One minute Coast Guard meathead Carl is rescuing his absentee ex-girlfriend’s prize Persian cat from a tree in the middle of the night. The next, every building on earth is smashed flat and at the behest of an alien voice, Carl and Donut(the cat) are forced to flee into the creature-filled underground dungeon that suddenly appears. Cue sentient talking pets, silly magic weapons, boss fights, NPCs, anti-capitalist critique, and plenty of other LitRPG shenanigans.
At my big age I think I’ve finally learned that I don’t have to love everything I respect. While many of my generation are grieving the ideological failures that are current events and the world is moving steadily past my individual politics, there are a lot of things that are socially good that I just don’t vibe with, personally.
So while Carl’s story has a surprising amount of depth and provides a lot of needed emotional affirmation for people who are discovering that they must express their dissatisfaction with the status quo despite their apparent privilege and comfort…
…I, perhaps have been Black and grown and countercultural for a little too long to fully appreciate this. Fellow readers, you might feel similarly.
It’s fun, easy reading, packed with scatological millennial humor and nerd lore. Carl is one of those ultra-regular PNW dudes who probably shovels his neighbor’s sidewalks for them, and that heart is apparent and enjoyable throughout. This is a story about learning to do good wrapped in fart jokes and level-ups.
But the ultra-white, side-of-right lens this story is told through lends itself to some well-intentioned othering that doesn’t make sense to us over here in the multicultural literary bazaar. The first boss fight turned my stomach–I almost closed the book when I realized what was happening. Immigrants, the elderly, the disabled, working-class POCs–all cannon fodder, albeit often the well-portrayed badass type. Even the cat is every edgelord girlfriend joke with fur, albeit subverted via XP and Carl’s emotional arc.
This isn’t a bad book, generally speaking. I just genuinely forgot that there are folks in my ideological neighborhood who think and talk like this.
There’s a lot of things I personally dislike about the book. But I also can’t piss on someone else’s parade because it takes a different route than mine.
By this I don’t mean that any of the things that made me–and will probably make you–uncomfortable are okay. They’re not, at all. I mean that everyone has to start somewhere, and I’ve been reliably informed that Carl grows past this in later books, or at least that these books are a launch pad for a certain demographic of people to either Do Better or remember to keep doing what they already are. A lot of people are finding a mix of ideological inspiration and silly cathartic humor in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series that is perfect for them. Most of those people have the same social goals in mind that I do, ultimately, and even though we’d probably get on each others nerves and clearly do not read the same books or have the same sensitivities or see the same people are the default in our every day lives–not everything is for me. This is for the folks it’s for, It’s fun and inspiring and emotionally resonant and character developing for those people, primarily. I don’t have to try to be a part of everything that does some ultimate good in the world, and I don’t have to read everything that says it does, either.
In other words, Carl is a goofy white boy, but they need love and protest lit, too. Carry on!
A French pedicure and bottomless cat treats to Dungeon Crawler Carl.
(Fellow readers! Listen, if you like these books, I totally get it. Were I reviewing this for a different publication, I may have taken a gentler, more mainstream approach. But this right here is Equal Opportunity Reader and you can’t do what this writer did with immigrant, Black and mentally ill characters in this book and not have me say something about it. Yes, he writes about them sympathetically and the people who do them dirty are the villains–but they’re also all victims or muscle, and in these parts we’re #ownnormal, not cannon fodder or story foils. Speaking of, for a booklist of #ownnormal fantasy stories, check out the Equal Opportunity Bookshop and be aware that if you buy one, we get paid a commission that helps keeps the blog alive and not in an underground bunker. Now, go read something good! Peace!)
Equal Opportunity Reader 