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...
Family does not end with blood. Cas, Dean, Sam, Jack and everyone else deserved better.
Dean had been destroyed and re-imagined.
Sam got a disrespectful, hollow ending, also being deconstructed and changed along the way.
Cas and Jack not only forgotten by the creators, but erased.
It is like watching Crowley stop being himself all over again, but in 1 or 2 episodes. So disturbing and wrong.
Not even one of them got out unscathed.
And the best part? I still can see it. I still can understand what all of that means and I can respect the idea behind it. Author's view etc etc. But only if we are looking at the episodes apart from the rest of the show.
Then. Then it is completely and utterly disrespectful to fans, to characters, to actors, hell, to anyone invested.
They did that to Lucifer. Then to Crowley. Then to Gabriel. And now they had an audacity to do that to. Every. Main. Character. Remaining.
HOW. DARE. THEY.
I’m done keeping my composure.
Sorry, this will be a LOADED post! (And I’ll be repeating the points others have made)
for real, to everyone being nasty and telling heartbroken fans that “Dean was always supposed to die get a grip you’re just butthurt etcetera etcetera—” F you royally.
How dare you police the brutal feelings that’s been embroiling us since the Finale That Must Not Be Named aired.
The show you think you all watched, the show you all believe was the same SPN from Season 1-4, changed at some point. Kripke wrote his original vision, put it to screen, saw it through in S5 as he intended, and closed the door on that era.
In 2008, Supernatural was adopted and inherited. As you know, there was a supreme paradigm shift post-Kripke era. The show FLOURISHED (we won’t talk about Gamble thanks). It evolved, transformed, grew beyond trauma-induced self-worthlessness and toxic masculinity and endless death and hegemonic social ideals and conservatism and repressive anti-revolutionary ideas. Castiel, the iconic favourite and beloved staple of the series portrayed by Misha Collins, was introduced in Season 4 as the core lead character, and he ushered in a brand new era of Christian mythos that SPN took advantage of. Longevity SKYROCKETED. Audiences were INTERESTED. SPN amassed an incredibly groundbreaking fanbase infused by non-nuclear principles. A massive subversive wave began, fighting the Status Quo of the times since 2008. It’s precisely why such an abysmal ending to a show of extensive Freud-Jungian metanarratively meta META complex stature and social POWER will render us totally and unbearably broken for years to come.
Point is, DEAN WINCHESTER NO LONGER WANTED TO DIE. HE WANTED TO LIVE. HE WANTED TO SIT ON THE BEACH, PLUNGE HIS TOES IN THE SAND, AND SIP UMBRELLA DRINKS WITH HIS BROTHER AND HIS BEST FRIEND. He said this in Season 13. And then, a season later, he told the ghost of his long-deceased father — the source of his deep-running trauma and the figure of self-reductive authoritarianism permeating his arc since Season 1 — after being questioned why he didn’t pursue the Nuclear Fam, that he already has his own: his brother Sam, his adopted child Jack, and Cas.
Dean’s best friend Cas. Oh god, Cas, who made his inevitably permanent mark on Dean’s soul beyond allyship. Castiel, renamed to Cas, God’s -iel removed by Dean. Dean, the human spark that lit the fire of pre-existing autonomy in the inherently rebellious angel who was, this entire time, the catalyst for free will in God The Writer’s puppet show. Their friendship set on goddamn fire. I can also write paragraph upon paragraph about my love for Cas while devastated tears stream down my face, but I digress—
Cas’ romantic love for Dean pushed our main Heart of SPN to love himself. Love is free will. Free will is also love. Of note, Cas’ love confession in 15x18 was supposed to offset something so vastly important and fundamental…to maybe (read: most likely) pull the trigger on SELF-TRUTHS in conjunction with free will. And The Great Anticipated Follow-Up to the episode penned by the passionate Berens should have included (read: seemed like it was going to be) Dean, closeted trauma survivor in love with his best friend, being given the opportunity to do it right: to SPEAK HIS TRUTH, and then that very singular opportunity was STOLEN so grossly. After poring over it for days, I refuse to believe we made their years-long story up out of thin air, spun it out of fantastical-delusional dream cotton candy, because we DIDN’T. IT WAS REAL.
