Ep 757 - Dungeon Crawler Carl, by Matt Dinniman

Summary

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Overdue Ep 757 – Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

Released: June 29, 2026 | Hosts: Andrew & Craig (Headgum)

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Episode Overview

In this episode of Overdue, Andrew and Craig both read and discuss the breakout litRPG novel Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman—a book recently recognized with the “Odie” award for “Book Andrew Would Most Likely Hate.” Prompted by persistent nudges from their Patreon community and the book’s recent surge in popularity, the hosts wade into Dinniman’s wild, irreverent, and cuss-filled sci-fi/fantasy tale, unpacking its litRPG conventions, cultural references, moral undertones, and meme-heavy tone. Their review weaves between the novel’s genre roots, its streaming/attention economy satire, and the hit-or-miss nature of its “cringe” humor.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Background on the Book & Author (03:18–15:30)

• Dungeon Crawler Carl was self-published by Dinniman in 2020 and acquired by Penguin Random House (Ace Books) in 2024 as litRPG exploded on BookTok.
• The book is now up to 8 entries in a planned 10-book series, with lengths ballooning from 384 to 880 pages in later volumes. Dinniman started on Royal Road, a hub for web-serial litRPG, and launched a Patreon when COVID hit.
• Dinniman’s writing method is fully “pantsing”: "I am what is called a pantser. I make it up as I go. ... I find joy in writing my way out of situations and making it look like it was the plan all along." (09:43, Author FAQ)
• The book’s “achievement” voice exemplifies the tone: sarcastic, irreverent, and full of meta/self-deprecating asides (see full FAQ quote at 11:14). The writing style is polarizing, with Andrew especially noting early “elder millennial cringe.”

2. LitRPG & Publishing Context (16:13–24:55)

• Dungeon Crawler Carl comes from "Literary RPG" (litRPG)—stories where game mechanics, stats, and interfaces are visible and meaningful to characters.
• Royal Road, Dinniman’s initial platform, draws deeply from Korean and Russian web novels about immersion in virtual/MMO worlds—the protagonist is aware of stats, skills, and achievements, a la Ready Player One or D&D actual plays.
• Andrew: “It’s the reading equivalent of watching someone play a game on Twitch or YouTube.” (24:27)
• The hosts compare this meta-structure to actual play podcasts and the popularity of seeing both story and ‘mechanics’ unfold together.

3. Premise & Early Impressions (35:33–39:22)

• Premise (per Dinniman): "Aliens come and destroy the world... The survivors, including a man Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat Princess Donut, enter an intergalactic reality game show dungeon. Donut becomes a fan favorite."
• The plot sets up a Hunger Games-esque death game, but through a lens of video game stat crunching, meme achievements, and a deeply online sensibility.
• Initial host reactions: Overwhelmed by “a fire hose” of achievements and loot box gags—“the most relatable thing about Dungeon Crawler Carl is the way he picks up and hoards everything in his inventory” (57:17).

Notable Quote

"My flippant, glib, uncharitable summary of what this book is: the Ready Player One Hunger Games by the worst version of Andy Weir."
— Andrew (36:20)

4. LitRPG Mechanics: Achievements, Satire, and Parody (44:22–51:13)

• Heavy focus on game mechanics—loot, stat increases, and endless pop-up achievements—can be both a parody of gamer culture and a narrative drag.
  • Andrew: “When Matt Dinniman is like, I'm gonna write one that's funny, it's always like, what compound funny early-2000s Internet swear can I come up with?” (44:49)
  • Some running gags (like the AI’s foot fetish) work for the hosts, most do not.
• Mechanical saturation sometimes resembles getting 40 notifications at once in a modern bloated game (47:01).

5. Characters, Moral Core, and Emotional Stakes (51:13–72:01)

• Carl is an “author insert;” his backstory is thin, though the book’s emotional weight comes from his unwillingness to kill other humans and his constant awareness of humanity’s dwindling numbers.
• Princess Donut, by contrast, is a breakout character—imagine “Garfield with spells”—balancing comic relief, fandom thirst, and surprising pathos.
• The hosts appreciate moments where the book recognizes the cost and horror of the premise:

  “That he can feel for those people and...keep that in his head, I think is way more interesting for him as a character than the fact that his dad was mean to him or whatever.” (71:51, Andrew)

• There’s a throughline of empathy, with Carl opting not to kill other crawlers and reflecting seriously on the kills he must make—distinguishing him from more “edgy” gamer-protagonists.

6. Social Commentary: Streaming/Attention Economy (63:09–70:13)

• Dinniman’s twist on the Hunger Games reality show trope is specifically tuned to the digital age: stats, followers, and audience numbers are omnipresent.
• “Every couple of chapters opens with like, the number of viewers and the followers of Carl and Donut. Especially with Donut, you get her paying attention to the number of followers she has and tracking in real time.” (63:45, Andrew)
• The book is best viewed as a satire/comment on influencer culture/Twitch/YouTube dynamics instead of political allegory.
• Donut’s “need to maintain brand” gets reflected in how she thinks about changing class or race—tied tightly to follower expectations (64:24).

7. Plot Structure & Episodic Progress (79:04–114:50)

• The narrative has a highly episodic, web-serial rhythm. There is no single “big boss” climax or clean arc for Book 1; instead, there’s a sequence of scrapes, cartoonish boss fights, and mechanic-exploiting “cheese.”
• Encounters range from “the juicer,” a roided-out weightlifter lizard, to ball-of-pigs monsters and gerbil minibosses; solutions are often “acquire widget, immediately use widget to defeat boss.”
  • Andrew: “Any given boss fight is fun to read in the moment... but then when you try to pick them apart, it’s just, Carl takes an item he got or invented a chapter ago and uses it on the boss.” (99:00)
• Late plot threads (training a dinosaur pet, foreshadowing being able to choose race/class for Book 2) are set up but not resolved, making the ending unsatisfying to the hosts.
  • “The book ends because it has to end, not because the story is demanding that it ends.” (117:54, Andrew)

