YMMV / Helltaker

* Adorkable: Despite being a hardened protagonist, Helltaker treats gathering a harem of cute demon girls as Serious Business, grinning and fist-pumping whenever he succeeds at charming one of them at the end of each level. And he loves making chocolate crepes!
* Alternative Character Interpretation: Given how little Helltaker seems to care that his mission was functionally a failure, it's easy to get the idea his view of a "harem" is a circle of close friends or roommates rather than a romantic circle devoted to one person, meaning he actually did get what he wanted in the end, and possibly made Azazel more accepting of her sexuality.
* Awesome Music: Mittsies provides all of the music for this game, and all of the tracks are awesome.
	+ "Vitality", the main gameplay theme. Little wonder everyone dances to its beat.
	+ "Apropos", the main menu theme. It provides a very dark, foreboding undercurrent (rather appropriate for Beelzebub), and to show the Helltaker's determination.
	+ "Epitomize", Judgement's theme. The dark beats and heavy bass really scream, "ignite the sin machine!"
	+ "Luminescent", the theme for the game's ending where the Helltaker talks to his harem. It provides a fitting backdrop to the equally silly ending.
	+ "Alchemy", the theme for the levels of *Examtaker*. It really sets the stage of Loremaster's vision of Hell being remarkably different from before.
	+ "Titanium", the song for the Final Boss of *Examtaker*. The dark thumping beats provide a brisk backdrop to the Brutal Bonus Level that is this boss fight.

* Draco in Leather Pants: *The entire cast* got hit with this when the game came out. Most of the harem are shown to be willing to horribly murder the Helltaker for being a slight annoyance at worst, and are either shown or implied to be regularly causing mischief, damage and other crazy (and illegal, considering the arrival of the Police in the Normal ending) antics during their stay with him. Meanwhile, the Helltaker's quest from start to finish was entirely for his own selfish desires. Despite this, they are often portrayed as Not Evil, Just Misunderstood, a bad case of Tsundere at worst in fanart, or outright heroic.
	+ Fanon Welding: The Friendly Fandoms between this game and *DOOM* gave rise to humorous idea of Helltaker and Doomguy/Doomslayer being relatives of some sort, with them being either father and son or brothers. Most of this crossover deals with the hilarity of how they have completely opposite views on dealing with demons, with Doomguy usually showing up pissed that his own flesh-and-blood would "lay" with morally bankrupt demons instead of slaying them.
	+ Fridge Brilliance:
		- The initials on Justice's gloves, "HPJ", stand for "High Prosecutor Justice". She held the title before passing the job on to Judgement, and the art book states that they were a gift from Lucifer, possibly to commemorate her being given the job.
		- Per the Old Testament Satan is characterized as a celestial prosecutor, whose job is to accuse humans to see if they're morally worthy. Christians take the more cynical approach that Satan is the accuser of the brethren, hoping to see Christians corrupted, and that Satan being a prosecutor is more of a formality rather than something God appointed. Either way, Satan serves the role of the prosecutor — this theme is most chiefly illustrated in the Book of Job. What makes this brilliant is that Lucifer in Helltaker has two prosecutors under her employment, which likely comes from her experience as a prosecutor in the Bible. The alternate take of loving to corrupt humans is certainly characteristic of Lucifer's demons, so the Bible backstory applies in both interpretations of Satan as a prosecutor.
		- Why does Pandemonica, *the Sadistic Demon*, work in customer service? Why does Hell even have customer service at all? Because it's a ploy to give sinner false hope and torture them even more. Anyone looking for help or to lodge a complaint would run into Pandemonica, who would take cruel delight in making them suffer even more.
		- Loremaster lost her arms during her battle to take over Hell and replaced them with Artificial Limbs, making her a "Cyberdemon".
		- Loremaster's seeming fondness for apple pies, and how Lucifer's new position as her maid means she's often getting served the dish, is likely a nod to how an apple was what corrupted Adam and Eve. Also, said apple was offered by Lucifer in snake form. Now, Lucifer's spending her days offering apples to another previously pure being whose corruption she was responsible for.
