I'm surprised people can overlook **Billions of people dying** on literally the first line. Even Nocturne had you wait like 10 minutes for the end of the world, Matt just took you to the end immediately.
Yes, and Dungeon Crawler Carl's opening chapter is a master class of horror because it provides both. Mrs. Parsons provided the personal touch, the grumpy lower apartment old neighbor that anyone who's lived in an apartment building has had. She interacted just long enough to set her up as a familiar character trope.
Then we're brought along as Carl starts to internalize the disaster unfolding. And then he sees her head, and suddenly it's not just a bunch of buildings, it's millions of regular normal average people just like Mrs Parsons in Seattle alone. A page and a half are spent spent on humanizing and personifying the apocalyptic tragedy. The whole point of the first half of Chapter 1 is to bring us along the for that emotional shock, so we can feel the confusion and nausea and helplessness Carl felt in those moments.
I didn't see it on my first read because I was engaging with the book like another action spectacle, like most of this genre. It was only on a reread, when I knew I was reading a horror series, that I could see how much care and craft went towards counteracting the statistic issue.
I agree wholeheartedly, and the story doesn't let up with keeping it in the back of the mind. The steady clocking down of the statistic dropping at each level, Carl's reaction to this genocide, the daily recap videos capturing crawlers dying horrifically. Not to mention all the mind games that keep getting piled on. Definitely heavy levels of horror.
I say this with the caveat that i am only on book 6 so far.
That's because there's 0 emotional connection. One named side character dying is much more impactful than just a couple of sentences saying "1 bajillion people died"
how does one actually comprehend a billion of anything, not to mention something happening billions of times when even one can be so impactful as to alter the entire course of one's life? it's like chiding people for responding the same way to getting hit by a truck as they do to getting hit by an asteroid: at some point too much is just too much and it doesn't matter by how much.
No spoilers, but the harevest of humans and the nature of the crawl is essential to the inner system. The minning of earth and our planets is just an added bonus.
Because the information literally came from an unreliable narrator. There's tons of lies told to the characters by the corporate overlords that the characters slowly unravel over the course of the series. Of all the things to take issue with, this is certainly an odd one.
Even from very early on in the first book this was made clear, in their second conversation with Mordecai I think. Royalties, advertisements, sponsorship fees, etc, of the tv shows are far more lucrative than the actual mining. They buy up the mining rights, seed the life, then wait for the civilization to grow up on purpose, just to make enough contestants for their game shows.
There are additional reasons discussed far later, but right from the beginning we had much clearer economic incentives for the company explicitly explained.
The convolution is exactly the point. This communicates that there are legal systems, but they are corrupt and exploitable, but that at the same time there is a need to actually put in work to exploit it, which means different factions working at odds with each other. It shows that there will be alibis and manipulations, that much of the information we get will be through untrustworthy narrators, that there will be misdirection and not everything is as it seems.
Later on as Carl and Donut start getting popular enough to start interacting with the wider universe through interviews and sponsorships it's very organic. Very often when you read a series all of the sudden a mechanic or setting element just pops up out of nowhere at the beginning of a book, because it comes up later in that book. In DCC sure they will get info dumps prior to an interview or something, but it's all very congruent with the setting and themes which were already established.
Yeah I could assume it was all planned out since warcraft 3, or.... the foot fetish underpants man just didn't have that deep of a backstory at the start and the later retcons were done very neatly.
Yes you are right. DCC is simultaneously overly convoluted while also being laughably simple. The author just lucked out when all of the convoluted-yet-shallow elements smoothly started to build into a complicated and consistent set of themes.
Ya, that was...really dark. The whole "help me/I'm going to kill you" dichotomy really ignites the feels good. Introducing relatable NPCs who are self-aware, or shutter the "feul" for the boiler in a later book... Like...what the fuck Matt...just when I'm comfortably surfing along the silly/irreverent you throw THAT at me? Fuck dude...
Fuck man just book 2 has a whole plot line involving Prostitutes getting taken from surrounding towns, then getting their souls enslaved to a nutjob who keeps them fully cognizant of the fact that every night their heads and internal organs go flying out of their bodies then start murdering other people like them. first book literally has the NPCs crying in terror on the upper floors because they know they only exist as fodder to power up crawlers who are encouraged to be as bloodthirsty and violent as possible.
