BEGGY BEGGBEGG: Devil May Cry 5: The Greatest Story In Gaming part 1
Devil May Cry 5 is an exemplary case of incorporating various esoteric (and even psychoanalytic) influences into an original hero-myth. Its thematic "flavor" is largely influenced by the prophetic books penned by a poet-painter of the Romantic Era (William Blake), who metaphorically portrayed the contentions within one's inner psyche through characters that embody one's bodily powers, or faculties.
Each "embodied faculty" (characters referred to as "Zoas" in Blake's prophetic books), of which there are four total (representing Imagination, Reason, Sensation, and Love), has been masterfully infused into Devil May Cry 5's narrative/mythos, and utilized in a manner that wonderfully complements the game's thematic messages! These messages are deeply complex and will take quite some time to unravel.
And so... this is a THREE-part series (this one being the first, the introduction to myth, William Blake, and Joseph Campbell) that aims to capture and concretize those underlying messages.
In this introductory piece (part 1), we will explore:
1) The essential function of ANOMALY in storytelling and especially in myth. The scope of any story revolves around the very composition and magnitude of the anomalous force that inspires creative, adaptive behavior in our "knower" (our hero who engages with the Unknown). This will prove essential to structuring the journey of OUR "knower" (Nero in Devil May Cry 5) as well as his parallel character in Blake's mythos (Orc, the Zoa/Embodied faculty of Love and Emotion)! The world-building that Devil May Cry aims to establish is best explained through such mythical language made popular by books like "Maps of Meaning" by Peterson.
2) Why human beings tell stories in the first place. As "the knower" encounters agents of the Unknown, he adapts, and returns with his new learnings. From ancient times to the present, we've progressed through a certain hierarchy of abstracting that newly acquired knowledge from interacting with the Unknown.
3) How the SAME hierarchy described in 2) also represents the stages of developing knowledge within the individual! This suggests that the IMAGINATIVE spark found in children is susceptible to decay as one's faculty of REASON grows more and more dominant with age.
4) How this "fall" from adolescent wonder to the oppressive constraints of material reality (from Innocence to Experience, to reference another Blakean work that I analyzed previously in the context of DMC5) is represented through Blake's mythos and of course through DMC5. The adolescent in question encounters a ghastly anomaly at a terribly young age, after which his Blakean faculty of Reason (essentially mirrored by the Freudian Superego and represented by the character "Urizen" in Blake's mythos) emerges as a dominant force, sapping him of all other desires in an effort to ensure predictability and prevent such pain from ever befalling him again. This drives him to seek the throne of omnipotence (once again, both in Blake's "The Book of Urizen" and in Devil May Cry 5 through Vergil) to constrain the dangers of the Unknown around him, eventually becoming so powerful that he nearly precludes the possibility of anomaly itself (for himself)!
That is what we are dealing with in this first part!! It's an introduction as well as an overview. It won't be until Parts 2 and 3 that we officially progress through each stage of Joseph Campbell's monomyth (starting with "The Call to Adventure" in part 2) and analyze all the parallels and thematic messages between Devil May Cry 5 and Blakean myth. YES, this is a story that follow's "The Hero's Journey"!!
I hope that you learn plenty, and come back for parts 2 and 3!! That's when we'll be diving into each stage of Joseph Campbell's monomyth, one by one, and illuminating all Blakean and myth elements along the way.
Thank you for taking interest. My blood's been ALL over this project for several months now.