my window right now whath the 

I've seen some unhinged complaints in Steam reviews before, but I just ran into one that gave a game which contains no dialogue the thumbs down purely on the basis that it doesn't have voice acting.

Yesterday was destiel-trends-day, right?

But today is destiel-trends-day, too!

me seeing destiel or supernatural trending for like the 100th time since november

he's still waiting for the serotonin :(

To be quite honest (and adding this to the post I just reblogged) the only thing that sets Nero and Dante (and Sparda) apart from the other demons (and Vergil) is just that they have someone / something they care about.

I mean, look a bit closer:

You have this inhumanly powerful guys, who likely will get shunned by humans usually because they stand out, are different, are scary… who live a much more dangerous life in general because every damn demon is gonna be after them… who live much longer than a human (at least in Sparda’s case)… who lost their family or never had family to begin with…

That gotta break even the most positive and kind person down some day.  

Look, I would totally get if those guys just stopped caring about the world at large at some point. Because this “shitshow” called life keeps repeating itself. Because no matter how much you try, the next demon follows up the one you just cut down. Nobody ever thanks you for helping them out. It’s infuriating. It’s exhausting. Because sometimes humans are just as bad as demons, in their hunt for power (and, especially, the power of Sparda).

They don’t want anything to do with it anymore, just give them a break.

 You see it in Dante’s attitude back in DMC 3 – that’s not just snarky banter and witty comebacks, he seems downright bitter and pissed a lot of the time. “I don’t have a father, I just really don’t like you.” – “You show your thanks by shooting me? Whatever, do as you please.”

Because at this point in time, Dante’s been alone for years, and there’s nobody he openly cares about anymore. He climbs Temen-ni-gru because some part of him thinks it’s his duty to clean up Sparda’s mess and stop Vergil, but he’s neither enthusiastic nor passionate about it.

There’s only a change in attitude, a hint of care the moment Lady is open with him after their fight and then keeps standing by his side after everything is over.

That later extends to Trish, Lucia and Morrison (and, if they keep her, Patty Lowell). Dante doesn’t fight for humanity as a whole – he does his job, takes out demons (especially those after his father’s power, because he sees that as his duty) and apart from that, will fight for the few people who earned his respect and love.

It’s the same for Nero – orphan, not welcome in the Order at large, likely eyed suspiciously in the whole city because he is a stranger to them – he only cares about Kyrie, whom he loves, and Credo, who was brother and friend to him. Nobody else. He doesn’t show any hint of care for Sanctus getting shot in the head in front of everyone, he only moves to kill the demons attacking people when Kyrie throws herself in front of others…

Basically, the Sparda descendants don’t give a damn about saving the world (despite Dante’s grand speech how you don’t get the opportunity to save the world every day) or humanity at large – they only fight and care for a selected few people. That’s their whole driving force. They are not heroes with a large heart who would sacrifice themselves selflessly at every turn – nope, especially Nero would likely have walked away if he didn’t know the victim of an attack.

Doesn’t mean they are not good people! They are, once you get the honor of being important to them. Then they would do everything for you.  

It’s just that they are so used to being alone, being damaged, that it takes a while to even get a place in their heart, you see.

(Not to mention that they are also part demon, which is a race not exactly known for love, care and selflessness. We probably can’t even fully measure them with human standards and morales.)

I love how pre timeskip law was a menace, he really was just a cocky and silly little 24 yo teen with many fucks to give to the world (quite literally).

Then post timeskip law is just an old 26yo man that sometimes get a shot of energy from his youth (two years prior) and give in to his sarcasm but is overall very grumpy and don't have any patience left for anybody's bullshit.

It’s true

randomgirlname37 has started following you!

me, reaching out for report and block: no they hadn’t

THIS

This is The Problem with new dmc anime. All other stuff can be overlooked. But not this shit. They made a such grand mistake taking out the literal soul of the gameverse. Everything else doesn't work as it should without this conflict done right.

And it's done completely wrong. Who's idea was it to poorly disguise USA politics and racism problems as "demons", "slavery" and "hell".

Dmc explored the union of human and demon parts, questioned what they are, what they represent. With main themes as love, power and survival, explored through different concepts of family. It was always there in different forms that evolved and layered over each other with each new game and manga.

So the most noticeable outcome of those? We got intimate family melodrama with brutal and unstoppable action. Which is a receipt for success!