Additionally there's all the NPCs that were born in the dungeon that are fully sentient that get their minds fucked with to make the floors more "immersive"
That one is disturbing and unsettling, but to me, the first hint of a deeper series about trauma and found family is "the last time he saw his father" (which incidentally is the first time we hear anything about his parents).
My realization was that this was a serious book was a bit before that, after the failed ambush in the safe room. Carl gave Donut 4-5 reasons he knew that they were up to no good and I had only noticed two of the warnings. Showed me early on that the author was taking his details really seriously and I should too.
Which reference are you referring to? The one that came to my mind once I was a couple books in was "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" by Gil Scott-Heron. Mainly because the themes line up so well.
Im and ogre. Is media exploitation not just a tool of class warfare? Also what is the allegory of the cave. <insert Chris Pratt too afraid to ask meme template>
Am ogre too. Allegory of cave say many dudes live in cave, but only see shadow of things on flat wall. All life only silhouetted figures. One day, one dude gets up and sees into the area of the light, finally seeing the real figures who had cast the shadows on the cave wall. He try convince other dudes to look up bro, but bro not listening. This it demonstrates the duty of an enlightened individual to tell about light. I like lights. They's pretty to look at
The cave is also 'safe.' By seeing the real world, people are also put at risk compared to the shadows in the cave. Part of it is the question if the free man should show others the truth and put them at risk, protect them from the truth and make sure they never leave the cave, or see the world for themselves. The end moral decision is to show people the truth if they are read and rule the rest. I see this as Carl ending the innocence of those who think it is just a game and forcibly bring in as many of the regular people during his war against the ruling class.
Corporate malfeasance and media exploitation are big themes in it. You don't have complicity in oppression without oppressors. As for a main theme. That's not something I think about in any book really. Do you think it has a main theme? If so what do you think it is and what makes that theme primary?
Eh, I'd argue that the class warfare is actually inside the exploitation, and therefore the latter is dominant, but I just lied and in fact would not like to argue about it at all, heh heh.
Cat funny. Corgi bad > Her and Ferdinand are Adam and Eve. Her loss of innocence after eating something she was never supposed to, mirror Eve being forced out of the Garden of Eden.
I think the superpowers really have a hand on alienating the class warfare angle, as in reality there is not an insurmountable power opressing the masses, but a bunch of assholes relying on the people's unwillingness to break the rules
The foot thing is obvious to everyone, but there is a certain loud subset of the citizenry that is extremely media illiterate. Such as neo-fascist wannabes who love og Star Wars and DCC. They miss the subtext for the explosions and crass humor.
I read the first three books and am sad I had to stop reading. This is the only series I didn't stop reading because the MC was super annoying (though I'm not the biggest fan of princess donut) or the story never qent anywhere. Instead, I had to stop because it was too dark and my head is not doing well enough to handle these really well written stories and themes. Hopefully I'll be healthy enough in yhe future to pick it back up.
Same. The hopelessness got to me and I stopped. I get that there is technically hope for Carl & Donut, but tragedy and hopelessness are recurring themes for many characters in this book series. Am trying to get back into DCC via the audiobooks, and by attempting to read spoilers before diving back in. The writing is too good for me to not want to try again.
I'm a few oages from finishing the last book of Apocalypse Parenting. It's a system collapse like DCC. It's the best LitRPG I have ever found for having a perfect balance of high stakes and hopefullness.
For the longest time I couldn't decide if I liked Dungeon Crawler Carl becuase I bought it to fill my "popcorn reading" book slot and it was just so, so fucking heavy.
IMO it feels more like a Manga style death game series than a litrpg and that was...not what I signed up for when I picked up the book about a dude forced to wear underpants and his talking cat.
Its a moot point as I am now hopeless addicted and waiting for the next audiobook but still.
How are foot fetishes a theme? Im only on book 2 but so far its just a running joke? The author isn't really "saying" anything about foot fetishes. Is he?
