Devil May Cry Showrunner Reveals How The Show Changed Vergil's Character For The Better
The rivalry between Dante and his wayward twin just received another tragic complication.
After countless hours of hacking-and-slashing through demon hordes on his quest to stop the King of Hell from crossing over into the human realm, one of the biggest shocks of the original Devil May Cry is the discovery of the identity of Nelo Angelo, the mysterious demonic knight that attacks him at multiple intervals throughout the game. You’re required to fight the wordless horned swordsmith at three different points in the game, and upon defeating him a third time, he drops an amulet identical to the one that protagonist Dante and his long-lost brother were given by their mother as a child — revealing him to be none other than Dante’s twin Vergil.
Despite Mundus revealing in the first game that Vergil has been corrupted and turned into one of his demonic minions, it’s not until Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening that the full story is told: As children, Dante and Vergil were separated by the same demon attack that felled their mother, and briefly reconnected as rivals manipulated by the sorcerer Arius into opening a portal to the demon realm. After working together to defeat their foe, the brothers turn their blades against each other once more due to Vergil’s thirst for the power of their father, the Demon Knight Sparda; upon his defeat, Vergil decides to stay in the demon realm and attempts to slay Mundus, his father’s old nemesis, but is beaten and transformed into Nelo Angelo against his will.
The familial tragedy at the heart of the story is certainly emotionally resonant, but the “brainwashed” nature of Vergil’s corruption is also a little simple in hindsight — and it’s a simplicity that Adi Shankar, the showrunner of Netflix’s Devil May Cry anime, set out to change with the show’s second season.
Vergil appears briefly in his Nelo Angelo form in the show’s first season, but the context is wildly different.
In an interview with Inverse ahead of the release of the show’s second season, Shankar discussed the thought process behind one of the show’s biggest changes, which is the nature of Vergil’s existence as Mundus’ champion. Unlike the brute-force transformation in the games, the anime takes a decidedly more nuanced approach: it’s revealed that after the attack that separated the two brothers, Mundus kidnapped Vergil away to Makai (the Japanese name for the demon world in-game and the realm’s official name in the show) and spent his entire childhood grooming him to become a perfect soldier, while laying blame for his mother’s murder at the feet of Arius and her own fragile humanity. Not only does it add a new emotional wrinkle to Vergil and Dante’s relationship, but it’s also a parallel to Lady’s arc this season, who begins to understand that the chain linking her to her soldierly duty was also forged when she was just a child — something that Shankar has explored in his other works.
“A lot of the stuff I do is kind of about the weaponization of youth,” Shankar tells Inverse. “Captain Laserhawk with the Rayman youth, the Power Rangers short film was literally about ‘hey, the Power Rangers were actually child soldiers.’”
Like the first season’s added political dimensions, it’s certainly a change that might be jarring to longtime fans. But according to the showrunner, it’s a change that was made possible by merely extrapolating on the content of the games.
Mundus’ manipulation of Vergil in the show allows Devil May Cry to explore what it’s like to be raised as a child soldier.
“It’s in the games, it’s just not highlighted. And my process with this was to take the IP, take the franchise, and approach it with psychological and emotional realism, and throw it into the real world. It’s not happening in Redgrave City, it’s happening in New York, DC… wherever, whenever, it’s a version of our world. So how would that actually play out?”
Criticisms about the fidelity of the adaptation to the source material have plagued the show since the first season, due to several additions to the lore not present in the games. Although your mileage may vary on how well executed those additions are, the change to Vergil’s arc is one that could only be made with a benefit the original developers at Capcom didn’t have when they made the first game: hindsight.
“What’s interesting is that when DMC was being developed, they didn’t know that ‘oh, there’s going to be a fifth game, and we’re gonna plan the fifth game.’ They just made DMC 1. It was supposed to be a Resident Evil game, and then they were like ‘okay cool, this is its own thing. Great, we’ll do a second one. Then we’ll do a third one. This kind of organically evolved.”
Although Vergil is introduced in the very first game, it wasn’t until Dante’s Awakening that fans got to see the full breadth of his backstory.
“You can extrapolate and kind of make things up,” continues Shankar. “Which we’re all doing to some degree for everything that we love. But I had the gift of just looking at the whole board that is Devil May Cry, in order to construct this new version of it.”
The anime isn’t the first time the franchise has been reinvented from the ground up. 2013’s DmC was a full-scale reboot of the series with a grittier tone, wholly new depictions of Dante, Vergil, and many characters from the original games, and a far more Westernized approach to everything – it was a move that was wildly controversial at the time, but in recent years, opinion on it has softened. Although the Netflix anime has its fair share of changes, Season 2 reconfigures those changes in service of what Shankar recognizes has always been the heart of the franchise: the complex, almost literary, familial drama.
“That’s how I honored it. I infused the Shakespeare into it. Season 1 less so, because it was very much in the framework of an American blockbuster. But Season 2, their relationship is very Shakesperean.”
Even though the show changes the circumstances of their first re-encounter, their final showdown still manages to be emotionally resonant.
Even though the Devil May Cry adaptation takes some detours from the source material, Season 2 makes a concerted effort to refine those changes and turn them into something that ultimately benefits a new perspective on a classic series. And in the case of Vergil’s character, those changes take the emotional weight of the original Nelo Angelo reveal and turn it into something a bit more complex than a character forced to act against his will. And now, instead of knowing exactly how the story will play out, Vergil’s existence as a liberated former child soldier seeking the power necessary to protect his adopted home means that he’ll be a complete wild card on the board when Season 3 finally rolls around.
