Devil May Cry: The Animated Series (2007) - Dissecting Episode 8 "Once Upon A Time"

Devil May Cry: The Animated Series (2007) - Dissecting Episode 8 "Once Upon a Time"

A.k.a. spending many words addressing what I feel is a much dismissed episode of the 2007 anime.

Ep 8 "Once Upon A Time" is a Vergil backstory episode. From what I've seen over the years, this apparently flies over the heads of even people familiar with all other works in Devil May Cry canon. But I think that this episode deserves re-evaluation, because it is really very consistent with how Vergil is portrayed both in DMC 3 and in his more recent re-appearance in DMC 5.

The premise of the episode is that a man named Earnest heard that his old friend Anthony had resurfaced running a business called Devil May Cry. He had fallen out of contact with Anthony 20 years ago following a fire that burned to the ground the port town called Morris Island where they lived - killing the majority of the population. The fire was claimed by survivors to be caused by a demon attack on the island. Dante denies meeting Earnest before. He goes along with Earnest to visit the town anyways because he wants to know who is putting Earnest up to this.

Consulting the various pieces of evidence.

1) Dante is not usually known for lying (except for withholding information), and yet he says repeatedly "I'm not the Anthony you are looking for". That's a pretty odd way to phrase his denial, but it makes sense when you realize why the show can't just outright say "that wasn't me, but it might have been my identical twin brother". A conceit of the show is that it never once acknowledges in words that Dante had a twin brother. The show is allergic to saying the name "Vergil" (not even once!), which made it surreal to watch as an introduction to the series in 2007 and to later learn "oh, he has a twin brother!....OH NO he has a dead twin brother!" Because of the way that in retrospect it's obvious that Vergil haunts the narrative in at least half of the episodes.

This is almost the exact same way that Vergil is handled in DMC 4, where he's very plot relevant despite his name never being spoken. The Yamato belonged to "Dante's brother" - that's the extent to which anyone acknowledges him in words. Because the writers have decided to address the question of "how do you make the viewers aware of the past escapades of the characters without wasting screen-time on exposition dumps" with the answer of: "Don't! :)"

Real people don't start off every new relationship by explaining their tragic backstory - so when characters like Patty and Nero are introduced they are surrogates for the fraction of the audience who did not play the previous games or read the books and are reacting to the mysterious figure of Dante from an outsider perspective.

2) This point is one of the weakest (because it only works in hindsight), but it should be said that as of DMC 5 and Visions of V it is known that the demon attack on Morris Island is entirely separate and unrelated to the demon attack on the Sparda mansion near Redgrave City. It is also heavily implied that Dante was constantly up in Vergil's business - making it unlikely that Vergil could keep a secret friend from Dante and also have that friend never find out about his twin brother.

Plus there is the timeline to consider. DMC 1 takes place 20 years after the attack on the Sparda mansion. Morris Island takes place 20 years before this episode of the anime. There is a gap of at least a few years between DMC 1 and the anime considering that there was enough time for Trish to partner with Dante, change the shop name, and then for Trish to leave and the shop name to change back. So even the timelines don't match up if these 20-year time spans are strictly correct rather than vague approximations of time.

3) Dante has a completely separate backstory about where he ended up after his family home burned down in a fire and he was separated from Vergil. Because of the shock and to protect himself he buried his real identity in amnesia for like 8-10 years and created an identity as Tony Redgrave. He became a regular human mercenary and unaware of demons until suddenly he was pulled back into it and forced to remember. This is covered in the DMC 1 novel. The DMC 1 novel has been more decisively folded into canon as of references to its events in DMC 5: Before the Nightmare. In contrast, Vergil's whereabouts during the same time period were a mystery. What would have been the point of giving Dante a new personal history set in a small port town when you can instead take the opportunity to fill in the blanks on the person whose past is unknown?

Basically, the writers take it for granted that there is a tacit understanding with the fans that they will be faithful in writing Dante's character to the extent that is possible. Thinking that the viewers understand that the 2007 anime is not an adaptation of any previous works and has no desire to re-tread those previous works. The version of Dante as he appears in DMC 3 and subsequently in the anime is written as the character he would be if he experienced the events laid out in the DMC 1 prequel novel. Anything that they've retconned is exclusively related to Vergil - Vergil was not abducted by Mundus as a child and Vergil did not experience the events of the DMC 1 novel (and is unaware of Gilver in general). So if those things did not happen - then what replaced them? The way that anime Ep 8 and DMC 4 are written imply that the writers already had ideas about the answers (it's only 3 years between DMC 3 in 2005 and DMC 4 in 2008), but outside of more prequels there is no graceful way to deliver information about a character who is canonically dead - everything about their thoughts and intentions is filtered through 2nd and 3rd hand unreliable sources.

Even so, Visions of V re-creates the singular kid Vergil scene that was shown in the DMC 3 manga. In that case the scene takes the form of a surreal nightmare that is forced on him by the demons that he is conversing with in the present. It's surreal in the sense of the symbolism of being naked and afraid and stabbed to a gravestone with your own name on it.

Whereas the Visions of V version positions itself as a more straightforwards narrative account of the event. Vergil chooses to acknowledge what he was really thinking and feeling that day as a step towards working past it:

4) Earnest and "Anthony" had a favourite teacher - Margaret - so they seem to have both had a scholarly inclination. The unique cutscene introducing the Vergil playable route in DMC 3:SE (and at multiple points in the DMC 3 manga) shows him browsing books in a library.

The plot of the episode is that Earnest has an ill-begotten plan to open a portal to Hell and summon a demon. Dante tries to talk him out of it and is unsuccessful. This is a smaller scale version of what Vergil did in DMC 3. The parallels - they are here.

