apprenticekoifish:

As someone who’s been a gigantic devilman fan since 2014, when I heard crybaby being announced as an anime adaptation of the manga I was hyped as fuck since the manga has never received an actual anime adaptation, there were the ovas yes but they never completed the series and weren’t the most well thought. So I was excited to hear that a full scale adaptation was coming and when it came out I binged watched the whole series from until 5am. As I approached the final episode I as excited to see how they would execute Miki’s death and the final battle with Satan and Akira’s defeat, and when Akira died and Satan held him crying I felt…

…. nothing but disappointment, I wasn’t sure why but I felt disappointed but I just wrote it off as me being tired. So i decided to see the whole series again a few days ago and I later began to realize that the issue wasn’t just in one episode, but a problem the series had building up within it that became extremely obvious in the last two episodes 

And that issue is and starts with the way Ryo is portrayed within crybaby

Ryo’s importance to the original story of devilman cannot be understated. His absence alone from the original 1972 anime completed changed the way it panned out and how it ended so he is arguably the most important character in the original story. So the way he is to be presented is of immeasurable importance. I’m not gonna explain what happens in the series since you’ve likely seen the anime or read the manga and know how the story goes: Ryo comes to Akira for help and Akira becomes devilman, they fight some demons over sometime, everything starts to go to shit and humanity becomes paranoid, Ryo betrays Akira, and the two engage in a final battle with each other in which Ryo emerges victorious and humanity is dead. So we basically get the same ending right?

Well no

For all intents and purposes these are the same ending, but at the core they’re both very different. Crybaby’s ending focuses on making Ryo look sympathetic through the harsh realization that love can exist and that he’s killed the only person he really loved while the original focuses on making him realize what he’s truly done and how foolish it was after its far too late. These are both rather ok but the issue lies that crybaby does a shitty job at making the relationship between Ryo and Akira feel like it meant something to him and an even shittier job at making you try to feel sorry for Ryo and I’m gonna explain it by comparing 3 scenes from the manga and the anime which I feel are the most useful in explaining how Ryo is done badly compared to the manga

1. Ryo’s introduction and how it affects how we view him

2. Ryo getting ready to put Akira in the sabbath and the way it displays the relationship between the two

3. Akira’s confrontation of Ryo after his betrayal

Ryo’s introduction in the manga has him asking for Akira while Akira and Miki are on the verge of being assaulted by the 3 thugs shown above. Ryo willingly ignores Miki, who is on the verge of being assaulted by the fat thug, he doesn’t explain what he needs Akira for, however he ends up shooting at the thugs to save Akira and Miki at Akira’s request and 5 pages later after Akira has gone with him, Akira explains that Ryo has changed completely after the last time he saw him (stated to be a month ago)

From this we can pull the following 

1. He’s mysterious and while we have no clue what he wants, its extremely urgent to the point he’d leave a girl to get assaulted by a bunch of thugs just to get the person he needs

2. Whatever happened in the last month has made him psychotic and serious since he’s breaking multiple laws (fake drivers license, carrying a gun and shooting at people with it)

3. That despite all of the above I’ve mentioned, you can still tell that he’s not a bad guy, and was just a normal guy who has gone through something that has warped him but he’s is definitely on Akira’s side 

This helps set Ryo up as someone who, even if a little crazy, is still a relatively good guy and was just a regular person. Which helps make the reveal that Ryo is Satan all the more surprising. The anime in comparison has Ryo introduced far more differently, once as a child and in a similar way to the manga

Ryo in crybaby is introduced as being emotionless and lacking in empathy, willing to kill a cat and giving a young Akira shit for crying over a dead kitten, and in the similar scene to the manga he opens fire but this time on a group of rappers who were, at the most, just bothering Miki and bullying Akira and Akira later introduces Ryo as a professor in the states and unlike the manga, Ryo isn’t serious or gives off the impression that he’s in a rush, he just shoots at them for bothering him

This shows us that he’s a full blow psychotic person, and that he doesn’t really show any sympathy or care for others and was always like this and never a regular person to begin with. It hurts him because it makes him seem like less of a good guy and if it were restricted to this one scene that’d be fine, but scenes like this where Ryo shows he doesn’t give a shit about human life are shown a lot throughout the series and it ends up giving his betrayal significantly less of an impact for two reasons:

1: He outright lets people die and kills other people indirectly throughout the show with no remorse or care at all so the surprise that he’s a bad guy is severely lessened because he already acts like a bad guy to begin with so nothing really changed

2. It makes his whole undercover to analyze human weakness just seem redundant. How would he discover and understand the weaknesses of human when he himself doesn’t act human at all? And while I’m at it him not crying was a shitty choice to make for the sake of the theme/motif of crying because manga Ryo does cry and That leads into the second scene comparison and my second point.

Manga Ryo cries a lot.

It helps makes not only make him more human but also strengthens the idea that his relationship is a strong one. He legitimately doesn’t want to pull his best friend into this and only does it because he has no one else to turn to and you can tell he clearly regrets it. The origin story taking a volume actually strengthens this as it even shows Ryo wanted to give him one last day to be a real human but the sudden attack forces them to rush the plan. It also shows that Akira is completely loyal to his friend and solidifies him as being a hero who is willing to give his life to help save the world even after having seen first hand the terror that are the demons

I’m not gonna give this scene too much shit because this is something i felt was unavoidable. But the origin episode really doesn’t show anything about the strength Ryo and Akira’s relationship. I understand it was inevitable but its effects are still there. Ryo explains the situation to Akira over a car ride and tells him the same shit but it feels rushed due to it being so quick and Ryo’s previously stated lack of emotion makes the whole scene seem disingenuous. Moving on

This scene, this fucking scene 

On my first viewing I thought this scene was marvelous because it takes place after miki’s death and you could cut the seething anger Akira radiates with a knife. But on my second viewing I came to realize this fucking scene is whats wrong with Ryo. Yes its so fucking emotional but if you remove that emotion all you get is a shitty scene that makes Ryo look like a dumb ass and shows how shitty the relationship between the two is presented 

The fact that he fucking thinks akira would be willing to join him after he literally ruined his life shows us how dumb he fucking is and how little he actually fucking knew Akira

This shit is literally why Nagai fucking had them meet before miki’s death in the manga, he knew having it take place after would only make Ryo look like a dumb ass

And i think that last point summarizes my issue with devilman crybaby and its ending. It tries to make me sympathize for someone who’s been a complete monster the whole time even before their reveal as villains and it tries to make me feel sorry for him even though if he really knew his best friend, he would’ve known that his friend would’ve never agreed to this. I felt sympathetic for manga ryo because he realized what he did was wrong even if it was far too late and his relationship with akira felt like it was real, i cant feel the same for crybaby ryo because he never acknowledges what he did was wrong and only feels sad because he killed someone he loved even though he claimed to have known them better. And thats my issue with devilman crybaby

please don’t think im shitting on crybaby. I love it and think its the best adaptation of devilman. And i give it shit because i love the series so much

(Shoutout to that one guy on /smtg/ for sharing a file with the whole manga, because of him i didn’t have to take so much fucking time looking for every specific page)