Line #22 Headscratchers/DantesInferno


1	* How can Dante absolve or punish anyone? By what power or authority?
2	** By God's Authority, of course.
3	* Lucifer. Just Lucifer. How is he supposed to be manipulative if he is a raving lunatic that looks ObviouslyEvil? You mean to tell me a person whose entire "career" is based on purging the church's enemies wouldn't recognise someone who looked like every demon stereotype as a demon?
4	** Well the only one we see make a DealWithTheDevil is Beatrice, and it's likely she never really trusted him. Her concern for Dante just outweighed the obvious warnings of dealing with Lucifer.
5	** To be fair, this is actually in line with contemporary portrayals of Lucifer at the time. The devil was often portrayed as incompetent and only truly evil or foolish mortals would fall for his schemes. Beatrice was just that desperate for Dante’s safety.
6	* Near the end of Gluttony, Lucifer implies that the people Dante fought against in the Third Crusade are in a different Hell, suggesting that there's some degree of AllMythsAreTrue going on and each faith has its own afterlife. Normally, I'd consider this an acceptable break from the poem, except that the virtuous pagans and various Greek and Roman mythical beings are still in the Christian Hell. Inconsistency much?
7	** Maybe the implication is supposed to be that just all different facets of monotheism are true? Or that geographical divides somehow play in? There doesn't seem to be any Hindu or Buddhist damned, either.
8	** It could be that this hell existed before the rise of Christianity/Judaism and God just appropriated it and set the Greek and Roman mythical beings to work there.
9	** Or Lucifer is just screwing with him. He's the damned devil, lying is one of the things he does.
10	** It's possible the game developers didn't want to feature Dante fighting damned Muslims, considering the current political climate and various controversies surrounding fundamentalist Islam.
11	** Lucifer said something along the lines of "This isn't their Hell, it's ''yours''". A lot of people seem to take this to mean that the Christian Hell is different from the Muslim one, but I took it more as "This isn't Random Saracen #20934's Hell, it's Dante's". Lucifer is in control for almost the entire game, and he does make a point of highlighting Dante's sins with what he sees in Hell; Dante runs into way more people from his life than seems likely by random chance, so having him fight a bunch of crusaders is an extension of this, hammering in the point that what he did was evil. Many or even all of the Muslims who died in the crusades are probably in there somewhere, but showing them to Dante would if anything help validate his actions in life, so Lucifer leaves them off the tour.
12	** Or it could be just how Dante sees it and everybody sees it differently. After all, the way Lucifer says "their" and "yours" sounds very personal, not broad.
13	* Why is there a city in Hell anyway? Is that where all the fallen angels and other resident demons who conduct all the torment to the souls actually live, or does Lucifer offer some souls a place to rest once in a while? What's the going rate on apartments there? Who's the mayor? Does it have a stable economy? For that matter, what does it take for you to actually rise above having to suffer the torments of Hell? Does Cleopatra still have to deal with the stinging winds while she's sending other lustful sinners into that tornado?
14	** The city of Dis was in the original poem, and thus was an obvious thing to implement into the game. To get into the other details is pretty futile, as the city is probably only a resting place for the damned and the demons.
15	** From a poetic standpoint, the city walls mark the border between the passive sins (sins resulting from inability to control natural urges) of the first five circles and the active sins (sins resulting from malicious intent) of the last four.
16	** Entering a bit of WMG territory here, but perhaps Lucifer’s formerly human subordinates had the sheer will to refuse to be part of the rest of the rabble of tormented souls. So, at some point, Marc Antony and Cleopatra died, but rather than become part of the scenery in torture, their combined Lust enabled them to exert power in their Circle of Hell. They’re still being tortured, of course, but they’re capable of moving around Hell and interact with others, so it’s a step up.