8. Adaptations, Audiobook, and Appeal (29:09–31:33; 120:56–121:17)

• Dungeon Crawler Carl has been optioned for a Seth MacFarlane-produced Peacock series (live action, with hopes to not “look like garbage”).
• The audiobook (Jeff Hayes) is praised for bringing the cast to life—Hayes voices Carl with shades of “likable Duke Nukem a la Patrick Warburton” and puts playful spin on dialogue.
• Many fans experience the series primarily as audiobook, where its zany tone and characterization arguably fit better.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Early Tone Check:
  “Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk is her name. ... I highlighted this and I wrote a note. And the note that I wrote to myself is, ‘God, here we go.’” (36:13, Andrew)
• On Achievement Overload:
  “When you play a Smash Brothers game for the first time...here are 16 notifications. Most of them you don't understand yet.” (47:18, Andrew)
• On LitRPG as Twitch Entertainment:
  “It is the equivalent. It is the reading equivalent of watching someone play a game on Twitch or YouTube.” (24:27, Andrew/quoting Caustic article)
• On the Book's Emotional Core:
  "That he can feel for those people...is way more interesting for him as a character than the fact his dad was mean to him or whatever." (71:51)
• On the Ending/Cadence:
  “The book ends because it has to end, not because the story is demanding that it ends. ... This whole series is a ten-hour movie.” (117:54/118:03, Andrew)
• On Series Appeal:
  “I would read a Wikipedia summary of the rest of this...I just think the thought of reading 5,000 more pages of Dungeon Crawler Carl...does not appeal to me at all.” (120:22, Andrew)

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Timeline of Key Segments

• 01:46 – Disclaimer: Spoilers and Content Warnings
• 03:18–15:30 – Author & Publication History; Dinniman’s Background
• 16:13–24:55 – LitRPG Genre and the Royal Road/Wattpad Context
• 35:33–39:22 – Book Premise and Early Impressions
• 44:22–51:13 – Satirizing Gaming/Attention Economy; Achievement Overload
• 63:09–70:13 – Media Satire: Influence, Followers, and Streaming
• 79:04–114:50 – Plot Summary: Episodic Encounters, Boss Fights, and Endgame
• 120:56–121:17 – Audiobook & Series Appeal

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Final Thoughts

• The hosts found Dungeon Crawler Carl more enjoyable than expected once past “the hardest part”—the opening deluge of gamer-speak and meme achievements.
• The book’s strengths are less in its plot or “Andy Weir on uppers” narration, and more in its engagement with streaming culture, the Princess Donut character, and a surprising emotional core that surfaces through Carl’s empathy.
• The series’ phenomenon is likely buoyed by its dazzling audiobook, relentless reader engagement (Patreon, Discord, etc.), and its reflection of a very online audience’s sensibilities.
• Neither Andrew nor Craig are eager to read further volumes, but they “totally get” the fandom—especially for listening rather than reading.

Andrew:

“Just because I had a better time than I was expecting ... does not mean I think this is a great book.” (120:09)

Craig:

“If this were a game, I might be interested to watch someone I liked stream it ... I don’t want to do it firsthand.” (121:24)

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For Next Episode

Next up: Forrest Gump by Winston Groom – “What better way to talk about America’s future than to examine the one man who is there at every important event in its [boomer] history?” (125:02)

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Feedback, spicy corrections, or “Dungeon Crawler Carl” fan rants?
Email: [e-mail]
Socials: @overduepod
Patreon & Discord: patreon.com/overduepod
Full schedule & archives: overduepodcast.com

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Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Yeah, I was gonna say the only thing I'm catching with my Mint Mobile service is all the bits and bytes from the Internet that I. That I am asking for with my good connectivity.

[A]

Because you have switched to Mint Mobile, you use them.

[B]

Yes, I switch. I switched in Mint Mobile many years ago before they were ever an advertiser on the show. I am a happy customer and I. That's. That's what, that's what I have to say.

[A]

To get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, go to mintmobile.com overdue. That's mintmobile.com overdue. Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com overdo. That's. There's no catch. I say $45 upfront payment required, equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on first three month plan only speeds slower above 40 gig on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details.

[B]

METV is America's number one classic TV entertainment network airing over 60 of the greatest TV series every week. Now METV presents the Golden Girls of Summer, showcasing the best of the Golden Girls. Watch Dorothy, Blanche, Rose and Sophia weekn on MeTV at 10pm 9 Central. Log on to metv.com now to find out where to watch MeTV. Free, over the air and on cable, satellite and select streaming services, METV is memorable Entertainment Television. This is a headgum podcast.

[A]

While Andrew and Craig believe the joy of discovery is crucial to enjoying any well told tale, they will not shy

[B]

away from spoiling specific story beats when necessary.

[A]

Plus, these are books you should have read by now. There's hay everywhere.

[B]

Sorry. There's enough cussing in the book. Is it. Are we gonna cuss? Are we just gonna try not to until it becomes unavoidable and then we'll make the decision then or.

[A]

That's a good question.

[B]

I mean, his catchphrase is a cuss.

[A]

Yeah, I think that's fine. Maybe we'll just mention it up top.

[B]

We may. We may cuss.

[A]

There's cussing in this book. It may require us to cuss.

[B]

Dungeon Crusher Carl.

[A]

Well, that you shouldn't have said that before we started recording.

[B]

I mean, we started recording. We're recording right now.

[A]

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Overdue. It's a podcast about the books you've been meaning to read. My name is Craig.

[B]

My name is Andrew. Buttheads.

[A]

Welcome, jerkwads, glurp. Glerp to the podcast. The world is over and the only thing left is this intergalactic podcast.

[B]

The only thing that's left is tude. All that's left is the tude. And the Internet speak of the early

[A]

2000s, and I saw in the footsteps that there was only two remaining. This is our book podcast where each week one of us reads a book and tells the other person about it. But because this week's book, Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Deniman, won a very special Overdue podcast Odie award for book Andrew would most likely hate, we decided both of us would read the book just to see.

[B]

Yes. I felt like I could not split the party for Dungeon Crawler Carl. So that's. And so that's why we're both here.

[A]

We're both. Well, we're always both here. But Andrew and I both read the book.

[B]

But you let. You went into the dungeon with me on this one and I appreciate it.

[A]

I did. I would always crawl through a dungeon with you, Andrew. Cool.

[B]

I'll remember that.

[A]

You have don't ask.

[B]

Don't ask any follow up questions.

[A]

Yeah. You haven't asked me to do it in real life. You've only asked me to do it pretend and I've always said yes. But if you told me in real life you need me to crawl through a dungeon, I'd probably still say yes, but I might ask questions.

[B]

I mean, we've already had. We, we disagree on where the line between real and pretend exists sometimes.

[A]

Oh, it's interesting. Isn't that interesting? That is interesting. Huh? I don't know if we would have read this book if it weren't for our Patreon community kind of nudging us. Though I do think it has been a bit of a sensation. We might have gotten there anyway.

[B]

No, it's like it is coming now to us because of the Patreon pushing. But like it's, it's being adapted, isn't it? Like it's, it's, it's.