As I said in another post: “I’ve just been feeling physically ill for the past >40 something hours with the terrible knowledge that 19/20 undid years of vital progression towards healthy interdependence, autonomy, and a positive endgame, where Sam, Dean and Cas close the ring of found family in final empowering self-fulfillment…where Dean, no longer repressed and set free, is able to use his words and speak his truth as a queercoded trauma survivor, henceforth confirming and self-affirming his own bisexuality since S1 by reciprocating — by telling Cas that he always loved him, too, loved him endlessly, which would have altogether divested Supernatural of its cult status and catapulted it into global worldwide significance as the longest running sci-fi genre show in American broadcasting history that actually dared to defy and, by proxy, empower LGBTQ2IA+ everywhere who found profound personal meaning in Destiel through VALIDATION,” — found themselves mirrored in Dean and Cas’ respective character journeys individually and as each other’s queer love interests.
THIS IS WHY DEAN WASN’T MEANT TO DIE.
THEY WERE SO ESSENTIAL, NOT JUST TO THE OVERARCHING STORY AND HEALTHY INTERPERSONAL THEMATICS OF MODERN SPN, BUT ALSO TO THE SOULS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE ACROSS THE WORLD WHO FOLLOWED THEIR JOURNEYS, HOPED FOR THEM, ASPIRED TO BE LIKE THEM, TREASURED THEM, WEEPED FOR THEM, AND FOUGHT FOR THEM, LIKE YOU AND ME.
Heck, how could anyone think Sam Winchester had a well-deserved characteristic ending? He didn’t. Dean’s brother was shafted so badly. He stopped hunting when seasons ago, he had canonically accepted that he no longer wanted an apple pie life. He simply…turned the lights off in a resoundingly empty bunker and left — abandoning his dead brother’s room — never to return (he did return later to get the Impala, family photos etc, I mean this symbolically)…as if — dare I say it — Supernatural itself eerily told us, in the negative-spaced pitch blackness, that the organic show and the wonderfully complex, matured characters we’ve grown to love weren’t going to survive or be revisited…that it was all going to perish, and that they no longer gave a single shit about their own show, which, to me, is the worst cardinal sin, because how dare they throw Team Free Will, an immovable and indomitable and passionate found family they built from the ground up, a found family CHOCK FULL TO THE BRIM OF LOVE AND LIFE RAGING AGAINST THE AUTHORITARIAN MACHINE IN ORDER TO ACHIEVE FREE WILL, under the bus no matter who is to blame. Growth was stomped on.
Then Sam married a faceless wife who wasn’t his textually established (and deaf) love interest Eileen, named his son Dean Jr., and grew old miserably, still mourning the passing of his older brother, shaken and sombre. Back to square one. IT WAS ALL ANTITHETICAL, even OUTSIDE a shipping context, and I ripped my hair out at this point in sheer disbelief.
This 15x20 ending would have fit somewhere between S4-7. Now? IT DOESN’T FIT. IT’S A JAGGED PUZZLE PIECE THAT DOESN’T BELONG ANYWHERE. IT’S THE FOREBODING UNKNOWN STRANGER IN ITS OWN LAND, BOTH LITERALLY AND FIGURATIVELY. This kind of ending was basically an illogical, unsound cluster of metastasized cells that, to me, ruined the viability of previous seasons to sustain bold praise and respect and dignity and rewatches and classic nostalgia in such insidious ways.
Dean Humanity Winchester and Cas, after everything they’ve been through, were silenced and lost in death, ripped apart from each other, unable to love each other the way they deserved, because of disappointing, vile incompetency and homophobia. The greatest love story ever told, again obliterated in less than 60 hollow minutes.
You know what this tells your audience, CW SPN? Death without self-growth is the way to go, and no one is allowed to forge their own path to freedom.
HOW INSULTINGLY HARMFUL IS THAT?
I don’t think I’ll ever stop grieving.
We all deserve answers.
Ao3 is still down my good people
roach pov where she just switches owners through the years and calls every one of them geralt
✅ tortured by Voices
✅ cursed by god
✅ small waist
✅ criminal record
✅ died once
Diagnosis: babygirl
*Is it true, or did Google Gemini just make it up, or did somebody just make that up about Google Gemini?
*Well, who knows; your guess is as good as Google Gemini's
The Ultimate Test!
Also, now it's official
I always knew I'm a catboy person
And know i am officially catboy-madscientist person, hehe, right
okay i made another quiz but this time it’s which monster you’ll get to hook up with. reblog with your result!!
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