		- Loremaster says that Lucy tries to kill her twice a week. This is why Lucy ate all the apple pie in the last level of *Examtaker*. She wasn't hungry, but rather taking away Loremaster's only means of controlling Subject 67 in hopes that he would try to kill her like he promised.
		- In the Bible Beezelbub is one of the names of Satan, and is specifically used by the pharisees on more than one occasion when debating morality with Jesus. In the Helltaker continuity Beezelbub is her own separate entity different from the mainstream Lucifer. The brilliant subtext here is that Beezelbub probably became one of the names for Satan in the classical tradition because she claimed herself to be the ruler of hell, and in the eyes of many demons they started calling her Satan in a co-equal fashion to Lucifer herself. Eventually this came down the grapevine until by the time of Jesus even humans were aware that Beezelbub was an accepted alternative name for Satan, not truly knowing they were different people. Lucifer not wanting a danger to her rule and reputation to exist banished Beezelbub to the void, but by then her name was recorded in the Bible and the damage was partially done already.
		- The girls (and the order in which Helltaker meets them) do loosely correspond to the *Divine Comedy*.
			* The first circle is Limbo and houses those not bad enough to get into the other circles. Pandemonica, the first girl, is too tired to really do anything evil (until she gets her coffee).
			* The second circle is for the Lustful, matching Modeus's title of the Lustful Demon.
			* The third circle is for the Gluttonous, and Cerberus lives there.
			* I'm unsure how Malina and the 4th circle (greed) connect, but the fifth circle is for Wrath, and the fifth girl is Zdraza the Bitch Demon.
			* The Sixth Circle punishes Heresy. Your sixth girl is an angel, Azazel, who is committing heresy herself by living with and "researching" demons.
			* The Seventh Circle is the home of the Violent- and while Justice isn't that violent, she would have had to be in the past as the High prosecutor.
			* The Eighth Circle covers Fraud, which includes Lucifer's styling of herself as a Corrupt Corporate Executive and playing The Corrupter to Azazel.
			* The 9th circle is for Traitors. The Final Boss, Judgement, is a Fallen Angel, and thus a "traitor" to Heaven, and because Lucifer can't control her despite being Queen of Hell, she's also a traitor to Hell.
	+ Friendly Fandoms:
		- With the fandom of *Doki Doki Literature Club!* since this and *Helltaker* are free-to-play games featuring a harem of cute Animesque girls. It's easy to come across a crossover fanart of these two.
		- Also, *DOOM*, mostly because of the crossover of extra manly men entering Hell to slay demons, for differing definitions of the word "slay."
		- *Hazbin Hotel* and *Helluva Boss*, being series about loveable demons in Hell, have a not insignificant amount of fandom overlap with *Helltaker*.
		- *Shin Megami Tensei* fans have a good-natured relationship with the Helltaker fandom because of the humorously similar plot of collecting demons.
	+ Genius Bonus:
		- In the Apocryphal Book of Enoch, Azazel is one of the fallen angels who married humans, fitting for the only angel in the game who joined the Helltaker's harem. However, given the implications from both the game and Vanripper that Azazel is only interested in the Demons, this interpretation still fits, as the fallen Watchers were described as "sons of God" who fell for "daughters of Man."
			* Taken further in Examtaker, which sees her taking over Hell and running it like a laboratory for her research, which ties in with the Apocryphal interpretation of Azazel as someone who provided pre-deluge man with forbidden sciences against God's will.
		- Minor, but Beelzebub's animation with the tissue actually resembles how flies◊ clean themselves; wiping their hands, then their head.
		- The Abyssal Prisoner's "This is the best day of my life" reaction to being offered pancakes fits with some interpretations of the demon in Christian theology, which equates Beelzebub with the sin of gluttony.
		- The lapel pin Lucifer wears with her business outfit is the Sigil of Lucifer. It's not just an accessory, it's also a name tag.