[A]

I had. Yeah, it is.

[B]

It's. It's a thing. And I think we would have hit it because it's like two books from the, from the end now. Like, he has published eight of a planned 10.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I feel like I feel comfortable saying we would have gotten around to this eventually. Just assuming that the podcast will continue stretching into forever as it has done for the last like 14.

[A]

Well, and it's also a book, so. So Dungeon Crawler Carl, published by Matt Deniman Self publishing, started in 2020. We'll talk about that. It starts getting physical publications by Penguin Random House and their Ace Books imprint in 2024, which is then when I think it also starts taking off on TikTok. So like the books have been around for a while, but they are a sensation more recently than that.

[B]

Yes. Right. So we only read the first book, which is Dungeon Crawler Carl.

[A]

Correct.

[B]

There are eight. Number two is Carl's Doomsday Scenario. Number three is the Dungeon Anarchists Cookbook. Number four, the Gate of the Pharaoh Gods, published in 2025. Number five, the Butcher's Masquerade, also published 2025. These are the second publication from Ace Books when these came out. The Eye of the Bedlam Bride. This Inevitable ruin, which I think is this Old house,

[A]

I think, I think.

[B]

Do you like it better if it's a this Old House joke?

[A]

I do like it better if it is.

[B]

And then a Parade of horribles, which I assume is a reference to Hillary Clinton's 2016.

[A]

Wow, what a gaff.

[B]

What a political Gaff was published this year in May of 2026.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

This is a. This book was 464 pages long and it's Ace Books edition. The shortest of the books is the next one, which is 384 pages. The longest of them is number seven at 880 pages. Yeah, it's usually when a book, when the length of an entry in a book series inflates toward the end of the run, you can be like, well, they, they don't. There's no editor doing this any. They become successful. They don't have an editor anymore. But in, in a book series, it's always been sort of self published.

[A]

Like, well that's interesting.

[B]

Is it just. Is it just that, Is it just that Mr. Dinnerman had too much to say and nobody to say no, no to him? And so this is what we've, what we've landed at. Like, what happened?

[A]

I can't remember. I read a couple of different interviews with him. One in the Seattle Times, one in Variety, one in Anime Herald, one in.

[B]

I'm sorry, Anime Herald.

[A]

Excuse me, Anime Herald and Grim Dark magazine.

[B]

I'm Anime Geraldo over there.

[A]

And I'm Anime Herald. And the no Good Very Bad Day. He said so Like Penguin Random House doesn't pick it up until, you know, going into 2024.

[B]

That's so random House.

[A]

He did say in one of those 15 interviews that I read that they did a light edit pass on the orig, the books that had already been self published by that point, but that he retains all of the rights to like digital publication and just generally to the books. But he is in the Penguin Random House like editing machine now. So there is like, there are people looking at his books and as he says it, removing lots of commas or whatever.

[B]

Yeah, but I mean you can remove a lot of commas and not really cut the page to countdown.

[A]

Yes. I think there was one interview where he said he had one more book to go. But due to them being like, hey, these get are getting very long. It will be split into the 9th and 10th book.

[B]

It feels like it could be because they're getting long and also for the same reason that they, that they decided to be like, yeah, this is season five and season 5.5 of a successful Stranger Things. Yes.

[A]

Yes. So, yeah, it's interesting how successful it has become when he decided he would take a series of like chapters that he'd written and published on the Internet and start selling them for money online because of COVID And he was like. And that. Not because he thought that was going to fight the virus, but because he needed money.

[B]

I've got some, I've got some stuff from his authored. Authored fac. Faq. Do we have house pronunciation for faq?

[A]

I think it's fact. Because game fact. I would usually say a fact.

[B]

Like, I don't.

[A]

I'm not here to, to be like, I'm going to go to FAQ Schwartz and like figure out, you know, what the author did.

[B]

This is what he says of his writing process. Quote, I do zero plotting. I am what is called a pantser. I make it up as I go. I keep a very careful track of everything behind me, including all the Chekhov guns I have loaded all over the place. But I usually don't have a firm grasp on how they're going to go off again. I do have vague notions, but I usually end up changing it up at the last minute. I find joy in writing my way out of situations and making it look like it was the plan all along. And then this is. We're going to talk a bit about the genre of book. This is.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Not that we. Not that we haven't touched on this genre before because I think Ready player one is kind of playing in the sandbox a little bit.

[A]

Not the same, though.

[B]

It's not the same because it's not as good of a book.

[A]

Wait, in which direction?

[B]

Ready? Player one is a worse book than this.

[A]

Okay. By quite. Get on the record. Yeah.

[B]

A quote from Mr. Dinnamon. I have a very, very large Excel spreadsheet with a whole lot of pages and numbers and stats and a list of character names, and if anything happened to it, I would literally just kill everybody and give up. And in case you're wondering if Matthew Deniman has an off switch, when you expand all the little subheadings on the FAQ page on his author website, you get an achievement. What new achievement? Mark David Chapman, which I believe is the man who killed John Lennon.

[A]

Wow. The achievement says.

[B]

Okay, slow your roll there, buddy boy. We get it. You like the author. You think he's sexy and cool and funny. You've read every question about him on this page. You've seen everything he's ever posted on every social media he's got. You've watched every interview he's ever been in. You might even be sporting a cute little crush. I'm going to need you to dial it back a notch before you find yourself sending him butthole pics at 3am and trying to find out his favorite brand of toilet paper. Reward. We don't reward this sort of behavior. Just a little. A little taste of. Of the writing style that we're going to be encountering here. I've got. I've got my issues. Issues with it, with this. With the achievement voice, specifically, which I don't think. I don't think is. I don't think is a voice that the entire book operates in, but it does enjoy going back to the space.

[A]

Matt Dinnemann was born in the 1970s and he moved around.

[B]

That's what Wikipedia says. As a kid, some AI link that I saw when I was Googling was like, I don't know, 1990s research on the Internet has become a.

[A]

It's become awful. Yeah, he moved around a lot as a kid. Army brat, or at least armed forces brat. He went to high school in Arizona. I don't remember if it's the army. I don't want him to speak about his father's military.

[B]

He was in the Chair Force, maybe.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

Sorry. My dad was in the Air Force.

[A]

I know, I know, I know.

[B]

He gets here.

[A]

Dinnerman attended University of Arizona in Prescott College. He took some creative writing courses at Pima Community College in Tucson. He moved to the Pacific Northwest and lied about Knowing what to do in Adobe Photoshop so that he could get a job as an obituary editor for a local newspaper in Yakima, Washington.