5) The kid in the photo that Dante sees at Earnest's house is wearing a blue/black jacket and red shirt. Blue with red interior lining being the colours associated with Vergil at the time of DMC 3, but even more directly with Nero in DMC 4. Morris Island is a port town. Fortuna is a port town on an island. This anime was being written and produced during the same timeframe as DMC 4.

6) Earnest and "Anthony" buried a box of treasures as children and it was a secret between the two of them. The box that Dante digs up has a scratched out name on a field of blue. The first letter of the name is a cursive "V". How did Dante know where the box was? Dante and Vergil were twins and were still similar enough at age 10 or so that Dante could guess where Vergil would have hidden something. They were similar enough that they both chose the same name of Anthony/Tony when they tried to obscure their identity. The identity confusion is a feature, not a bug - it's part of the tragic irony. It's toying with the same question as DMC 5: if their positions were switched, would their fates be different?

Dante does not care about Earnest. At all. At least, beyond the point that he's a person about to do something foolish that could get himself and a lot of other people killed. Dante is doing the bare minimum to humor this man - so if not because of some gesture related to their "friendship", why even dig up the box? For the same reason that he went to visit the town: curiosity. He was looking for proof of Vergil's existence in the world before that one time he showed up when they were 18 talking about a lunatic plan to raise a demon tower and open the connection between human and demon worlds (DMC 3 manga), and then at age 19 actually went through with that plan while revealing that the point of it all was to gain more power (DMC 3), followed shortly by throwing himself into Hell while severely injured at the end of DMC 3. What would motivate a person to do these things?

7) This port town being burned down in a fire caused by a demon attack explains a lot about the psychology of Vergil, in ways that would not be explicitly confirmed until DMC 5 and Visions of V. He's motivated by his fear. He did not hide from Mundus as successfully as Dante, and even when he tried to reinvent himself as a different person the demons caught up with him. Dante lived through one tragic fire and loss of home and safety and he knows how devastating it is - but he repressed the memory and moved on from it in his own uniquely dysfunctional way. Vergil experienced at least this 2nd attack, which begs the question of how many more times did it happen that Dante is unaware of? How badly would it damage a person to live in fear of being constantly hunted and unable to stay in any place for very long or form lasting attachments to other people? Dante can relate to this a bit given his own personal tragedies, although unlike Vergil he has a handful of people like Lady and Trish to keep him grounded though the years.

But for Vergil it can be extrapolated that he was forced to be alone after any attempt to get close to normal people ended in further tragedy, and it seems like the demons won't stop hunting him until either he is dead or the mastermind sending the demons to hunt him is dead. This evolves into an obsession with power, detachment from human social connection, and willingness to make the decision that a city worth of humans is acceptable collateral damage so long as it gets him that power and opportunity to end Mundus.

If there is a single detail that calls in to doubt that Ep 8 is about actual Vergil post-separation from Dante, it is that "Anthony and his mother" lived in the village. On the other hand, the inclusion of this detail seems as much designed to baffle Dante as it does the viewer. This could be a hook for Dante that has him doubting Earnest's story and/or his own memory because he was certain that their mother died at the same time that Dante and Vergil were separated. However, although there are photographic records of "Anthony" in the town there don't seem to be any of this "mother", and her name is never given.

So if indeed "Anthony" was Vergil, then this mother figure is a continuing mystery. The possibility is that Vergil was accompanied by a woman who was a mentor to him in some way, similar to Dante with Nell Goldstein. Could have been a magical mentor - how did he learn to fling about spectral swords anyways? Impossible to say for certain (i.e. more flexible for future use as a plot point), but if Patty and Morrison from the anime are canon then this suggests that other things set up in the 2007 anime could get a callback if ever there was a DMC6.

As for the purpose of this episode in the context of the anime - it would have been deliberately designed as an attack on Dante by Sid - the mischief maker of the series who is advancing a background demon resurrection plot. One of the times that Dante confronts him Sid says "In the end you were drawn here by the smell of a devil weren't you?" before backflipping off the balcony as the scene lights up with blue lightning.

What is it that Vergil says in the Mission 13 fight in DMC 3 the first time he uses his devil trigger: "You will not forget this devil's power".

This whole episode is a twist of the knife to deliver a reminder that Dante and Vergil weren't so different once, that kid Vergil probably missed their mother as much or more than Dante because he didn't have the luxury of willing himself into amnesia, and that while Dante managed to make it to adulthood before demons found their way back into his life Vergil was not so lucky. Understanding some of the reasons that drove Vergil to obsessively seeking power only makes it worse that Dante was now twice responsible for unknowingly playing into Mundus plans by severely injuring Vergil in a fight to the death in DMC 3, and then by killing him instead of saving him in DMC 1.

Bonus: Even the alcohol gets in on the theme. Dante in his own home office enjoys a "Budweiner" beer with his buddy Morrison as he gets the details about Morris Island. The end credits show him with a glass of "Back Janiels" liquor - these are his usual tastes. When he visits Earnest's house it is just after seeing that photograph of (presumably) kid Vergil that he is offered a glass of red wine.

This is some classic gothic imagery where red wine evokes the look of blood. The last time that Dante and Vergil fought (intentionally - not counting when Vergil was under the control of Mundus) it was over what it means that they have the blood of Sparda. And blood is present in the lyrics of the lesser demon battle music that plays through Missions 2-13 right up to the scene where Vergil is trying to open the gate.

... Taste the blood, Taste your fate, Swallow your pride, With your hate, ... Knee's in the blood with your crying pleas, Wade in your sorrow, bathe in your fear, Clear the mind of the righteousness suffered, Witness the moment of your failure's prosper!