The Outsider: Adi Shankar’s ‘Devil May Cry’ Is Sublime & Undeniable Creative Defiance

I’m pretty jaded when it comes to video game adaptations, but I was genuinely excited when I saw both ‘Devil May Cry’ and ‘Adi Shankar’ pop up on my Netflix. 

As a third culture kid who grew up fundamentally disconnected from his roots, Hideki Kamiya's Devil May Cry was a series that gave me my first real glimpse into the alternative subcultures that I continue to gravitate towards. I remember sitting alongside my brother and being absolutely transfixed as ‘Dante’ the series’ half-demon protagonist hacked, slashed, and shot his way through hordes of monstrous abominations while the crushing roar of downtuned guitars and guttural vocals that sounded straight from the depths of hell cascaded and crescendoed in the background. 

For Adi Shankar, the creator and showrunner of the series, disconnection, displacement, experimentation, and curiosity have shaped the vast majority of his creative endeavours over the last decade. Since the very beginning of his career, he’s blazed a trail that refuses to bow down to convention or expectation. If there’s a big book of rules across Hollywood and television for South Asian creators, Adi routinely says ‘fuck off’, sets it on fire, and writes his own. And it’s undeniably for the best. 

From his gritty, literally pull-no-punches interpretation of everyone’s favourite antihero in ‘The Punisher: Dirty Laundry’ to his bold and genre-defining reimagination of Capcom’s iconic ‘Castlevania’ series, Adi invokes themes and motifs that can only exist in that liminal space between displacement and belonging. His characters are often charming, flawed, and conflicted misfits who yearn for connection but refuse to compromise their own convictions, even if it means being a perennial outsider both at ‘home’ and in new lands.  

His body of work stands as testament to the fact that it’s perfectly okay for individuals of South Asian heritage to create outside of what the world deems to be our ‘niches’. He’s showing all of us that it’s possible to be connected to your roots and your identity without having them become what defines you.  

Like so many third culture kids, I never really related to my Indian heritage when I was growing up. Rather, it was video games, movies, books, and television that had a fundamental role in shaping my identity and my tastes. Everything from the aesthetics that I gravitate towards to the music I like today has been, in some way, influenced by the games I played, their eclectic casts of characters, and the backdrops that they were set in. 

The Devil May Cry games are largely products of their time. The series made its debut during the early 2000s and proudly channels the spirit of that era. Its frenetic pace, and pull-no-punches, balls-to-the-wall, hypersexualised, unhinged and in-your-face approach is a far cry from a lot of the slightly more grounded games we see today. 

The Netflix show retains a lot of the essence of the video games, from its industrial, electronic, and nu-metal soundtrack to the gothic camp backdrops and aesthetics that players lost themselves in growing up, but there’s also a great deal more nuance and complexity that’s been brought into the core story and even the characterisations of key protagonists, including Dante. 

Beneath its engrossing, all-action veneer lies a narrative depth that few adaptations have managed to match. Its story, while certainly over-the-top and even camp at times, has an endearing warmth. For a series that’s essentially about murdering hundreds of thousands of demons (some of whom may or may not be Dante’s family), there are also clear themes that centre on navigating displacement and mixed identities. At its core, Devil May Cry is about finding belonging in people with different worldviews and acceptance in places that don’t completely feel like home, whether that’s because you’re an Indian kid in a new land or because your father was a demon general who betrayed his kind to save humanity.   

We sat down with Adi to talk about Devil May Cry, his uncompromising creative vision, and how he’s managed to break out of the ‘prison’ that heritage and identity can so often be for Indian creatives in the West.  

Could you talk me through your process of making changes to the canon DMC story? What we’ve seen in the recent past when it comes to certain adaptations is that creators either leave things as they are and do a straight one-to-one recreation of the source material or they change too much and alienate their audience. Your track record in this regard is exceptional, however. 

How do you approach making thoughtful changes to established narratives, and what are some of the things you and the writing team consider while adapting something as ‘sacred’ as a video game story? It’s impossible to please everyone, but do you take fan feedback into account while figuring out how a narrative is going to progress?