17	* In the beginning of the game, you face enemies covered in hellfire that can only be put out with the cross before they can be attacked with the scythe. But in the rest of the game, hellfire becomes barriers that don't disappear until you kill all of the enemies in a "room". How come you can't just put those barriers out with the cross? It's made of the same fire.
18	** Maybe the barrier is simply too much big for being put out with the cross.
19	** Maybe the cross can only put out fires that a person's on.
20	* Why you keep finding certain specific demons in other circles of hell, like Temptresses in Greed or Gluttonous in Malebolge? Shouldn't they be restricted to a specific area?
21	** Maybe you've been breaking down the barriers that would ordinarily prevent intermingling?
22	** My best guess is that in hell the sinners turn into the demon whose sin they did the most of. Therefore extremely lustful... women? get turned into seductresses and the extremely gluttonous can turned into gluttons. This is used to show what sin they were most guilty of. However to give proper punishment to them (since the punishment gets worse the worse the sin) they are found in the circle of hell that they did their worst in. Thus a prostitute who killed one of her clients would be a seductress but be found in either violence or maybe treachery depending on the circumstance.
23	** Or Lucifer might be messing with you.
24	** Maybe they are chasing you because you destroyed their specific hell?
25	** Reinforcements from the other circles?
26	** Better than the Gluttonous: Unbaptized Babies. You know, it's one thing to consign them to Limbo for something that is not and could not be their fault, but to throw them into the ''second-worst circle of Hell?'' What possible fraud could they have committed?
27	* Beatrice chooses to follow Lucifer and eat the evil seeds yet never gets called out for it or suffers any consequences. How does that work?
28	** Who could call her out? The guy trying to save her? The angel? The thing is Beatrice did not have a presence until Paradiso in the original poem where she served as a guide (Vergil was granted leave to escort Dante through Purgatario but his place is in Limbo, and he cannot enter Paradiso, given that he´s a pagan from the Age of Gods), so she was the obvious weakpoint of the plot.
29	*** Dante could never blame her for that. He loves her to the point of waging war against Hell. And he did prove that the real her was under there.
30	* At the end we learn that Dante has been dead the whole time and that by extension the fight with Death never happened. So why does Dante still have his scythe?, the scythe that he used to free Lucifer no less!
31	** I took that to mean Dante's soul was defiant enough to actually fight Death and use the Harvester like any other combat scythe. There's no reason a non-physical entity shouldn't be able to use a weapon Death uses against non-physical entities if he can steal it. That's making assumptions about whether Hell and Death, as constructs, are physical or non-physical, never mind the mind fuck all about what a non-physical thing even is in any context.
32	* I haven't read the original ''Literature/TheDivineComedy'', so this may or may not be a problem with that, but... you encounter Pontius Pilate on the way to the boat, and Orpheus within it. But then, in the actual circles, you see several people from Dante's lifetime (including a couple of bosses), along with others from before his lifetime. Shouldn't Pilate and Orpheus have been long since unloaded and sentenced? Is Hell's queuing system really that weird? Did Orpheus just hide in there somehow (even with his constant out-loud retelling of his story), or is his particular punishment to just ride the boat back and forth without actually getting where it goes?
33	** The first level, before Hell proper, is Limbo. Dante describes it as "a place of sighs, not screams". This is where unbaptized infants and noble unbelievers go. Dante placed Orpheus here.
34	** Also in Limbo are the "uncommitted", and Pilate is implied (though not directly stated) to be one of them. These are people who, for all intents and purposes, weren't good enough for Heaven but not bad enough for Hell. This includes angels who didn't join in rebelling with Satan or confirm their allegiance to God but stayed neutral. Their afterlife is to eternally chase a flag but never catch it.
35	*** Technically, the uncommitted don't even go into Hell, but remain on the shores of Acheron (a.k.a. the vestibule) for eternity, so it's even more appropriate that Pilate be there.
