YMMV / Arabian Nights

• Archive Panic: Hey, I've always wanted to read Arabian Nights! Wait, there's 1001 of these stories?! (Or, to be fair, enough stories to be plausibly stretched out over 1001 nights, but we're still talking well over three hundred.)
  • And more than 30 versions of the book. To elaborate, the frame story made it very easy to slot in new stories without any appearing out of place. It's believed more stories kept being added until the total number of nights would match the original title of 1001. However, this means most of the stories can be removed without issue, and have to be if you're publishing the work in a single volume. The different versions include not just differing translations, but different collections of stories, though there is usually considerable overlap with some popular stories being included in most versions. A comprehensive translation can take up anywhere between three to ten volumes.
• Ass Pull: "Adi Bin Zayd and the Princess Hind" seems like a typical romance with the Happy Ending where Adi marries the princess. Then out of nowhere, at the very end Shahrazad says "after which time the King was wroth with Adi and slew him".
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Aladdin and Ali Baba are the most famous stories from Nights even though they are not in the original source material; in fact their oldest documented versions aren't even in Arabic, but come from the French translation of Antoine Galland.
  • Sinbad the Sailor, who's probably second best known after Aladdin.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: According to The Other Wiki, the Nights to this day aren't particularly well-regarded in the Arabic world to anyone beyond certain writers and scholars, and it was even less popular back whenever it first was written ^note Fictional prose was considered "low art" by most Arab thinkers and writers of the day, compared to works of non-fiction or poetry. It's entirely possible that the Nights have had more influence on European literature than they did on Arabian.
• Ho Yay: The old man and the beautiful boys.
• Retroactive Recognition: For the miniseries:
  • Benedict Wong, later to become famous as the similarly named Wong in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, features here in a very minor role as Aladdin's sidekick (unnamed on screen, listed in the credits as Hassan).
  • Andy Serkis, a couple of years before The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers shot him into the A-List, plays Ali Baba's ill-fated brother Casim.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Shahryar. We're supposed to see him as a Beast-like Anti-Villain whom Shahrazad redeems and helps find new happiness. However, his Disproportionate Retribution Revenge by Proxy against countless innocent women, combined with the below-mentioned Values Dissonance, makes him come across as The Caligula and a Karma Houdini to many readers instead.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Many/most of the stories portray women as devious, immoral, unfaithful, foolish, and untrustworthy, and there's something of an obsession with women cheating on their husbands with black men, as if that's particularly egregious. Though in-universe, the obsession with cheating could be a deliberate ploy by Shahrazad to appeal to the sultan.
  • Beating one's wife is treated as acceptable and even laudable.
  • It's not uncommon for male characters to have sex with women who aren't their wives, and this isn't treated as morally objectionable, whereas a woman cheating is treated as a justly capital offense.
  • In the fourth voyage of Sinbad, he murders and robs innocent people for their food and jewelry to survive a little while longer in a pit. He apparently didn't even bother to look for an escape, seeing as he easily finds one later, just by following a wild animal that was snacking on all the corpses.
  • The story of a King discovering his wife was cheating on him with what later translations claim to be the ugliest man on earth. Apparently more accurate translations were simply that she was cheating on him with a black slave.
  • In one story, a man murders his wife after concluding, after a comment from a random person on the street (who has an apple that her husband traveled a great distance to give to her), that she's unfaithful to him. Immediately after this, he learns that he was wrong. When the sultan learns of the murder and the man tells him this story, the sultan orders the death of the man who falsely claimed the wife was cheating but appoints the murderer to a high position.
  • In the first section of the King 'Umar ibn al-Nu'man stories, we meet a group of warrior women whose leader can fight a warrior prince to a stalemate... She is then drugged and raped by the King, so she flees in 'dishonour'.
  • The framing device of the three years before Shahrazad marries the king. At no point is Shahryar called out on the fact that he's killed a thousand innocent women, just because he was deceived by one, nor does he ever admit he was wrong or try to atone. And we're supposed to be happy that Scheherezade ends up with him! (Perhaps the bright side we're supposed to see is that we know Shahrazad is faithful, and thus the king won't be relapsing as long as she's around.)
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The book is known for its violent, sexual, misogynistic, and racist content. Thanks to Values Dissonance, it borders on Black Comedy at times.
• Why Would Anyone Take Her Back?:
  • (In the 2010 musical) The male genie and Aladdin take back Djinninia and Jasmina in spite of all the wrong they've done.
  • More commonly, why would anyone agree to marry a man so vengeful and cruel that he enacted a plan to marry a new woman every day, sleep with her at night, and then kill her in the morning — in some versions, for three whole years? A man that vicious should be put down, never mind the fact that he rules a country. Being a king, there's little chance he'd allow the women he wanted to marry to refuse him.