YMMV / The 120 Days of Sodom

• Designated Hero: The Libertines are egregious examples. They kidnap several people, including their own daughters, and subject them to 120 days of violent, nightmarish psychological, physical, and sexual torture just For the Evulz. Given that this book was written by Marquis de Sade, this trope was bound to happen.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The premise of wealthy elites using their power and social status to sexually abuse women and children comes to this in the wake of The New '10s under the #Metoo movement revealing Hollywood and celebrities' abuses and scandals such as Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein.
• Nightmare Fuel: The "Hell Libertine" anecdote from the incomplete section on "Murderous Passions," which is the only one told in-depth. This was a man whom each of the four prostitutes had encountered at some point, but the story that Desgranges tells about him is that he masturbated to the display of fifteen adolescent girls being tortured to death.
  • The murder of Augustine, one of the kidnapped girls, is described in excruciating detail.
• Nightmare Retardant: Some of Sade's descriptions (such as the girl tied to a firework) unintentionally evoke Looney Tunes. This may have been somewhat intentional on De Sade's part, given how over-the-top and deliberately, cartoonishly extreme the depicted behavior is. De Sade was almost certainly adding in as much ultraviolence and vulgarity as possible in order to get a rise out of people.