Les Misérables (novel)/YMMV

• Accidental Innuendo: "I have come to sleep with you," from Marius to Courfeyrac. Also see the Foe Yay quote from Javert in the Main tab.
• Complete Monster: The utterly despicable Monsieur Thénardier, as opposed to main antagonist Javert.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Oodles of 'em. The street urchin Gavroche was especially embraced by the French as a literary and cultural icon.
• Evil Is Sexy: Montparnasse, described as 'the flower of the underworld,' has a pretty significant fanbase.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Marius/Éponine was this, at least at in the early days of the fandom. Not so much anymore; there actually seems to be more Marius/Cosette at Fanfiction.net, for one, than Marius/Éponine.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The book was extremely popular among Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War, who identified with Enjolras' rebels and called themselves "Lee's Miserables."
• Hilarious in Hindsight: "In Which Is Explained How Javert Lost The Game."
• Ho Yay:
  • Grantaire is described as being "fanatical" about Enjolras, and is "subjugated" by his character. Grantaire says Enjolras' "chaste, healthy, firm, direct, hard, candid nature charmed him," and his own "soft, wavering, disjointed, diseased, deformed ideas, attached themselves to Enjolras as to a backbone. His moral spine leaned upon that firmness."
  • You can't put nine young-ish revolutionaries in a novel without experiencing at least a little of this. The strongest would be Grantaire towards Enjolras. Grantaire respects, venerates, and loves Enjolras, to the point of offering to black his boots and asking to die with him, and doing so (while Enjolras smiles at him and takes his hand), though throughout most of the novel Enjolras finds Grantaire to be an irritating drunkard.
• Moment of Awesome: See Awesome: Les Misérables
• Narm: A single tear running silently down Enjolras' cheek as he snipes a young artillery officer.
• Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: Many, many good anvils.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Every death scene.
  • Fantine's descent into prostitution and sickness, amplified by extortion by the Thénardier couple and the cruelty of Montreuil's townsfolk.
  • The story of Mabeuf's growing poverty and despair, and the whole book onwards from 'The Sleepless Night'.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Being over 150 years old at this point, the book runs into this rather hard in some places.
  • The most notable is the above, with She's All Grown Up happening to Cosette and Marius becoming infatuated with her. Marius' behavior during all this can strike many readers as profoundly creepy, what with hanging about the places she and Valjean hang out for hours on end (and certainly Valjean gets annoyed with him in-story) and the fact that Marius is 20 while Cosette had just turned 15, but in the 19th century Marius' incredible shyness and his devotion to wanting to see her would have come across as extremely romantic.
  • Very modern readers may have some difficulty feeling sympathy for Valjean's initial plight: "so his sister's children needed bread, just wait to morning; so he gets five years hard time, so what, just wait it out, don't try to escape and make your sentence worse, idiot". Given how "poverty" in almost all Western countries in the 21st century still provides at least some way to eat and is much gentler than in any time in history, modern readers can have difficulty understanding the absolute depths of destitution and lack of learning that Valjean was subjected to as a young man and his subsequent lack of judgment, even when Hugo attempts to point this out himself.
  • A great many modern readers could very well rankle at Hugo's treatment of Gavroche; that is, the way in which he is portrayed as perfectly healthy and happy despite being a street urchin and technically a thief. Given modern attitudes concerning the necessity of children having a loving caregiver, Hugo's apparent tacit message that Gavroche is better off on the streets could shock or disgust many.
  • Cosette herself, though a feminine ideal in the nineteenth century, could strike modern readers as empty-headed and significantly underdeveloped next to many of the other characters -- she doesn't really serve any purpose as an adult other than the female love interest. Interestingly, the same can't necessarily be said for Hugo's other female characters; Fantine and Éponine in particular are given much more realistic personalities (even if they both wind up tortured throughout most of the story).
  • There's a section in the novel where Jean Valjean goes to the Thénardiers' inn and gives Cosette a doll (the first one she's had since she's been with Thénardiers; probably the first one she's ever had, considering how poor Fantine was). Hugo then goes off on a tangent to explain how important it is for a young girl to have a doll, since it is the fate and instinct of every little girl to grow up to be a mother. Although this was a perfectly natural outlook on gender roles in the 1800s, many woman today would be insulted by such a "degrading" gender stereotype.
• Values Resonance: For 150 years, many issues discussed in Les Miserables are remarkably pertinent today, as we see men persecuted simply for their past reputation, families divided over such petty issues as political fanaticism, and scoundrels who abuse their position of 'caretaker' simply for the money. Victor Hugo's urging that these ills must be faced are every bit as relevant today as they were in post-Revolutionary France.
• The Woobie: Basically every character who is not one of the Thénardier parents or working for the Thénardier parents qualifies.