I’m not interested in doing one-to-one recreations. That’s not art. That’s reenactment. My job as an auteur is to extract the emotional truth from the original material and then reforge it for the medium I’m working in.

With Devil May Cry, I saw something buried under all the madness — trauma, identity, grief, and power. The games channelled the early 2000s in the best possible way: chaotic, stylish, deeply expressive. But games and TV are different languages. What works in a button-mash combo doesn’t always translate to long-form, serialised storytelling. So I had to build a new emotional grammar for this universe.

Take Lady, for example. In the games, she’s a vibe. In my show, she’s a person. That wasn’t about changing her — it was about excavating her. What motivates her? What breaks her? What’s she hiding? The same goes for Dante. The character in Season 1 isn’t the fully-formed legend. This is a younger, angrier, more fragmented version of the man fans know. And by giving him room to grow, we make his transformation mean something.

Yes, I listen to fan feedback. And no, I don’t try to please everyone. That’s a trap. What I do try to do is honour the emotional contract the franchise has with its fans — that promise of cool, chaos, and catharsis. But I also want to surprise them. Challenge them. And hopefully, move them.

What was it about Devil May Cry that captured your attention and your imagination? What first compelled you to develop an adaptation? What’s your elevator pitch to get your average Indian viewer to check out an episode or two or even dive into the game series? 

What captured me about Devil May Cry was the attitude; the refusal to conform. It didn’t just give you a power fantasy — it handed you a sword and said, “Make chaos look beautiful.” That spoke to me as a kid who felt like an outsider. It was stylish and emotional. 

But underneath all the flash and fire, there was something deeper — this broken family dynamic, a search for identity, and a legacy that haunted every character. That’s what pulled me in as a storyteller. I didn’t want to adapt Devil May Cry just because it looked cool — I wanted to dig into what it meant.

As for how I pitch it to an average Indian viewer? I say: Imagine if Mahabharat was directed by Zack Snyder and scored by Linkin Park. That’s the energy. It’s gods, monsters, and brothers at war — wrapped in a rock opera with swords. And trust me, once you watch Dante flip a table and unload twin pistols mid-air, you’re not going back.

We’d be remiss if we talked about Devil May Cry without talking about the show’s soundtrack, which, for me, is as close to perfect as can be. From Limp Bizkit in the show’s opening theme to an Evanescence banger that we’ve all been waiting for, the show taps into the spirit of the 2000s as well as a larger revival of the era's genres and bands, many of which are enjoying a resurgence in 2025. The music-driven Episode 6 in particular, is a masterclass in evocative storytelling that underlines the depth and moral complexity of the show's ostensible ‘bad guys’. 

Could you give us a little insight into how you conceptualised and put together that episode as well as the larger soundtrack? What were the initial conversations like when piecing together the narrative? Did it always factor in the music, or did music enter the fray a little later in the process?

Episode 6 was always designed to feel different. It’s the moment the show spirals into opera. And from the very beginning, I wanted music to be the emotional spine of that episode — not background; not a vibe, but the language of the story itself.

I conceived Episode 6 with the rhythm of a rock album — every emotional beat is synced to the soundtrack like a giant music video. The choice to use Evanescence was alignment. The themes of grief, rage, and betrayal in that song matched exactly where we were taking these characters. So yeah, Episode 6 is loud. It’s messy. It’s tragic. And it doesn’t apologize. Just like Devil May Cry shouldn’t.

The larger musical direction of the series came from a very real place: I’m trying to channel the spirit of the 2000s. That era shaped me. It shaped DMC. And the resurgence we’re seeing now — of nu-metal, industrial, and early-emo energy — is happening for a reason. That wounded power mixed with chaotic sincerity — it’s exactly what this story needed.

You were born in India but you spent a lot of your formative years moving between countries and cultures. How has that hybridity shaped your own identity and the way you create? For a third culture, South Asian like myself, I find a lot of resonance in the way you present your stories and their protagonists. 

