User:Sff9/Name Origins and Influences

Since some seem eager to remove interesting pieces of info, I'll keep them here for myself just in case. Story speculation isn't interesting, well backed-up influence speculation is.

Impel Down

 * Various influences of "Hell" are present within its walls:
 * Impel Down seems to be heavily based on how Hell is described in Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. Both are level-based, "inescapable" prisons with unique forms of punishment per level, and the lower one traverses, the worse the punishments become.
 * Level 4: Blazing Hell is a typical representation of Hell in cultural and fictional references, with intense flames and heat burning the "sinners" (or in this case, prisoners), while a demonic figure (in this case, the Demon Guard Minozebra) pushing sinners into the flames. Magellan's residence on this level could refer to this depiction of hell being where the devil resides. This resembles, in Dante's tale, the level where violent people are punished: a lake of boiling blood, where the damned are drowning.
 * Lever 5: Freezing Hell is another thing that is based on Divine Comedy. Infact, this level is the one where the damned are fraudulent. With the only difference that the Dante's damned are totally frozen into a lake of ice.
 * A few of the levels of Impel Down also seem to resemble Buddhist concepts of hell such as the Crimson Hell which seems based on the "Hell of the Sword Tree and Knife Hill" which similarly tortures its victims by forcing them to run upon or impaling them upon trees and hills covered with knives and swords. Also the Four Demon Guards seem to resemble the demon guards Horse Face and Ox Head.
 * Luffy's journey through Impel Down to rescue Ace might also be a reference to the Transformation text on Mahamaudgalyayana rescuing his mother from the underworld in which a filial enlightened monk named Mulian goes through the levels of Buddhist hell to rescue his mother and in the process breaks open the gates of hell and releases everyone else trapped in hell.
 * The Gaol may be based on the famous French penal colony, Devil's Island (Île du Diable), because of its notoriously harsh treatment of prisoners, the sharing of the initials ID, and the Devil theme of the warden and several other prison workers.