The Count of Monte Cristo (novel)/YMMV

• Awesome Music (Sugar Wiki): The 1973 British-Italian series has one HELL of an opening song.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Although he's presented as/intended as an Anti-Hero, for a large part of the book, the Count is, arguably, a Villain Protagonist. He does manipulate a greedy wife into poisoning almost every single member of her family, including one Kick the Dog moment outside the count's immediate control where she poisons her nine-year-old son. Which, ironically, makes him fully realize how far he's gone.. As such, he may fit the following tropes as well: Affably Evil, Aristocrats Are Evil, Evil Is Sexy...
  • Is Eugenie a Sweet Polly Oliver, or is she a Transgender man instead?
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The book is pretty popular in Japan and has had several TV adaptations, manga (ie, a 2017 one by Ema Moriyama), anime, TV series, etc. The term Gankutsu-ou, coming from the book's first JPN translation ("Shigai Shiden Gankutsu-ou", by Shuukurou Kuroiwa), has been used to refer to both the story and to Miscarriage of Justice cases like the "Yoshida Gankutsu-ou incident" (where a Japanese man named Yoshida was imprisoned unjustly for fifty years)
• Magnificent Bastard: The Count himself, one of the oldest and best.
• Misaimed Fandom: The novel has a theme of Revenge, yes, but it also presents many problems with revenge itself and other ethical issues -- to the point that the last part of the novel is about the Count himself realizing that he's gone too far. Many of the adaptations focus much more on the revenge elements than the others.
• Moral Event Horizon: Benedetto crosses it when he burns his foster mother alive.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Depardieu film has a moment where Danglars' wife (in the movie, they're childless) starts ranting that she did have a son, with Villefort, the one Monte Cristo was ever so subtly hinting at earlier, staring at him the whole time while wearing a kind of weirdly happy grin.
• Older Than They Think: Among other things, the book is one of the first to introduce invisible ink and the treasure map as concepts, and the scheme employed to bankrupt Danglars is not only a version of the con known as the wire, but is essentially the same trick done in the Eddie Murphy movie, Trading Places. Also, although invisible ink was used earlier by Edgar Allan Poe in his story "The Gold Bug", this novel is one of the earlier uses of the idea before it became a cliche.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The Count and Haydée's relationship. First, she technically is his Beautiful Slave Girl even when the Count is more of a Parental Substitute and she's his Morality Pet. Second, she's MUCH younger than he is. It's next to no wonder than several adaptations take this out: ie, in the 2002 movie Haydée is Adapted Out (to be fair, she's not the only one) and the Count and Mercedes manage to rekindle their relationship.
  • The Count owning slaves. Period.