YMMV / Demon Lord Dante

• Complete Monster: From the 2002 anime adaptation:
  • God himself is the Big Bad of the series. An ancient energy being who first arrived at the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, God committed genocide and torture upon the inhabitants when they refused to worship him, before attempting to torture the survivors for eternity. Upon the demons and devils rebelling against him in present day, God engineers a series of horrible disasters and attacks before draining his energy from all the humans he had created, driving them insane and leading to bloody massacres over all of the world with the knowledge God has done this on many, many worlds before arriving on Earth. Sadistic and egotistical, God believes he deserves worship and will enact nothing short of terrible vengeance for any minor slight.
  • Lamia, one of the treacherous devils known as the Four Devil Kings—and possibly the worst of them—leads her forces to a series of brutal attacks that kill many civilians after she is released by God to stop Dante. Not satisfied with this, Lamia begins abducting young men and women, impregnating the women with her demonic spawn and using the lifeforce of the men to feed her progeny. Lamia's common MO is to have her children eat their way from the "mothers" and use them to overrun entire countries, devouring everyone therein. When the devil Medusa interrupts, Lamia attempts to use her as a host as well before trying to devour Dante himself.
• Designated Hero:
  • All of Dante's underlings sacrifice young girls and we are supposed to believe they are good?
  • Ryo also gets this in the final episode when he causes the end of the world!
• Fridge Brilliance: Once you remember that Dante inspired Mazinger Z in addition to Devilman you start to notice that many of Dante’s powers in the anime resemble Mazinger Z’s weapons: Dante’s Eye Beams = Mazinger Z’s Photon Beam, Dante’s building leveling roar = the Rust Hurricane, Dante’s body blast = Breast Fire.
• Ho Yay: in any given incarnation Sosuke Oshiba is very persistent in getting Ryo to join the Church Militant serving under God.
• Narm: Lots of it. Bad animation and poor dialog don't help.
  • Dante's origin: He got caught in an explosion with a machine, two dinosaurs and God’s hellfire in the most accidental way possible. Even Go Nagai himself thought it was stupid, so much so that he retconned it in the 2002 remake, known as Mao Dante: Kamima Taisenhen.
  • Also it's hard to take Dante's appearance seriously when it always has half of Ryo's face in the forehead almost as if Ryo is too scared to see. This was also changed in the 2002 remake where instead it's the upper half of his body instead of just half of his face.
  • The anime is sometimes inconsistent with the less human looking characters mouths moving.
  • The entirety of God’s attack on Sodom is this: from the rampant Stock Footage Failure to dialogue that either tells us stuff we can see (“God has divided himself!”) or is so ludicrous that it is hard to take seriously (“Damn you, God! You’re a monster from outer space!”). And the dialogue is even more Narm filled in the English dub
• Narm Charm:
  • While the fight scenes action were Battle of the Still Frames, at certain points they managed to be very powerful, especially in the last episode.
  • The fact that Zenon’s mouth doesn’t move is somewhat less of an issue because his counterpart from the Devilman anime’s mouth didn’t move either.
• Nightmare Fail: The demons of this show look like rubber monsters from the Power Rangers. Though that was likely not an accident, since Go Nagai was actually mentored by Shotaro Ishinomori, who created the super sentai genre (which Power Rangers is part of), and Nagai himself has created a few Power Rangers-esque shows like Battle Hawk.
• No Yay: Even when it is eventually revealed that Ryo and Saori are Not Blood Siblings the constant Incest Subtext between them can cause this reaction with casual viewers.
• Special Effects Failure: At one point in the third episode, the snow in Demon Lord Dante’s ice prison is animated in Conspicuous CG and fails to behave like real snow as a result.
• Stock Footage Failure: During God’s massacre on Sodom, in the initial attack you can see the same woman getting crushed by debris three times, and God kills the same group of people twice.

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