[B]

I feel like it was a thing we all did in the early. The early aughts. Right. Is like, yeah, I got. I got. I've opened Word before. I've got Word experience.

[A]

I honestly think there was. I remember when you got a job that involved like it involved.

[B]

It involved web design.

[A]

And you had done our website.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

On Squarespace.

[B]

No, it wasn't on Squarespace. On bloggers. On blogger.com.

[A]

oh yeah. Were using the Blogger website.

[B]

I was using the Blogger website and I got into like our custom style sheets myself. So like, it's not that I was good at it, but I had.

[A]

You had done it.

[B]

I had seen the matrix of the code that makes the Internet work.

[A]

You knew what a. A ref was.

[B]

I don't. I do. I know what all the refs are. I don't always a. Never the herf. You know what I mean? But no, I don't think Square Cities is a sponsor on this episode. So I can still mention Blogger, which is an active thing. And our old video game website with all of its broken image links is still up somewhere. But I'm not going to.

[A]

We're never going to speak its name. Nope.

[B]

Nope.

[A]

He became a cat. He became a cat artist. He was. He did learn how to use Photoshop. Why you need to know how to use Photoshop to be an obituary editor, I don't know. But he. Fill in the blank. And he learned how to make cat art. He was doing cat art. And then he became. He fell into the world of going to cat shows and creating art of the cats at the cat shows.

[B]

This feels like a direct to DVD sequel to Best in Show that we never that Nobody ever.

[A]

Yes, yes.

[B]

It's got like Eugene Levy in it still, but nobody else.

[A]

He had, you know, he had written a novel when he was still even in high school or maybe even younger that ultimately became his first novel, the Shivered Sky.

[B]

Yeah, he's got his other books that I've got here. There are three in the Shivered sky series which were Originally published in 2003 and then republished in 2020. Yeah, there are two in a sort of late 2010s series called Dominion of Blades, with another on the way, allegedly. And then a few one offs, including a 2026 novel called Operation Bounce House.

[A]

And that is one that I have seen him doing sort of doing press for while everybody's asking him about Dungeon Crawler. Carl.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Like, he's like, hey, I also wrote this new book, but at least he

[B]

published a Dungeon Crawler Carl book in the last calendar year.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

It is not. It's not a George R.R. martin thing where he's like, no, I'm still not doing that book because I wrote something called Operation Bounce House.

[A]

Yeah. And so, you know, lockdown comes a call in, he needs some work. He had been publishing some chapters of Dungeon what would become Dungeon Crawler Carl on a service called Royal Road.

[B]

I got some stuff about Royal Road when you're ready.

[A]

Yeah. Serial publication. And instead I think I read that he was planning to just straight published the novels there. But then with lockdown and some business considerations, he launched his own Patreon instead, which is still active. He will share chapters there in advance. He said in one interview that in the. In the sixth book, apparently they go to the surface of the planet, which is a bit of a change. And he asked his Patreon supporters, like, what country of Earth they should go to and ultimately decided it would be Cuba. So we had to learn a lot about Cuba. But yes, tell me a bit about Royal Road and what that means. I feel like we have ever encountered something like Wattpad.

[B]

Well, we've. We've encountered Wattpad. I think most people have some level of familiarity with AO3. Like the big fan fiction repository Royal Road is not one I had heard of before, but it has a very specific history that. That explains why this story, like, arose from it. So this is according to some person on Reddit who seems to consider themselves, like, a keeper of the lore. This is the, okay, the Royal Rogue community is that kind of forum community where, like, it's like trying to understand Homestuck. Like, you could never possibly understand the layers of beefs that all of these people who have been publishing here for 15 years have with each other. You could never understand it, but according to some person on Reddit, on the Royal Road, Reddit, this site, its history begins in 2007 with a Korean novel called the Legendary Moonlight Sculptor, which is a story set within an MMORPG called Royal Road. So the. The reference. The. The name of the website is a reference to the fake MMO in this Korean novel from 2007.

[A]

Okay. Okay.

[B]

And this book apparently involves a lowly protagonist who unexpectedly manages to fight his way to the top of a game world quote. And this is quoting the Reddit person quote through nothing but effort and stubborn willpower. Ring a bell? Yes. You've read this protagonist approximately 400 times. Since then. And I'll let you tell me a little bit more about lit RPG. But in 2013-2014 a like fan translators start working to translate this Korean book into English and they start posting it to a forum called Royal Road Legends which is [e-mail] in the L is

[A]

for Lessons

[B]

from their translators. People who are working on the translation of this start writing fan fiction that's sort of set in this world. And then from there they start branching out into a fic that is not based in this world. But is is taking a similar approach to storytelling with like RPG like stats and systems like like organizing the stories around that kind of stuff. And the site's focus gradually shifts from the translation of that of that book to original work. Moves to its current domain sometime between 2015 and 2017. And since then is it's become a, you know, it's a repository for this kind of story. Including Dungeon crawler Carl Craig. Tell me what, tell me more about the lit RPG genre.

[A]

Okay, so the litRP, the litRPG literary role playing game. It's not a game. There's no role playing. No, it is. I read a Writer's Digest article written by Matt Deniman, that is what is litrpg and how do you write one where he says many call it a genre, though it's not technically genre. He says that there are quote game like elements such as player stats are an essential part of the story. Characters are also aware of these elements. I don't remember if this is in the Writer's Digest article or another one that I read and publishes weekly. The term seems to have been coined specifically in 2013 by a Russian publisher called Exmo. And they had been working on some similar novels that were like downstream of things. Like I guess the Korean novel that you just mentioned. There's some anime in the 2000s called Hack is one of the ones that I remember.

[B]

Oh sure, yeah.

[A]

Where. And I guess you could go all the way back to the wonderful TV show reboot, though I don't think that that had as many stats in it, I suppose.

[B]

No, I mean I just go to drag Dragon Ball on the power level stuff I guess. But like it's. It's in there, it's in the milieu somewhere in there.

[A]

But this is so specifically kind of downstream of video games and. Yeah. Or. Or even at the very least tabletop games because there's an article in Publishers Weekly where this guy Connor Kostic of a UK imprint talks about it being kind of a mix of like, you have this, like, Tolkien influence on D and D. You have these literary novels that people like that are like fantasy novels. What if you could mash up the number crunching elements and game elements that people like from DND and all the things that come from it with the storytelling that people like from fantasy novels or novels.