In the new anime we get boring "save the world, save them all" in a grand plot because "they're just like us" and Dante who has NO IDEA that he's a halfdemon and what was his family. Unless they play the amnesia card which would be ridiculous ngl but also even worse. So he's basically left without conflict AT ALL.

He's just a guy.

When the whole premise of dmc is that this "just a guy" is not in fact "just a guy".

I'm almost crying, send help

I think part of what makes the Netflix show so frustrating is the fact that there's definitely blind spots in the original lore that could allow for a deeper discussion on a demon's capability for love and goodness, but the show itself just did not seem interested in actually exploring those ideas.

I've seen some posts going around about how demons not being inherently evil was already established in the games, and I think that is true. The gameverse has a bit of a strange philosophy when it comes to demons and their capacity for good. On one hand, the original two games act as though the only way for a demon to be good is to actively distance themselves from their demonic heritage.

Dante telling Trish and Lucia that "devil's never cry" actually feeds into the idea that demons are inherently evil and that they aren't actually demons because they are capable of goodness. In those games, this is played straight. However, in later entries, they seem to recognise this for what it actually is - the rhetoric of a man who is projecting his own self loathing in regard to his demonic half onto the people in his life who are dealing with similar problems.

Vergil and his core beliefs around demonic power being the only thing to keep him safe when human fragility failed him is the first time Dante is forced to confront a flaw in his worldview. Vergil is technically correct in that their heritage is what has kept the two of them alive up until that point and that in order for Dante to stop his brother and Arkham, he'd need to embrace that power too. Dante seems to internalise this as the idea that his power needs to be used as a force for good - "with great power comes great responsibility," style, but still retains that he is good in spite of his demonic power.

Power in DMC is not inherently evil, the folly of the villains in the series is that they seek it to fill a hole that should have been filled with love instead. On some level, Dante recognises this, but is often too burdened by his self loathing that he has a hard time excepting and seeking out love himself.

In contrast, Nero is able to acknowledge what is truly important to him, allowing himself to be vulnerable when he gives and receives love, while also fully embracing his demonic side and the power it gives him. V also has a similar revelation, although his is just as much about learning to love life itself and rediscovering passions so he can have a better coping mechanism that isn't more power.

These core character arcs clearly indicate that the reason humanity is seen as morally superior in the games is their willingness to love and willingly give. To gain more out of life than just power (it's also what makes the power hungry human villains so evil, they want to throw away what makes them human for the chance at being powerful). Whereas demonic power means that demons live in a perpetually dog-eat-dog world where there is no incentive to love or create, you can only ever take. But when demons like Trish are given the chance to grow from that, they are just as capable of love as any human.

This then opens up for the line of questioning, well, if environmental factors are what's making demons so power hungry, then wouldn't exploring how being shut off from the opportunity to grow in the human world be an actually valid idea for the Netflix adaptation to explore? It could have been! Genuinely!

However, the writers were not interested in exploring that concept, not really. The need to fit established DMC lore into the shape of a narrative about how the Iraq war and the US government intensionally otherised Arabic people meant that those ideas couldn't be expanded upon because of how that would have impacted the portrayal of a very direct analogue of a real life group of people.

This is often the problem central to the fantasy racism trope, because it's a direct reference to a real group of people who's only actual differences from any other ethnic group is appearance and culture, any discussion of how physiological differences may impact the way they live and experience the world very quickly become a minefield.

The demons in the games are often one of a kind or a species with entirely alien biological incentives, trying to make them seem like their way of life would be no different from the average human is actively contradictory and just plain boring. It's part of why the demons that were taken from the game look so out of place compared to their more human shaped counterparts.

There is the potential in examining a demon's ability to love in the gameverse version of the lore, and it wouldn't have been a problem for the anime to explore that. That sort of exploration would have had to focus on how love can come in many forms, how a fundamentally different way of perceiving the world around you doesn't mean your perspective isn't valid. However, because demons are an exact reference to a real life group of people now, making them out to be anything other than just like any other human is risking a lot.

So that's the crux of the issue for me. I think trying to force the demons from the game lore into an Arabic shaped hole is kinda a bad idea. Hell, if they were desperate to make the US government into the big bad then there would have been precedent for it. DMC2 and DMC4 both concern powerful groups in society abusing demonic power for personal gain, the idea that a government would do the same isn't too dissimilar in my opinion.

To be honest, I feel a lot of the criticism of the anime has only been scratching at the surface of the actual problems so far. I'd appreciate it if the pre-existing fandom could recognise where problems existed in the source material before jumping to complaining about the adaptation, even though there is a lot to complain about...