Devil May Cry logo with Trish in silhouete

DEVIL MAY CRY is another video game series i'm obsessed with that i did not grow up with. i knew vaguely of dante for a while but didn't really bother paying attention to the franchise until Devil May Cry 5 came out, after which i was quickly made aware of it due to its presence on my tumblr dashboard. mostly because people were talking about how silly and over the top the games were. since i knew they were hack-and-slash games, i didn't think i would be interested, as this was in the middle of me thinking i was a Serious Gamer who liked Games That Made Me Feel Smart, like Fire Emblem. and Ace Attorney. so i kinda just scrolled past and ignored it, not the genre for me, i thought.

WHAT AN IDIOT I WAS!!!! devil may cry is SO goddamn good!!!!!!!! also, i have no idea why i ever thought i wouldn't like it considering i like sonic the hedgehog but whatever.

i remember pretty vividly what got me interested in the games; at the time i was using twitter and my friend retweeted an anniversary post from capcom celebrating DMC1's release date. the box art (conveniently this happens to also be the background art for this shrine) immediately struck me. whoa, this art was cool as hell. i think i quote retweeted it with the caption "wait this looks awesome" after which my friend decided to jump on this and bait me into checking the games out. "i thought devil may cry was stupid and over the top," i said. "it is," my friend replied. later that day we were all playing FFXIV and they had a playlist of DMC music going in the background while we did our dailies. with my industrial-gothic aesthetic and musical inclinations i was like "this music is SO good..." and from there the story basically writes itself. the games were on sale on steam so it worked out perfectly

getting to play the whole series as an adult was pretty special, not only for me but probably for my friend who did grow up with the series, since they got to experience mine and the other first-timers' reactions to things like, "I wanted to be the one to fill your dark SOUL WITH LIIIIIII-IIIIIIGHT!!!", me getting tilted as hell trying to beat up Phantom 1 (DMC1) and Vergil 1 (DMC3), giving up on DMC4 upon the return of the dice room, DMC5's opening screen with nico crashing her car and nero jumping out the passenger-side window in effortless cool as it goes all slow-mo, and of course:

"I'll try it your way for once."
"Remember what we used to say?"

""Jackpot.""

--i don't think i'll ever forget the shouts of absolute joy me and all of my friends let out when this happened. a chorus of "OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH" echoed across discord voice chat.

my favorite game is 3. i think it strikes the perfect balance all prequels should; it lets you cut to the meat of your character's motivations, and playing it after DMC1 adds a lot of fun texture to nelo angelo when you meet vergil and understand the tragedy that his character is already wrapped up in. vergil is probably my favorite rival character in pretty much anything i've played; he strikes this perfect balance of "GOD i want to beat him up" and "guy who appears extremely competent and put together and who you kinda wish you could fight on the same side with." my favorite DMC character overall is actually nero, but i just think vergil is the perfect encapsulation of how to write a compelling foil and rival for your main character.

other than sonic, which has the bonus of being a series i've been preoccupied with since i was small, DMC is probably the world i have come up with the most headcanons and personal lore for, largely because DMC's world isn't really fleshed out very often. and when it is you get stuff like DMC4 which i do not really like, but blessedly DMC4's scope is still kept rather small considering fortuna is just a city-state. i think keeping the scope of the world centered in around dante and his immediate friends and family is a strength of the games since it means you can basically do whatever you want to flesh out the surrounding world and how it functions. it also helps make the stories feel like modern mythos, which works well since sparda is supposed to be a legend anyways, with everyone who knows of devils and half-devils left to speculate if dante, sparda's son, is even real--or just an extension of the myth.

DMC5 and DMC3 are the two games i play the most, albeit for different reasons. DMC3 is my favorite for atmosphere, mood, music, characterization, etc.. but DMC5 is just so much more fun for me to play in an arcade-ish setting. also DMC5 has Bury The Light, which is my favorite song from the series, so there's that too.

"oh, but what about the Netflix show?" It's bad. it's an absolute disgrace to DMC, i stand by this firmly. i've complained about it extensively to friends and in other online spaces and don't want to sully the shrine too much so just let it be known if you want to get into DMC, the netflix show is not--i repeat, NOT--a good supplement for the games, also it's honestly just a really bad show in every possible way imo. just watch some "the movie" let's play compilations online if you can't play the games yourself. i'm begging you

DMC3 Dante art of him sitting in his chair with a phone between his cheek and shoulder, his legs kicked up on the desk

as mentioned i like worldbuilding in the DMC world; in fact DMC is a big reason my partner and i ended up becoming so close. this gets a bit more into my gripes with DMC's writing and also the fandom side to DMC but the tl;dr is that basically capcom loves to underwrite women or not write them at all & fans are usually not any better.