[B]

This is something that, that I mentioned when I was, when we were like, talking about, you know, what, what is the. What is the reason why dungeon Crawler Carl has taken off? Like, what is. What is. What is behind the essential popularity of this? And I, I, I think some of, I think the popularity of any actual play, like DND stuff, which I think this is definitely like playing in a similar space.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Is you like, when it, when it is well done, you, the like, reader or viewer or listener or whatever, get to enjoy the story that the people are creating on like, a narrative level. And then you also get to step up one level to the like, mechanical game level and enjoy the like, you know, what, what stats do you get? Like, how creatively are you using the, the spells that you have? Like, what, what, what. What dice roll have you, have you gotten? And how is that affecting, like, what happens with the story?

[A]

Yep.

[B]

So, yeah, I think that is definitely a part of, of the Dungeon crawler Carl thing is just like, there is enough sort of gamey stuff here and it's all, it's all very contrived, you know, Very contrived. It can't, it can't be as contrived when you're doing actual play stuff because I think you have to like the, the name actual play. Like, people play Lucy Goosey with the, the rules of D and D. Like, I don't think anybody follows any of the rules for like, having rent and a landlord and stuff. Yeah, like, most people ignore like, spell components and that kind of stuff. Like, there is a people strip it down a little bit. But you do have to adhere to the rules that are written in the book a little bit in a way that like, constrains you a bit. And obviously Dinnerman is writing, writing an actual play thing based on a player's handbook for a book that exists, like, for a game that exists only in his mind. So it's like a little bit easier for him, but, but it's still a thing where like, okay, yes, Carl is in this dungeon and he's crawling through it it. And then also this thing where like, Carl is. Has like an inventory they can click through and he has stats and he can, and he can like, Read tool tips and like, how does that. How. When he is removed from like interacting with people and interacting with the game system like that. That's a different like speed of.

[A]

Of book. Yeah, it is. It's very strange. I just.

[B]

It's very strange. It is very strange.

[A]

We'll talk about it. Relative to the book itself, Caustic says it's like it. It is the equivalent. It is the reading equivalent of watching someone play a game on Twitch or YouTube. I think you're totally right, Andrew. Like, if you enjoy that part of watching someone, like get the next thing in a game or figure out how to use something effectively in their. In their playing of the game, I think I. You've listened to Adventure Zone, right?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, not. Not it. Not in years, but like not in years. First. The first couple arcs of it.

[A]

But yeah, I've listened to some friends at the table. I probably watch more streaming stuff than you do.

[B]

I've watched a little bit of that. The Amazon cartoon that's based on.

[A]

Is it Critical Role maybe or.

[B]

Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

[A]

I haven't watched much Critical Role. I generally just watch people stream games.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And like, I get the appeal of the kind of like the meta thing that happens when you are like, there's a story of someone advancing through a game that is like, what is the. The. The streamer experiencing? Right. That is like potentially entertaining. Along with the story that they're going through this we'll talk more about like, how this book is just such a weird blend or I guess the genre is just such a weird blend of those thinks because it's also not really commenting on it. I guess maybe it is. I don't know.

[B]

I. I think. I think it is commenting on some stuff. I actually have a lot of thoughts about. About what it is trying to comment on.

[A]

Dinnerman says that he in the late 90s, played a lot of Runescape and felt this is a Seattle Times article. He felt very limited by the NPC interactions in those late 90s. You know, you're looking at Early Everquest and Azeron's call. You're even looking like World of Warcraft launches in 2004. I think Ultima Online, I remember like having a PC that could play some games in the early 2000s and I got to play some Fallout. It's not an mmo, but like I was shopping in the PC section of a game store and being like, huh, These are games where like, everyone's doing something that's kind of neat. What is that? What Would that be like. I've never really played one of those ever in a real way. But yeah, so he's kind of deep in that. He's thinking about that. And so he writes these books. They go very well. He makes a bunch of money. They sell a lot. I found a whole. I found an article that was just an interviewer trying to talk to him and not succeeding and instead talking to all these other people in the Pacific Northwest who have, like, weird little bespoke marketing deals with him or, like, it's fine if you sell Dungeon Crawler Carl inspired tea. I'll make sure nobody sues you kind of stuff. And yes, it has been adapted or it has been optioned successfully for a liveaction television show Produced by Seth McFarland and. And his gang.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

That was announced a little while ago. And then more recently, they did do a formal Peacock announcement. It will be on Peacock.

[B]

I think, like, some people like that. That, like, fake Star Trek show that. That he did.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

Or whatever it's called. The Orbits. I think that's.

[A]

Dinnerman is. Is optimistic about it. He did, in one interview, say, like, I get that people might want it to be animated. I obviously wouldn't want it to be. I think live action would be more successful just because more people will watch it. And I don't want it to look like garbage.

[B]

He's.

[A]

He cites stuff like the movie Ted as, like, they can probably pull off Princess Donut in it, like, looking. Okay, I am not here to. To. To vouch for the script of Ted.

[B]

I mean, but he does know that, like, Seth McFarlane wasn't doing the. Like he did. He's not sitting at a computer doing

[A]

the animation, but it's his production company, at least, like, he oversaw who. Who animated the bear that he voiced, I suppose.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

So I don't know.

[B]

Maybe he's thinking, like, you know, when I think about Princess Donut, I think about. I think about Brian the dog from Family Guy.

[A]

Yeah, maybe. This book was nominated for the 2026 Arthur C. Clarke Award. It may or may not win $2026 in a few weeks from the time of this scene, this episode.

[B]

I feel like I gotta adjust that thing for inflation.

[A]

They really need to. I did read an interview in USA Today with Jeff Hayes, who is the audiobook narrator for the incredibly successful dungeon crawler Carl Audiobook.

[B]

How much of the audiobook did you listen to? Because I didn't.

[A]

Like, an hour. I didn't get as much as it as I had hoped. I get It. He's good and he's doing all the voices. And I was listening it to it, thinking it was more than one person.

[B]

The Mel Blanc of a little bit lit rpg.

[A]

Yeah. And he. What. What. What I didn't want to conflate it with is they have gone on to start producing what they call immersive auditory tunneling or something. Something that's, like, referenced from the book. Because they say in the book, like, all the streams or the TV shows are like their tunnels or they're tunneling.

[B]

Right.

[A]

I guess so. Jeff Hayes runs a production company called Sound Booth Theater. He is now producing, like, full cast immersive audio versions of the Dungeon Crawler books.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

Okay. Where he is still doing Carl and Donut, I think, but then they're hiring other people. I listened to the original. He's very talented. There's a little bit of production on the, like, AI Achievement voice. That happens a little bit. And he is also, I guess, doing, like, his arrangement is like, royalties only, which is kind of not common because he's like, it's an independent author. He's an independent, you know, audiobook guy. He also says that he. When he thinks of characters, he thinks of.