		- In the *Examtaker* DLC, the loading screen is branded with a certain sigil associated with Azazel, providing a hint as to the Loremaster's true identity.
	+ Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
		- A considerable Japanese fanbase developed rather quickly, likely due to all the Cute Monster Girls. Lucifer even gets her own Nendoroid!
		- This game also became massively popular in South Korea as well, and there are already several fan dubbings (including one done by professional Korean voice actors, featuring the Korean voice actress of Rey) and even fan animations and fan parodies (including political cartoons) created by Korean artists.
	+ Hilarious in Hindsight: This fan theory about Azazel became increasingly funny in the run-up to the Examtaker DLC.
	+ It's Short, So It Sucks!: One of the few complaints people have about the game is that it's very short, able to be completed in its entirety in a single sitting. The game can be completed in twenty minutes if you know what you're doing, and it's possible to get all of the achievements in under an hour. The game being free helps mitigate this somewhat, but it's still very short.
	+ Memetic Mutation:
		- A Party Parrot parody quickly surfaced from the dancing demon sprites.
		- Helltaker's uncanny resemblance to Kazuma Kiryu from the *Like a Dragon* series led to several crossover jokes of how "This is what would happen to Kiryu if he learned what sex is." Though, considering the implications in the game, it's possible it's just plain old Kiryu.
		- Cerberus quickly got mixed up with a bunch of dog/wolf memes like Awoo, Gyate Gyate, and the Cone of Shame.
		- GLORIOUS SUCCESSExplanation
		- Jokes about Helltaker changing his plans and becoming a Heaventaker instead (by assembling a harem of angels instead) in Azazel's ending got bandied around by some fans.
	+ Moe:
		- The Japanese side of the fandom quickly brought out Lucifer's moe-like points — according to the Party Parrot parody, Lucy's real moe is the combination of her long-suffering ("crybaby") CEO status with her cute newlywed housewife (plus *apron*) appeal in the ending.
		- Cerberus, a trio of adorable Little Bit Beastly demon girls with the personality of a rambunctious puppy.
		- Modeus, the nymphomaniac who's somewhat naive views of romance come from reading erotic literature. I guess you can call her, Moe-deus.
	+ Nightmare Fuel:
		- While the art-style is cutesy and most actions happen through text, the various descriptions of the "bad endings" can be terrifying if thought about. So many gruesome descriptions of death and mutilation happening to Helltaker, whether it's neck-snapping, sledgehammer knee-capping, blood-bursting throat-slashing and more.
		- The implications laid during the events of *Examtaker* are pretty disturbing. From Azazel becoming the Mad Scientist Loremaster who *conquered Hell* and lost her arms in the process, to the implied sheer number of gruesome demon-human hybrids if Subject 667's name is any indication.
	+ Recurring Fanon Character: Amazingly enough for a character who was never intended to be part of the story in the first place, Generic the Template Demon, who as her name suggests was the baseline design that every other demon girl's appearance was developed using, got an impressively high amount of popularity once the concept bible page featuring her was released, mainly since her design is rather unique among the girls *because* she's so basic. Plenty of fanart has been made about her, usually going the route of being The Generic Girl as befitting her name.
	+ Retroactive Recognition: After Mittsies got a massive Colbert Bump from having their music used for this game, a plethora of gamers looked back on their music catalogue and found themselves experiencing memories of 2012 and beyond, involving a decent number of... NSFW fan-games for *My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic* that Mittsies themself made to go with said music.
	+ That One Level:
		- Level IX has become notorious for its difficulty for players. Despite having no enemies or spikes, you must follow an exact pattern of steps so as to not run out of them and having to start all over again or, more likely, get hopelessly stuck and have to start all over again.
		- The part after that, however, is flat out Nintendo Hard. With the other levels, you can at least cheat and look up the solution to the puzzle, but this level is a straight-up boss fight requiring fast reflexes and a *lot* of patience.
		- Pretty much the entirety of *Examtaker* is seen as much more challenging than the base game, with level 5 and the Final Boss being exceptionally frustrating.