Paradise Lost/YMMV

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• Alternative Character Interpretation: It's been around for more than three centuries, and has picked up a ton of these... for some of the most popular, see God Is Evil and the various portrayals of Satan, in the Main tab.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Satan's conflicted, stirring speeches and soliloquies are some of the best writing on the book, causing him to have a legion of fans. William Blake was probably the first to suggest that Milton was subconsciously on his side, and Satan has developed one of the most loyal Alternative Character Interpretations in literature.
• Evil Is Sexy: Lucifer is indeed the most beautiful of all the angels, and even as Satan possesses a great deal of charisma and a seductive, salacious tongue.
• First Installment Wins: Paradise Regained, the sequel, is about the Devil's temptation of Christ, and it features his final major loss. Both are often collected with Samson Agonistes, which has some similar themes and is sort of a Spiritual Sequel.
• Funny Moments: Following Adam's & Eve's celebratory sex after eating the fruit, Adam blames Eve for their current predicament, and they end up not speaking to each other for the rest of the day.
• Magnificent Bastard: Subverted by Satan, who seems this way to his minions, as well as the reader for some of the early parts of the story, until he starts admitting his shortcomings to himself in the later chapters.
  • God is perhaps a more straight example, as Satan finds out over the course of the epic: all of his scheming went according to plan for God, proving that as the omniscient creator of the universe, God simply is more magnificent and more of a bastard.
• Misaimed Fandom: Satan has one of the most loyal.
• Moment of Awesome: Gabriel facing down Satan in the garden, Michael cutting Satan's legs off, the angels responding to the rebels' war machine by dropping a mountain on it, Abdiel's "Shut UP, Hannibal" speech in Book 5, and finally, the Son smiting all of Satan's forces single-handedly, causing the demons to throw themselves into Hell.
• Motive Decay: Satan opens with a lot of stirring rhetoric, but by the later books he's mostly just trying to piss off God in any way he can, no matter who he has to hurt to do so.
  • Interestingly, this may have been intentional, as part of the story's philosophy is that evil degrades the sinner--as he sins Satan is becoming less of a person, and thus less developed.
• Squick: Satan gets his daughter pregnant, and then their son constantly rapes her and the children attempt to eat their way out of her womb.
• Tear Jerker: The Bittersweet Ending.
• Values Dissonance: "What?" you say. "Seventeenth century religious fiction features Values Dissonance? No way!"
  • Milton's portrayal of Eve is certainly a product of its time, yet also Fair for Its Day.