nero is vergil's son but we are given approximately 0 information on that except for a little half-nod to a character the fandom has dubbed the lady in red who makes a brief appearance in vergil's special (non-canon) campaign for DMC4, and all she does is show up in a rendered cutscene and clasp her hands together as he walks off. we aren't even told that she's nero's mom, but the implication is obvious. anyway, i would like the lady in red more were it not for the fact that fandom likes to do approximately 1 thing with her and that's make her walmart aerith gainsborough (if you took away everything that makes aerith an actually interesting character). AKA, the LiR often ends up reduced to a tradwife to fulfill the sunshine x grumpy trope and i find it annoying, especially since, again we know literally nothing about her except that she is on fortuna at the same time vergil is and that she wears the uniform of the order, the cult that runs the island. this is all people could come up with, a goody two-shoes church girl-next-door type of character?? and that's without pointing out how often vergil's cruelty gets written off to make him an asshole with a heart of gold--which frankly is not how i interpret his character at all lol and find it pretty disingenuous to his character motivations. i do think vergil is fairly romantic underneath his facade, a trait picked up from years spent reading william blake and other assorted poetry, but he's too embarrassed by that and refuses to act on it. to me vergil is a guy who pretends to be a devil prince so he doesn't have to acknowledge that he's a person, and i don't think it can be reduced down to "i hate all humans except the singular one who happens to be a good church girl," god even typing that made me want to roll my eyes. the LiR is part of a cult that worships his dad as a messiah figure, you don't think he'd be weirded out by that? 99% of vergil's character is about wanting to usurp sparda's legacy, be fr. anyway, obviously i was very annoyed by these portrayals in fanon spaces.

so that's how my partner and i decided to workshop an OC that would make things more compelling (at least for us), acknowledge vergil's vergilisms (aka his active disregard for humans and anything he perceives as being related to humanity to gain more power) and play off of character beats that make him so interesting without undermining the events of DMC3 culminating in vergil's death or nero's backstory of growing up as an orphan in fortuna, while still making it feel plausible that nero could even exist in the first place because the nature of the timeline is such that nero has to. well. happen. before the events of DMC3. on account of vergil basically dying and all that. said OC's name is cam; she's more my partner's OC than mine at this point since he came up with all of her backstory and stuff, but there's been a lot of time spent between us developing her and a lot of creating shared-fic and roleplays and stuff to define their relationship and it's very special to me to have this shared lore for the world for a video game i love so much & being able to develop that with my partner who loves playing barbies as much as i do!!! i may make a secondary page for the vergil/cam dynamic because it means a lot to me and it would be fun to share some info about the worldbuilding and general timeline to Clearglass. oc/canon will rule the world forever

Dante is pointing his gun at the camera. A lens flare effect moves across him. In fornt of him it says 'Let's Rock Baby'

i've written a few DMC fics and put them on AO3 if you want to check them out:

The Name's No Good | 2018 words, 1 chapter. Dante & Vergil.

“You know, with how good of a team we make now that you’re not tryin’ to kill me all the time, I might just consider offering you a spot with Devil May Cry.” Dante grins and swings his hips to the side, the sword over his shoulder following suit with his languid motion, fluid as Dante himself. “Keep it up and you might even get a promotion after three months.”

Vergil slows to a stop.

i wrote this one shortly after beating DMC5 for the first time to test the character voices! it was before we came up with cam. i think it still captures and distills the energies of dante and vergil pretty well.

Illuminations | 31,758 words, 6 chapters. Basically everyone is in this one, but it's Vergil-centric.

“How Nero feels–,” he’s finishing setting the box down, “–is none of my concern.” –That’s a lie. It’s very much Vergil’s concern. But he crossed that bridge long ago. Even though he had no idea of Nero’s existence all these years, even though Vergil sometimes wonders what might have happened if he hadn’t been turned into Nelo Angelo, it’s much too late to play father now, and Vergil doesn’t think he’d be any good at it anyway. Nero is much more well adjusted than Vergil is, everyone knows that too. But no one feels it more acutely than Vergil himself.

(Or: a series of mundane/slice-of-life-ish drabbles following Vergil some time post-DMC5 trying to navigate his life and the relationships that come with this new way of living; relationships that are both wanted and unwanted. He's kind of failing at it.)

i started this one not too long after the name's no good but didn't finish it till earlier this year (2026). at first i wanted to explore the rocky relationship trish and vergil might have as two people who were both serving mundus for a time; i also really like the headcanon that trish was created to psychologially and physically torture vergil to turn him into nelo angelo so i started it with that in mind and it sort of evolved from there. cam is in this one! also after all this time it still has my favorite stupid dante joke i've ever written in it; seriously, i'm quite proud of it.