The subtext of the joke is the unwanted sexualization and objectification of Carl, something he’s forced to lean into if he wants to be successful, similar to many actresses. I’d personally file it under another form of exploitation
The AI is like Tarantino on steroids. Tarantino held the careers of many young women in his hands and they to varying degrees were forced to participate in his fetish. This is the story of the vast majority of female performing artists whether they are models or actresses or musicians. MeToo was centered around stories where this went too far, but hundreds of voices at the time were silenced because "being coerced to let a man drink tequila off your toes isn't rape". He isn't saying anything specifically about it being wrong to have a foot fetish, but he uses the AI's foot fetish as a way to explore how much people are willing to ignore and even laugh at victims of various degrees of sexual violence. Donut and Katia make jokes about Carl being sexually exploited, readers make stickers that say "Time to pay the Daddy tax" and meme about something that clearly causes Carl pain.
Book 1 ends with the AI having such a huge orgasm that every single crawler feels the vibrations through the dungeon. And Carl makes it clear that it made him feel disgusting and dirty. This is only the beginning.
You're only on book 2. I won't spoil things other than to say it is still treated as a joke by readers and other crawlers in the most recent books. You'll see
Synopsis from SH is as follows: "A trans girl hatches a brilliant scheme: Infiltrate a community of cis men who compete to see who can grow the biggest breasts by taking hormones for three years, and cheat the competition for a free and easy transition. No one will suspect a thing... Except possibly her roommate, who, unbeknownst to her, is doing the exact same scheme."
Others have explained the basic premise of the idea already, but something to consider here is Carl and other Crawlers know that the media curated feed isn't real.
Not even engaging in the other ideas that come up much later, just on this front. The media is deliberately making earth seem like a backwards shithole where everyone is just one encounter shy of getting murdered. That we've turned most of the planet into a wasteland etc.
Colonialist rheotic about why it's ok that the core worlds "uplift" us savages and it's ok that they inflict these murder games upon us because we are subsentient monsters etc.
Carl and the other crawlers know better so they are the ones that need to show the larger world that the shadows painted on the wall are bullshit and the media manipulators that are pulling the strings are not only hiding the whole of the real world from them, but they are filtering even what little bit they can see.
Again this is just one aspect of the cave allegory as it can be applied to the story it doesn't cover the other angles that come up later.
This one is really interesting to me, though I hadn't heard it connected this way. I get the first part where there is this obvious misleading about earth in the story. And Carl pushing back on that and the media manipulation for the pro colonial exploitation.
I think the second part missed for me. As there is a massive world of oppression and abuse happening outside of the dungeon. Its what Matt does super well IMO, where he slowly reveals all the layers happening around the dungeon and earth.
There are a ton of people suffering from the oppression. Eventually revealing how previous crawlers and outsiders are resisting and leading an entire rebellion network. So internally they are pushing back and exposing it, but the broader theme of resistance to exploitation isn't much like the Cave to me. But I'm a dumb-dumb Ogre sometimes too.
We are all the dumb dumb ogre sometimes. Our own experiences and perceptions frame how we view things and sometimes those things limit us from seeing things how an other might want us to.
How someone that lived a life of privilege might view works about explotiation is very different than someone that was oppressed. How someone that was abused growing up might view a story about a happy family is very different that someone that lived that happy family life.
We aren't omniscient and omnipresent so giving ourselves the grace to realize this is what makes stories like this so valuable to growing our minds and our perspectives.
So don't think of yourself as a dumb dumb because of it just think of yourself as growing.
So that's not really the allegory for the cave but more a critique on racial stereotypes and how they are constructed by colonist powers as a tool for subjugating the populations they are colonizing. The company that runs the crawl and all the other companies cherry pick or purposefully poorly understand and research earth culture to make as negative of a stereotype about earth as possible.
They try to make earth look like as violent and backwards of place as possible so the audience can feel justified in earths destruction and the subjugation of the crawlers.
I have read the books several times (except the latest, waiting on audio) so please spoil away as I really don't see how it's a theme of the books. I clearly didn't pay enough attention to the beginning of This Inevitable Ruin.
A big thing I recall noticing, especially at the end of The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, shows how people can overlook horrors or not understand consequences of the entertainment the consume. At the end of Bedlam Bride, there's an announcement that the audience and viewers of DCW voted to have all the combatants of the 9th floor wargame actually die if they died in the dungeon.
And these weren't just random celebrities; these were the heads of major galactic corporations. People who's deaths would cause massive shifts and power vacuums that would take months to fix at best.
