YMMV / Divine Comedy

• Ass Pull: At one point, Dante uses a cord around his waist to lower himself and Virgil into a section of Hell. Scholarly opinion is still divided as to whether this cord was actually an Ass Pull or was a result of Dante wearing a Franciscan habit.
• Evil Is Cool: Guess what part of the trilogy is overwhelmingly the best-known?
• First Installment Wins: As noted above, there is much more awareness of Inferno than Purgatorio or Paradiso.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The punishment of corrupt politicians — being trapped in boiling pitch — is especially ironic considering the politics behind oil today.
• Moment of Awesome: The episode of Ulysses' last journey (Hell, 26th canto) is usually regarded as an epic one and one of the best-remembered moments of the whole poem (Men are not thou to live as brutes... etc).
• Nightmare Fuel: There's probably at least one Infernal punishment that will tap into a person's primal fears, even if they're not guilty of the associated sin; if they are, maybe it'll Scare 'Em Straight.
  • If you're just passing through, there's the wood of suicides, where you have to walk through a forest where the trees bleed from every snapped twig and torn leaf. Through the bleeding holes in their wooden flesh, they wail in pain or ask why you're hurting them. And then one of the local denizens comes crashing through, leaving a trail of blood and agony in its wake...
  • Ugolino.
    • There are two possible meanings to what Ugolino says: Yes, he did OR No, he didn't. The line is fairly ambiguous.
    • Would he really be in Hell if he didn't do it?
• Values Dissonance: A'plenty. Remember, this is medieval Christianity.
  • There is a Circle of Hell for Heresy; that is, being a member of a non-Christian religion.
  • Zigzagged with homosexuality; it's punished in Hell (Circle Seven, Ring Three, specifically), as was the typical attitude in the the Middle Ages (and indeed the vast majority of Christian history), but the gay characters are far and away the most sympathetic characters seen in Hell. Dante even finds his own mentor there and has a heartwarming reunion with him.
  • Similarly, suicides are turned into trees. We tend to think of suicides as Too Good for This Sinful Earth, Thanatos Gambit, and related tropes, but they're all sinners here.
    • The most logical view of this is that 1) No life is man's to take, not even his/her own, and 2) suicide is basically murder for which you cannot absolve yourself since you're, you know... dead.
  • Usury —- lending money and charging interest for it -— will get you into the worst section of the Seventh Circle.
    • Considering that usury is one of the most despicable ways to exploit people in need, there's not much dissonance about it.
    • Actually, in medieval times, any interest, not just exploitative interest, was considered a sin. Europe did not start to advance until people ignored this.
  • Consulting fortune tellers. While it's generally agreed that you shouldn't, most people think of it as a harmless game.
  • Among the sowers of discord in the Eighth Circle, Dante discovers none other than The Prophet Muhammad himself; apparently, Dante viewed Islam as a splinter sect of Christianity.
  • In Dante's Hell, thieves and counterfeiters are regarded as worse sinners than murderers - the explanation given for this is that while any animal can kill, thievery, counterfeiting, and the other crimes punished in the Eighth and Ninth Circles are unique to humans and require perverting God's gift of intelligence to commit. The First Circle (Limbo) consists of "virtuous pagans" and the unbaptised, whose only real crime is not being Christian. Nowadays, condemning someone to hell for such a fact is generally considered a wee bit harsh.
    • However, and perhaps ironically, quite a few "virtuous pagans" end up in Purgatory. Some translators noted that this was usually due to some Heroic Sacrifice and general messianic ideals.