[B]

Who is the. Clarify your pronoun right now? Which. Who are you thinking about?

[A]

I'm thinking about Jeff Hayes.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Jeff Hayes. Sorry.

[B]

Because Dinnerman has said now when he's writing Dungeon Crawl, he thinks about Jeff Hayes. He hears Jeff Hayes voice in his. In his head. So, yeah, I wanted to make sure who we were talking about.

[A]

I was just gonna say that. That Jeff Hayes says that when he is thinking of the different characters, he thinks of actors who would be good at the role. And that does not do an impression, but just kind of like a half impression. He's not trying to capture them perfectly. And that Carl did start as a Patrick Warburton riff.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Which upon hearing it, my note is, what if you liked Duke Nukem?

[B]

I mean, I. I think, you know, if you're trying to do a Duke Nukem who you liked, I think Patrick Warburton would be up there. I've always been a Patrick Warburton fan.

[A]

Big fan. Big fan.

[B]

From his. From his work in the movie Space Chimps and. And elsewhere.

[A]

I can't believe you saw Space Chimps in a movie theater.

[B]

In the theater, yeah. I mean, you got to support the art that you want to see.

[A]

That's true. You do. You do.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I'm sure we could keep talking in setup, but we got to get into this book. Andrew so let's take a quick break.

[B]

Dungeon.

[A]

And we will descend into dungeon crawler Carl.

[B]

Craig. I know you like to keep your rights private, but I know there are other things that you want to make public and there's no way to take something public like making a great website with Squarespace. That's right. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Craig, you heard of these guys?

[A]

I have, but I'm not quite sure the best way to make myself public. Is that what I just. I want.

[B]

It's the best way to. It's best way to take. You take your ideas public to just kind of present your. The things you're thinking about to the public.

[A]

So you're talking about taking my ideas out on the information superhighway?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

I don't know how to drive an Internet car. Can Squarespace help?

[B]

Squarespace is the. They give you the car and a driver and a road and a destination and a starting point. Squarespace gives it all to you.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

They're the website that helps you make websites. Here's some things that we like about Squarespace. Yeah, they have cutting edge design cred.

[A]

Ow. Ouch.

[B]

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[A]

Log on to metv.com now to find

[B]

out where to watch MeTV. Free over the air and on cable, satellite and select streaming services. MeTV is memorable entertainment television.

[A]

Foreign, I guess. Are we gonna have to cuss in this episode?

[B]

I'm gonna try really hard not to, but it depends on the quotes that we read because there is a lot of cussing. Including the main character's catchphrase is a cuss.

[A]

Yeah, it's not a bad cuss.

[B]

It depends on whether you think it's a blasphemy or not. But yes, it's.

[A]

It's not a gratuitous cuss is what I would say.

[B]

Okay, so to table set.

[A]

Okay, sure.

[B]

I did not dis. I did not dislike this book.

[A]

I don't think I disliked this book. I. I think I enjoy the beginning of this book.

[B]

I. I didn't really enjoy the beginning of it is the worst part, the roughest part, because it is like reading a transcript of a YouTube video of somebody playing the tutorial of a video game.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I also think that, like, my. My flippant, glib, uncharitable summary of what this book is. The. Ready player one. Hunger Games By.

[A]

Written by.

[B]

Written by Andy. Weird.

[A]

By the worst version of Andy.

[B]

By the worst version of Andy.

[A]

Or maybe not the worst, but the, like the.

[B]

The version of Andy Weir who is the most up his own butt about. Yeah, just like. Like the cool man who. Who is so excited to be doing awesome sauce things. The beginning of this book is filled with a lot of, like, I don't know, elder millennial cringe stuff. And I like my. The first. Okay, could. Could you read me, Craig, do you have. Do you have to hand the full Christian name of Princess Donut the cat?

[A]

I don't have it to hand.

[B]

Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chunk is her name.

[A]

Huh.

[B]

This appears for the first time on page two of the book.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

I had. I highlighted this and I wrote a note. And the note that I wrote to myself is, God, here we go. Because I truly did expect the entire book to be this.

[A]

And when it is not, it is not.

[B]

Listen, when the in game AI that's like reading the achievements or whatever is talking to you. That is when it is the most in this mode. And you get the most of it at the beginning of the book.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so when the. When the book is. Is being like, oh, I' ma fireball your ass and you're supposed. And. And you're supposed to think it's funny. I was. I just. That's when I was having the most trouble.

[A]

Yeah. When the book is like, you don't get a reward, bitch. And you're like, I hate this. I really don't like it. And I know that Carl doesn't like it either, but that doesn't make me like it more. No, that's.

[B]

I mean, that's. That's the. That's Matt Deniman saying retweets aren't endorsements. Like, you don't.

[A]

You don't get to.

[B]

You don't get to hold a thing that you wrote at remove. At a remove because your character doesn't

[A]

like it the other.

[B]

Because you're. You're the one who keeps pushing in our faces.

[A]

You know, I was trying to think of.

[B]

I think we also just need to describe the. The, like, basics so people know what we're talking about.

[A]

Okay, let me give you. Let me give you. I actually have one from Dinnerman. I will just read it.

[B]

Okay, great.

[A]

This was for Grim Dark magazine. Someone was like, can you just like, what is your book? He says aliens come and destroy the world, killing most of the population in a single instance. Amongst the survivors are a man, Carl, and his ex girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut. The aliens have turned the planet into the set of the galaxy's highest rated reality game show, Dungeon Crawler World. Carl and Donut enter the dungeon, become contestants on the show, and are forced to fight for their lives while a galaxy of viewers watch their progress. Donut the cat, one, quickly learns the magic missile spell, and two, becomes a fan favorite. That is. That is the premise of the book.

[B]

I think just by putting magic missile in there, I think you're opening yourself up to all kinds of legal action from Wizards of the Coast. But I don't know. Yeah, I don't know that that's happened. I don't know.

[A]

And the thing that's not encompassed in that summary which Andrew mentioned before the break, is that this is a lit RPG convention. Some of them, as Dinnamon says in interviews, are like more of or less. But there is a lot of. Once they go into the dungeon, there's a whole, like, I guess it's a chip in his brain or something that he. He has a mag. He has a magical inventory.

[B]

There's. There's a lot of. There's a lot of video game stuff in here.

[A]

Like, there's a lot of video game stuff.