Within your characters, there are motivations tied to displacement, isolation, and a general uncertainty about their place in the world. There’s also a consistent theme of hope; of finding familiarity, kinship, and even family within people from worlds away. Does this mirror your own experiences growing up? How much of your own story and history do you inject into your shows? 

Growing up between cultures gave me a very specific kind of loneliness — and a very specific kind of freedom. I never fully belonged anywhere. But because of that, I learned to build belonging. I think that’s why my characters often feel displaced, fractured, and uncertain about where they fit. It’s because that’s the emotional architecture I know best.

At the same time, there’s always a thread of hope in my work. No matter how broken the world gets, my characters find connection — sometimes messy, sometimes painful, but real. They forge meaning out of chaos. That’s my life experience too. To me, identity isn’t a place you’re born into, it’s something you forge.

So yes, my story leaks into everything I make. Not autobiographically. But spiritually. Every character searching for a home, every outsider trying to survive with style and defiance — that’s a piece of me. And maybe that's why my work resonates across different spaces — because the need to belong; to matter; to fight for your own place in the world — that's universal. No passport required.

You’ve championed South Asian representation within mainstream film and television for a very long time now, and your own career proves that you don’t necessarily have to fit a certain ‘Indian’ or South Asian archetype to be successful. You’re showing us that we can find ourselves and our voices in whatever genre we want to — whether it's fantasy, sci-fi, action, or anything else we choose. 

Could you talk about your own relationship with your South Asian heritage and identity in the context of your life’s work? What kind of obstacles or barriers did you have to overcome when trying to make your mark on an industry as cutthroat as American film and television? How do young, aspiring, alternative South Asian filmmakers and producers who don’t necessarily want to constantly be talking about their identities or cultures find a way to make the projects they want to make? 

My relationship with my South Asian heritage is deep, but it was never something I wanted to turn into a cage. It’s in my DNA, in my instincts, in my values — but it doesn’t need to be the headline of every story I tell.

The biggest obstacle I faced early on wasn’t rejection — it was invisibility. The system couldn’t imagine someone like me making dark fantasy, mythic science fiction, or brutal countercultural animation. They expected a certain story; a certain voice. But this had nothing to do with being South Asian — it had everything to do with being creatively outside the box for the time period I was coming up in.

My advice to young South Asian creators is simple: build the thing you can't stop thinking about — even if no one asks for it; especially if no one asks for it.

Don’t waste your energy begging for permission from systems that were never built to recognise you. Channel that energy into sharpening your skills, finding your people, and creating work so undeniable it can’t be ignored.

You don’t need to explain your identity. You are the identity. Your existence in spaces they said you didn’t belong is the revolution. Make your art. Take up space. Force the world to catch up.

In terms of mythology and legends, India has some of the most engrossing and captivating narratives to ever exist. Do you ever see yourself returning to your roots and creating a show centred on one of these? Could we see a Bootleg Multiverse interpretation of the Ramayana at some point in the near future? What other plans do you have for the near future, across animation and beyond? 

India’s mythologies are some of the most profound and emotionally complex ever created. They’re not just stories — they’re living systems of meaning, passed down through blood and memory.

I don’t need to make the Ramayana — I’m already infusing it into everything I do. Most Western storytelling is built around simple binaries: good versus evil, hero versus villain. But the Indian epics I grew up with are more complex. They deal with karma, dharma, and unintended consequences. They show how even noble actions can lead to tragedy, and how even villains can carry sorrow. That moral complexity — that layered emotional architecture — is the foundation of how I build worlds and characters.

Whether it’s Devil May Cry, Guardians of Justice, or anything else I create, that storytelling DNA is always present. It’s not about retelling ancient myths — it’s about evolving their spirit for a new era. My goal is simple: to create stories that outlive me; stories that feel ancient, dangerous, sacred — even if you’ve never heard the myth before.

You can follow Adi here.

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