Vergil is given a chaotic rebrand: a multifaceted personality with a more monotone demeanor than his twin, yet somehow just as, if not more, chaotic. Showing that the recklessness of the Sparda bloodline didn’t just go to one twin. Though better trained than his younger brother, Vergil is just as naive about his own brainwashing and the impact that Mundus’ propaganda has on his ambitions to avenge his mother. Holding the same ambition as Dante, they find themselves on opposite corners of the boxing ring, only to be forced together to take down their mutual enemies, Arius, who is trying to revive Argosax the Chaos, an even bigger threat than Mundus, and Mundus, who lied to Vrigil about who killed his mother.
One of the main emotional themes this season is the impact that father figures and male relationships have on the main characters.
The twins’ father, Sparda, almost literally haunts the narrative. His absence from their lives, even his whereabouts, is never fully explained, even in the stories’ source materials. Dante and Vergil both reject and embrace their father’s legacy in various ways in the season. Vergil rejects his humanity, believing it inhibited his ability to protect his mother. In season 1, Dante rejected his demonic nature due to his seeing demons (Makaians) as nothing but evil due to their hand in his mother’s death. This season, Dante embraces humanity, as it is the only thing he has left of his mother.
Lady still deals with the trauma of her father’s experiments that ultimately turned him into the villainous demon, the Jester – a traumatic transition she witnessed – as her father brutally killed her mother, and set her on the path of hating the Makaians. Lady admits to herself that her father’s greed for knowledge was his undoing, having lost her father long before his transformation.
Even Mundus’ relationship with Sparda and Argosax is a reflection of generational trauma amongst mentor figures. Argosax, the original king of Makai, had his tyrannical reign ended by Mundus, who saw that his mentor had gone too far. Only for Sparda, his top general and loyalist subject, did the same when he saw that Mundus had strayed too far from their path.
Matilda “Mattie,” a young girl whom Lady and Dante meet, loses her grandfather, Prof. Lucan, a powerful, arcane scientist and sorcerer. Mattie is impressionable, dealing with the feelings of hatred and anger that the story’s main protagonists dealt with at her age, acting as a mirror for them in certain scenes.
