Netflix’s ‘Devil May Cry’ Turns Dante’s Story Into Allegory For War On Terror, Complete With American Invasion Of Hell Set To Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’
What do the band Green Day, the country of Iraq, and Capcom’s Devil May Cry action series all have in common?
If you’re a person with any sort of sense, you’ll know the answer is ‘absolutely nothing’ – but if you’re producer Adi Shankar, who in taking ‘bastardizing a given piece of source material with hamfisted political preaching’ to a new level has used Netflix’s Devil May Cry animated series as a vehicle to criticize America’s post-9/11 invasion of the Middle East.
Coming from the same mind responsible for Netflix’s previous Castlevania, Castlevania: Nocturne, and Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix, expectations for Dante’s latest small screen adventure were (understandably) extremely low ahead of its official release, sinking even further with each new detail revealed about its production, such as its featuring of contemporary, real-world pop-culture references in its script and its ignoring of the game series’ iconic soundtracks in favor of very entry level nu-metal picks.
And though preview materials left fans presuming that the worst they had to fear from Shankar’s latest was an unsurprising misunderstanding of the source material (as best demonstrated by his depiction of Dante as a try-hard, attention-seeking manchild rather than an aloof-but-quick-to-lock-in wisecracker), as the old adage goes, things can always get much worse.
[SPOILER WARNING: Significant spoilers for the first season of Netflix’s Devil May Cry follow below. If you’d like to avoid them, please refrain from reading any further.]
As fans of the game know, the story of the Devil May Cry series revolves around an ongoing, seemingly eternal battle between the ‘good’ forces of the Human world and the ‘evil’ legions of Hell, which in this world is a genuinely supernatural realm akin to its depiction in the Christian religion and was borne from the absolute darkness that existed prior to the concept of ‘light’ coming into being.
As a result of these origins, the inhabitants of Hell are creatures of natural evil, existing solely to inflict pain and terror on humanity in order to take over their realm and establish themselves as the ruling class of all existence – and while some are capable of higher thought and even being able to develop genuine love for a human, such as Dante’s father Sparda, most demons are nothing more than beasts who care for nothing more than accomplishing their goals.
However, in Shankar and Netflix’s take on the series, Hell is instead depicted as a full-on separate universe à la DC or Marvel Comics, with its inhabitants being not demons, but rather “a related but separate evolutionary branch from Homo Sapiens.”
“They are natives of another universe, one that exists parallel to our own,” explains Dr. Fisher, the scientific director for the series’ mysterious DARKCOM group, to the US President and his Joint Chiefs of Staff of a mysterious “terrorist” group that laid waste to the Vatican just hours prior to the start of the first episode. “My current hypothesis is that one of our common ancestors found their way into this other universe where they adapted and became stronger, able to survive the more hostile environment there.”
Pressed by one of the government board’s members, “Just to be clear, the hostile environment you’re talking about is Hell,” Dr. Fisher pushes back, “Mythology exists to explain reality. Why do you think every culture on Earth tells the same stories about the Demons and the underworld?”
To this end, it is further revealed that rather than a world of fire, brimstone, and eternal pain, ‘Hell’ – or the Japanese ‘Makai’, as its inhabitants refer to it – is instead a planet whose surface has been absolutely ravaged by the plundering of the demons’ upper castes, in doing so practically leaving its lower-class, more human inhabitants to either die by starvation or by choking on polluted air.
Enter the series’ main antagonist, the White Rabbit, who has made it his mission to help those suffering in Makai to cross over to Earth in the hopes of escaping their torment and someday thriving, even if it means his forceful manipulations of the barrier between the two planes allows for the occasional ‘monstrous demon’ to cross over and wreak havoc.
This very on-the-nose ‘demons = refugees’ analogy is driven home even harder in Episode 5, Descent, when Lady, acting on orders to storm a local tenement building occupied by the White Rabbit’s forces and either arrest or kill any and all demons, is impeded in her efforts by the series’ rendition of the Cavaliere Angelo demon (which shouldn’t exist given the series’ established timeline, as it doesn’t seem as if Dante has even fought the original Nelo Angelo yet, but I digress).
Promptly finding herself on the ropes, Lady attempts to duck away and hide inside of a nearby apartment, begging with its scared occupants, a family of three, for help before reluctantly being allowed in.
After managing to evade a subsequent sweep of the apartment by Cavaliere Angelo and finding herself shocked that the family were not human but demon, Lady, under the influence of a hallucinogen lobbied at her by said enemy, begins to mistake her hosts for aggressive Hellspawn, prompting her to draw her gun on them under the assumption of self-defense.
With the tension rising between both parties by the second, Lady and the family’s mother and father proceed to have the following conversation:
Father: “Now you turn your gun on us? On our kids?”
Lady: “Your friends slaughtered my team”.
Father: “You think we’re with, with them?”
Mother: “She’s a sapien. Of course she thinks all demons are the same.”
Lady: If you’re not with the White Rabbit’s gang, why are you here?
Father: We…we needed a way out. He had one.
Lady: A way out of where?
Mother: Makai. You call it the demon realm, or hell. But it’s not hell. It’s worse. A desolate place barely suited for life. And that was before the warlords ravaged what few resources we had and turned the atmosphere toxic. Only the strongest Makaians can stand to breathe it. For those like us..
Father: The air itself is poison. Children rarely survive their first year. We couldn’t accept that fate.
[The White Rabbit] showed up with [a device to bridge the worlds] a year ago, offering passage to anyone who wanted. Dozens of families like us came.
Mother: We did it so our children could live. And live in a better world. Then we realized, there is no better world for us. Sapiens hate and fear our kind. We’ll never be able to mix openly amongst you.
Father: We have no choice but to stay here in hiding, doing whatever that lunatic tells us, and turning a blind eye to his…
Mother: The children who are orphans, he does tests on them, experiments.
Father: All we’re trying to do is survive. Like you.
And to really drive this ‘9th Grade AP US Politics’-level criticism of the Iraq War home, enter the series’ overarching villain, United States Vice President William Baines (as voiced by the late great Kevin Conroy in one of his final performances).
A deeply religious man whose utmost belief amounts to ‘Everything according to God’s plan’, Baines funds the ongoing research into and military actions against Hell under the belief that it is the United States’ duty to save the collective souls of humanity by waging “the final war against Hell itself.”
“Even I, for much of my life, could not comprehend his true plan,” the VP pontificates as his plan begins to come to fruition in the season finale. “God has never asked us to sit idly by and await his kingdom on Earth, but to build it ourselves.”
Ultimately getting his hands on the White Rabbit’s aforementioned device, Baines proceeds to rip open a tear between Earth and Hell.
And that’s when a squadron of fighter jets begin raining missiles onto Hell, kicking off a full-on montage set to the tune of Green Day’s American Idiot depicting the American military undertaking a ‘War on Freedom’-era invasion of the alternate universe.
“My fellow Americans, what I am about to tell you is going to sound shocking,” declares US President Hopper over footage of the Uroboros Corporation establishing a corporate foothold in Hell, rounding up its citizens, and mining its soil for natural resources. “Even unbelievable. But as your president, it is my duty not to conceal these hard truths, but to lay them before you so we may confront them together as a nation. The truth is, Hell is real. Demons are real.”
Just…see for yourself:
It's worse in motion. pic.twitter.com/7abSpwRTqU
— G-Warning (@GWarning89) April 3, 2025
All in all, however bad you thought Devil May Cry was going to be, it’s genuinely so much worse.
And please, dear video game developers, for the love of God: stop letting Adi Shankar handle your IPs.
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