I, like everyone, have spent the past year obsessed with the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I started reading the Lit RPG in May after classes were over, and have almost finished the eighth and last published book. To recap over 5 thousand pages of narrative, the series follows Carl, his anthropomorphized cat, Donut, and lots of other characters as they compete in a Hunger Games-style alien TV show. But, as I read the books and began to see interactions with the characters and themes online, I began to become extremely frustrated with the popularization of DDC.
However, my gripes come not with the series or with Matt Dinniman, the author of the novels. Instead, I have noticed a disconnect between what the books say and how people represent the novels online and in real life. As I see more and more discussion around the books and commercialization of the series, I cannot help but think…
Did anyone actually read the books?
The In-Book Marketization
In the books, our star main characters, Carl and Donut, compete not just for their lives, but also to gain the most views and fans. The books contain many brushes with death, or death for those around them, where their pain automatically equals more views. The viewers watching the show create intense and obsessive fan groups around the characters and create merch and online discussions of the characters’ most heartbreaking moments. The System running their game also forces Carl and Donut to submit to this capitalistic fan-culture, forcing them to acknowledge and wear their own fan’s merch.
The Disconnect
If you look up “Dungeon Crawler Carl” on Instagram, a wide variety of results will show up. Book reviews and author interviews, but more significantly, there are a lot of creators interacting with the book in the way that replicates how the in-book fans interact with the Crawl. Fans emphasizing certain intense, funny or terrifying moments in a way that parallels Dinniman’s satire on the exploitation of entertainment. Now, I am not putting down fan culture in any way, I think that interaction with literature is important in any form, but the irony between the fans is undeniable.
My question is, why is fan culture around DDC focused on the in-crawl intense moments and not the deeper themes regarding corporate entertainment and systemic exploitation? I see the majority of fan-made discourse around DDC to contain a deep disconnect between the purposeful themes of the story, and the quotable, more face-level aspects of the story. However, not every creator contains this face-level analysis, as some do discuss the wider themes and implications.
Merch
As is typical for a franchise as big as DDC, the verified merch collection is immense, spanning from stickers of the characters, to coffee mugs, to phone cases. However, for those that have read the books, searching up the merch seems dystopian.
Why?
Because not all of the merch, but a large amount of it, replicates exactly the merch that the viewers of the game in the story wear. Donut specifically has her own fan club of millions of aliens that wear the same merch that is advertised on the official merch site. The in-book characters are frustrated, exploited and ridiculed by the “fans” of their death match reality TV. So, my question is: why do people wear the merch that represents exploitation in the series they claim to love so much?
The TLDR
Essentially, I am not claiming that people shouldn’t interact with the series as fans. DDC is immensely popular for a reason and, at the end of the day, it exists as fiction to be engaged with. I, however, want fans of the series to take a second and consider how they are interacting with the books. Buy merch and make social media posts all day, but contemplate the deeper themes of the books and if that aligns with what is being said about them online.