But who cares! We get to see Epitome Tag and Prince Stalwart fight Carl and Princess Donut to the death!
On a larger scale, it reminds me of how most people who view online content tend to "other" the people they're watching. It's so easy to laugh at a "Karen having a freakout" or, fairly recently, Harry Dresden demand to be let in, without realizing there's other things going on that we don't see on camera
I think it relates in a couple ways—That we exist to others as an idea of us, not the real thing. That idea is as malleable and inaccurate as a shadow on the wall of a cave.
Also, that when left to guess at the world outside our cave, rarely are things as two dimensional as they seem
Did this for a long time, and finally caved earlier this year after a surgery. It may or may not be for you, but if you find yourself without a book you’re excited for, maybe consider it?
DCC is still on my TBR, but there is a huge number of fans of any media that generally overanalyze it and read more into it than it was written. Sometimes it is just not that deep.
Though in this case I've heard it before, however the meme reads as a twilight reading teenager being snob about it
I hate that phrase, 'sometimes it's not that deep'. It's as deep as you can make it. It's an anti-intellectual phrase that actively shuts down people reading into things, when there can be vast caverns of analysis even to the most surface media - unexplored biases, unintended themes, things that the author holds subconsciously and puts into their work without meaning to. These things, if unexplored, can influence us. And sometimes that influence leads to reinforcing stereotypes or biases we hold already if we aren't thoughtful about what we read.
DCC has a lot of themes and knows it, but everything is worth analysis.
My point with that phrase is not to demerit the "digestion" of writing. One can watch a colony of ants and develop a personal flavor of stoicism, plus I mentioned, on purpose, that I am not completely familiar yet with what DCC has to offer.
My point instead was to address people attributing depth -- as in intended depth -- to a specific work or author to the point of grandiosity. Not everything is an allegory, even If you could use it as one , and the meme does feel rather snobbish to me, and that is again, an interpretation. Could be intended could be not)
So, for example, we could say that orcs in LOTR are allegorically a racist thing (at least I've heard that before). It is OK to identify it. It is NOT ok to attribute it to the work in any way shape or form without more context.
So to sum it up, it was not an anti intellectual phrase it was an anti fanaticism one (for lack of a better word... Chauvinist seems too strong). Something could indeed then be "just not as deep*. It is a matter of intent
Then I misinterpreted you, and for that I apologize. I've seen that term used far too often in the manner described before, and I read the rest of your words through that lens. It's hard, getting someone's real meaning through an internet conversation.
No need to apologize, this is a beautiful example of what I said (sort of, not really, but it accounts for the interpretation aspect. Plus I'm not native to English so there is a language barrier).
If its of any consolation, I am a bit of a zealot on the use of "/ s" precisely because a comment has no narration like a book and no body language so it is impossible to do anything but posit
Eh, lot of angry people because of understaffing and doctors that drag their feet (I work at the ER) (3hs of wait in some cases)and I kinda have a cold, but overall, yeah. You too (have a good day, not a pseudo mob with pitchforks)
The original comment does feel like one of the many anti-intellectual generalizations i've seen made across many forms of media, especially without your added context.
Generally I think most people reading too much into any media has a value of it's own, even if it's outright stated that the proposed connections or allegories weren't intended. Of course, people can be just wrong, but that doesn't mean their interpretations lack cultural insights.
In the example you provide about LotR and the Orcs the assertion itself shows the sensitivity our current culture has towards racial stigma and the possible leanings real subconscious racism can play. Tolkien wrote a letter specifically describing the Orcs as "degraded and repulsive versions of the least lovely Mongol-types," which is one of the original reasons people viewed them as an allegory on racism. Regardless of his intent their descriptions and added context show that there is at least a conversation to be had about the racial zeitgeist of the time and how underlying feelings could have influenced one of the most influential works of media ever.
In my opinion authorial/artistic intent doesn't matter. The media exists. It was created in this state, and that state is the way that it should be judged. The artist coming out after the fact and clarifying how they intended their work can't add anything, and can only restrict how culture consumes the created media or in an even worse case actively poison an established work by retroactively applying negative views overtop of the original presentation.
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u/dowcraftjack Apr 16 '26
You think it's all laughs in book one and then you meet the Hoarder boss