[B]

So this. The stats can be Video game or tabletop. But like the, the stuff about like even, even uses clicking as the herb that you use to interact with this, this interface.

[A]

It's like I think the closest there's a mini map.

[B]

Yeah. The closest analog is like what if you just had like a sort of a permanent VR or ar, like game inventory that you could bring up and click on with your eyes and stuff.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

There's a lot of that in there. And then with that comes all of this achievement unlocked language where you can,

[A]

can you explain what an achievement is to anybody who's listening who does not play video games?

[B]

For anybody who has not played a video game since like 2008.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

An achievement is you, you did this thing in a video. You did this. Sometimes, sometimes an achievement in a video game is just like you played the video game on its own terms and you like beat a boss or you, you beat the game. Like you get achievements and sometimes it's like you went out of your way to do a specific kind of thing.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Like you, you defeated like 500 of this, of this specific kind of enemy. Or like you did, you did something that maybe you would only do if you knew that doing it would get you an achievement.

[A]

I will add.

[B]

And the, and the, and, and what you get for that is a little like a little noise and a little notification. And then on your profile, usually on whatever service it is, whether it's Steam or Xbox or PlayStation people, other people, if you've set your visibility settings to allow them, they can see what you have done in the game and they can be impressed by what you have accomplished.

[A]

Yes. I want to note that the rise of achievements comes with these. A video game is no longer a physical thing. You plug into a machine and you play it in your house. It is, it is maybe a disc, but it is always something that the Internet knows you've played.

[B]

Yes. You're playing it on a, on like a service Internet connected console of something. And like, and there's a, there's a service, I think it's called Retro Achievements.

[A]

Yeah. That adds it to old games.

[B]

When you're playing a game, an old game and an emulator. Yeah. You sign into the service and it adds it to old classic stuff. Which is kind of cool. Yeah.

[A]

And the thing that is interesting to think about in this context to me is that those are always, they're not, they're, they're created by the developer of the game. Whether or not, you know, that's like a second team who's like kind of coming up with them or whatever. But they are surfaced on the like platform level of what you're playing. They're not, some of them happen inside of a game. Not always. I think MMOs like wow. Like World of Warcraft and lots of other games like that have now kind of rolled that whole type of achievement system. Fortnite has like daily quests and things. Like it's sort of akin to that at this point.

[B]

Well I think, I think Nintendo is the main holdout of the.

[A]

They don't do it gaming platform controllers.

[B]

Like they, you can, you can have a game on a Nintendo system that will give you achievements for stuff but there is no like centralized tracking system. Like it's all, it's all being done

[A]

like Xbox used to give you points, achieve points attached you got gamer points.

[B]

I think that's literally what they were.

[A]

Gamer score.

[B]

You got your gamer score that you put in your gamer profile.

[A]

And that's why people would play the original Avatar game on from like the James Cameron avatar game. Whole website achievement farm for people who

[B]

are trying to get the most points on their profile. Like here's the junkie license game that you can buy where there are 10 achievements that are all worth like 100 points.

[A]

Had a thousand points or something.

[B]

Maximum of a thousand points. Yes.

[A]

Man, What a time. 20 years ago.

[B]

We sound enthusiastic about this.

[A]

I, I, because it's fun, because it's

[B]

fun to remember it but like I don't like the what it's wrought.

[A]

You know what it does in. And we will probably jump all over this book because we both read it. That's, that's typical I think when we both read a book because it's like let me talk about this thing. Let me talk about this thing. The thing for me that didn't work about the achievements particularly early is just like yeah, there's a really weird cheeky voice to them. An irreverent cheeky voice.

[B]

When Matt Dinnemann is like I'm gonna write one that's funny. It's always like what, what? Like compound. What funny. Early 2000s Internet compound swear. Can I come up with with that? They're really going to laugh at.

[A]

And also like Carl keeps getting like rewards and stat buffs and inventory related to his feet.

[B]

That actually is the one that I thought was funny.

[A]

Okay, fine.

[B]

That's, that's, that's the, that's the one that I actually think has some, some legs kind of work. Well I mean not legs cuz feet are at the bottom of legs but

[A]

like that's actually a gag. It's a running gag.

[B]

That's a gag. That is. That is not just like, yeah, I'm gonna put the word at the end of something. Or like, yeah, it's. It. Yes, yes.

[A]

But I. I think that that one

[B]

is like, the AI has decided to

[A]

be into my feet, which Carl's uncomfortable.

[B]

Yeah, that, I think that. That I think is funny. I don't. And I can't always draw the line between why I think something in these books is, like, gratuitous and cringy and why I think it's funny. But, like, there is stuff that I think is funny occasionally.

[A]

Overall, what I was struggling with with the loot boxes and achievements in, particularly in the first, you know, 10%, it's

[B]

just like such a fire hose of them.

[A]

It's a fire hose. And, like, games don't do that. Like, that is. I. I think that was a thing I was struggling with early in the book is that when I am playing a game or even when I am watching someone play a game, there's a lot more other stuff happening than the, like, flavor text in achievements. And there's a reason why when designers want to have some fun with, like, kind of funny achievement writing or, like, you might get an achievement for something that is actually kind of you bad. And, like, that's kind of silly. Right. You can put jokes in a game. That way they pop up and you're surprised by them, or they're actually wrapped up in what you were trying to accomplish in the game that day. And the way that you are inundated with them in this game. Just did not. Was. I wouldn't enjoy that in a game I was playing in the same way either.

[B]

I will. And I. I think you will appreciate this. I will. There is one exception to the games don't do this rule, and it is when you play a Smash Brothers game for the first time.

[A]

Well, that's true. And you just unlock a bajillion.

[B]

Here are 16 notifications. Most of them you don't understand yet.

[A]

That's fine. Yeah, I understand.

[B]

But I do, like, I don't think. I don't think that is fun. Here's another one is when I did. When I had a job that involved a lot of benchmarking of, like, graphics cards. Sure. I would install the video game Shadow of the Tomb Race creator. And I had, like. It was some game that I like. We. We had the. There's a special team account that they give you when you're, like, a member

[A]

of the press when you're oppressed and you can just install whatever.

[B]

Yeah. They give you free reign in the entire Steam store. And so whenever I would install Shadow of the Tomb Raider it would give me like all the downloadable content and like all the little costumes and stuff. And so I would install it on a new computer and then the first time I would launch it it would be like, hey, I'm going to tell you about each one of the 38 outfits that you have gotten for Lara Croft that you could, that you could play this game with. And it's a little bit like that, like that, that, that was. I, I don't know if I have a point. Just that that that's the bad version.

