The Devil May Cry animated series has done halfway decently for itself, renewing for a second season after its release back in April. And despite some mixed reception—particularly from diehard fans—Netflix seems to be chalking it up to a success. So much so that it's making merch for it.
Alas, there's been a blunder—as spotted by DMC superfan @vergildearest on X (thanks, Eurogamer), a now-removed t-shirt sees Dante and Vergil split clean down the middle. Only it's apparently not Vergil, but Virgil. Or Publius Vergilius Maro, an ancient roman poet and guest star in Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, whose name is sometimes spelled Virgil.
You're probably wondering why I'm talking about roman poets, and it's because it is genuinely relevant to the typo in question. Devil May Cry is heavily inspired by the Divine Comedy. And by 'heavily', I mean the main character is directly named after the guy who wrote the dang thing.
Vergil's not the only character named in reference. There's also Trish, coined after Beatrice, who guides Dante through heaven in the Divine Comedy. Beatrice is also Dante's ideal woman, and Trish in the game resembles Dante's mother, which is deeply psychosexual and also something I'm not going to interrogate at 11AM on a Thursday.
Basically, what I assume happened here is some put-upon graphic designer tasked with drumming up a t-shirt for Netflix was auto-corrected to Virgil and, being that Virgil is a real name of a historical figure, likely assumed that everything was hunky-dory and pushed it through to manufacturing.
Either way, it's been pulled off the Devil May Cry merch store. You can still buy other stuff, though, like a baseball cap that says "see u in hell" and a thermos where Virgil—crap, sorry, Vergil—glares at you the entire time you're sipping your hot chocolate. Clearly, there's only one thing Netflix can do now. Re-release the shirt with Vergilius' full roman name clipping horribly outside the box of the graphic. I know what the fans want.
