Oh I don’t have anything particularly interesting to add. It’s just that in Inferno he put a lot of people in hell who were real people he had beef with. That’s just petty.

Not just making himself the main character, chosen by God, to find his lost love in Heaven, but also to be like “oh and for sure all these people I don’t like totally end up in hell, too.”

He even compares himself to the poet Virgil by having Virgil lead him through hell. It’s definitely a power fantasy and the biggest “pick me” of all time with God being the being Dante wants to “pick him.”

The historic context that makes Inferno so damn funny is that Dante wrote most of it while in exile from Florence and had a massive axe to grind with the people responsible for it. Glossing over the boring parts you can find on his wikipedia page, his family, and by extension Dante were supporters of a political party within the papal states (early 1300s) and they got ousted from their positions. While traveling around Italy, he penned “The Divine Comedy”, a story about himself bumming around the christian afterlife with the Roman poet Virgil.

Overly Sarcastic Productions has a good overview of the basic plot Link, and Im quite a fan of their work (this is one of their older videos). The part that this meme is calling attention to is that Dante wrote several recently deceased popes and many of his political rivals into his self-insert fan-fiction of hell (Inferno). In modern parlance, he was being a massive troll, but that work is also so influential that many practicing christans can’t tell the difference between their afterlife according to their own scripture (which there is very little actual description of) and its pop-culture interpritation by our Italian mad lad condeming people who screwed him over in life to enternal torment in his own renaissance live-journal.