36	* Much like in ''Divine Comedy'', Lucifer is portrayed just as much of a prisoner as the other damned, held by giant chains found linked all throughout Hell. However, he is also portrayed as Hell's ruler, Virgil claiming that the only reason why Hell is such a CrapsackWorld is because he wants it to be that way. In the animated film, he is even seen giving orders to the demons. However, he needs to lure a soul into Hell (like [[spoiler:Alexander the Great, Lancelot, Attila the Hun and Dante himself]]) in order to free him. Why does he not command the damned souls already there to free him? What about the hundreds of demons under his command? Can they not do it and he needs a live human to free him?
37	** What makes Dante so special that he could make it that far more so than the others? They imply that it was because Dante's sins were so great that he was meant to go to the ninth circle anyway, but are they saying that this somehow makes Dante worse than [[spoiler:Attila the Hun]]?
38	** Is it because he wields Death's Scythe? If so, did Lancelot and Alexander also kill Death and stole his scythe? How many times has this happened? Is there more than one GrimReaper wandering about out there? That would explain why more damned souls fall long after Dante kills him when he enters Hell.
39	** To answer all these questions:
40	*** Lucifer ''is'' the ruler of Hell, but only because he was imprisoned there by God. It's why he only rules Hell and not all of Creation. The other demons would free him, but either can't or won't defy the will of God out of fear for their own existences (especially considering that an agent of God as powerful as Gabriel was able to waltz right into Hell and do as they pleased).
41	*** Dante is one of the few damned souls suitable to free Lucifer because unlike most, he has committed ''every'' one of the sins of the circles, meaning he has a place in each level of Hell, but he also believed he would be absolved. Attila, Alexander and such could have met the criteria as well, but only Dante had both the badassery and determination to actually ''reach'' Lucifer's prison.
42	*** Not only did Alexander and Attila not kill the Grim Reaper, neither did Dante. It reveals at the end that Dante was merely FightingAShadow, and both the scythe he wields and the being he stole it from are illusionary replicas of the ''real'' Grim Reaper. If shown in his entirety, the real Death would be an omnipotent being that far outclasses even Lucifer himself, and exists as an immutable law of the universe, and thus couldn't possibly be killed by a mortal. The reason the cross and the scythe are able to harm Lucifer is because they are imitations of the power of the only two beings greater than him: God and Death.
43	** Perhaps it’s part of a bigger plan by God. Gabriel implies that Dante’s journey through Hell was part of a design; that God is moving pieces into play for an end that Dante himself can’t see. Hence, while Lucifer is trying to lure souls down to Hell to free him, Lancelot, Atilla, or Lucifer’s demons would get struck down by Angels if they actually made progress. Dante was permitted to break the chains, because it was part of God’s plan for Dante to do so. Presumably, the sequel would see further development of that plan.
44	* Why did they make Lucifer be butt naked with a massive weiner just hanging out like a horse? what were the developers thinking?
45	** Biblical figures were often seen nude in artwork and Lucifer probably hasn't been able to put on pants since, you know, he's been trapped and probably wouldn't care about being decent anyway. [[https://dantesinferno.fandom.com/wiki/Infernopedia Infernopedia notices that]] his huge dong is always flaccid and proposes that that is meant to symbolize Lust.
46	** Lucifer's appearance is based on satyrs from Greek mythology. who were quite famous for sporting comically large dongs.
47	* It has been said that Dante had committed every one of the sins of the circles of hell, but exactly what did Dante do that would be him committing heresy or greed? he has definitely shown to have committed acts of lust, gluttony, anger, violence, fraud and treachery, but not quite anything to do with greed or heresy.
48	* Why the hell is it that you cannot absolve or punish Temptresses, Hoarder/Wasters, Heretics, Pagans or Damned Crusaders in the game? especially since you can still absolve or punish the Gluttons and almost all variations of demons in the game? what sense does that make?
49	* Why didn't the game have [[Creator/SteveBlum Steve Blum]] as the voice for Lucifer like in the animated movie?

Context Headscratchers / DantesInferno