[A]

Yeah. The early part of this book feels like I can't turn off the pop

[B]

ups or it feels like I. This game is three years old and it's had a lot of downloadable content and if you were playing it, if you're playing it at the time, you would have gotten them one at a time and it wouldn't have been a bit big deal. But to get them all at once is too much.

[A]

Yeah, that's fair. But it does start to space that out. We'll talk about the plot and the characters, I promise. But like the, the part of the LitRPG stuff that was not working for me early was this like as Andrew said, fire hose of achievement and loot box stuff. When Carl is getting all these items and then I think just overall I still don't know what to do with the. I'm reading a book in which like people are like leveling up their constitution and like that matters to them. When I. What I like about role playing games and tabletop in particular I suppose is the way those systems are meant to represent character traits and reality as opposed to being character traits in reality. Like what I like when I'm playing D and D is it's not oh, the character knows he has a 12 in strength and like so maybe can lift a thing but maybe can't. It's the like, oh, I get to play somebody who is like a little strong but is like a third string quarterback. Right. And like, oh, we can try to lift the boulder and like he and I can come. I can think about the type of person who might have those stats. Right. And, and then I, Craig can also play the game where I'm number crunching. It was kind. I just had a little. I got mostly over it by the end of the book. Book. Because the book also seems less concerned about it by the end of the book. But the number crunching of stats and what that meant for these characters was just a hurdle I had to get over as I'm used to all of those stats being an abstraction.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

Upon storytelling and it. And now it feels recursive.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

As I'm reading lit RPG stuff. Sure.

[B]

You know, totally get that.

[A]

Tell me about the start of this story, Andrew.

[B]

Sorry. The start of the story. We got. We got Carl, who is kind of a wise crack and sort of generic kind of guy. I don't. I am not going to go to bat for the characterization of Carl himself at any point. I think that he is primarily an author insert character.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

And I just, I just don't. I don't think that, you know, like, the vague like, oh, I used to be in the army thing or like, oh, my, my dad was mean to me stuff like it was.

[A]

My dad was mean to me. Beats feel really hollow.

[B]

None of. None of it is super compelling. And it only comes up every once in a while to like, I don't know, to justify a thing that is kind of already happening for other reasons. Yep.

[A]

I guess I find him. Him and Donut and him as what if I could plan for a thing. But then I still have to improvise. Way more compelling than like any of Carl's quote unquote backstory.

[B]

Yeah. Like Carl's. Carl's whole thing is just like, I, I am. I. I have. I have problems with authority. I have a heart of gold underneath, like sort of a sarcastic exterior.

[A]

Yep. Yep.

[B]

And that's. And that's kind of it. There's not. Maybe in. In later books he becomes a more distinctive protagonist, but I just don't think there's a lot to.

[A]

He's. Yeah. Generally, if we're gonna stay in the RPG world, he's generally like a good alignment.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, neutral good.

[B]

Maybe

[A]

we see him care for people.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

We see him struggle with his own. Like, how do I keep myself and my people close to me alive while, like, when I see something morally repugnant, how do I balance, like, keeping myself safe?

[B]

And he also thinks, you know, like, the entity that is running this, like, intergalactic torture game is bad. And I. And I don't want to lose myself.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Even. Even as I try to win this game on its own terms like that. But I, I just, I don't. I don't know that any of that is. Is. I think it's kind of table stakes for. For a character in this in this genre. And I. So I don't think that Carl himself is particularly interesting, but. So Carl is a guy who is set up from the beginning to not be particularly interesting. And his girlfriend be. Goes on vacation and is like, cheating on him. He sees on Instagram. And so he decides he's gonna, like, hold her fancy show cat whose name is Princess Donut the Queen Angelong.

[A]

Inspired by a cat that Matt Deniman saw at a cat show once.

[B]

Yes. He's gonna hold this cat for ransom. And that's. That's the thing. And so. But then in the nighttime, the cat gets a very.

[A]

Like, the characters of the Good Place, like, before they went to the Good Place, like a kind of like, is he. Meh. He's holding a cat hostage. But maybe he's a good person kind of set up.

[B]

So it's. It's very cold outside, and so he. The cat gets out and he needs to keep this cat. So he goes out, like, not really. Like. Like barely dressed in shoes that don't fit him and his boxer shorts, pink

[A]

Crocs and a leather jacket or something.

[B]

And he's trying to coax his cat out of a tree, and a neighbor lady is yelling at him. And then suddenly all the buildings are gone as though they had all buildings on Earth. As though they just been, like, smushed into the earth.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Like decapitating this lady who had been sticking her head out the window to yell at him.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

And then. Then a voice appears in his head and it's like, hey, you're playing an intergalactic video game.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

It's time to play the Ready Player one. Hunger Games by Andy Weir. Please go into the dungeon.

[A]

The planet is being harvested. Humanity can claim Earth by winning the dungeon. You have to get to floor 18 and survive. Go in some stairs, go down some

[B]

stairs to get to floor one. And then you need to. And. And they're just. That's the other thing about the beginning of this book is there are just like multiple pages of this in Carl's head voice. Just like setting up a game, setting

[A]

up a game, setting up a game.

[B]

There's like. Yeah, there's all this stuff about floors and about stairs and about how many. How many. The number of stairs that there are and floors that there are.

[A]

Yep. And how many hours until the first floor collapses. And it's just like.

[B]

Okay, yeah, it's just. It's a lot to start the book with.

[A]

The.

[B]

And then. And then he's down in the dungeon. Then he's and then he's dungeon crawler Carl. And here we are. Here we go.

[A]

I just.

[B]

We could talk for four hours about this, and I'm so tired and I don't want to do that, but like, I don't. I also don't want to give anything short shrift, so I'm like, really not sure what to do.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

I've never really. We've never really done a two parter, and we haven't really talked about.

[A]

No, we're not doing a two parter. We're just gonna. We're just gonna keep going.

[B]

Oh, my gosh.

[A]

Because how. We can't do a two parter, Andrew.

[B]

We can't do. I mean, can't. We can do whatever we want.

[A]

Okay. If you.

[B]

We're the game masters. No, I don't. I don't want.

[A]

I don't want to release a two part.

[B]

I don't release a two parter, but I would record a two parter. But let's. Let's. Let's keep going for now. Okay. I just feel like, you know, we're like, narratively, we're still at the very beginning and we haven't even talked about any other stuff, and it's. We're almost at an hour now.

[A]

I know. Sometimes these books go like this.

[B]

Sometimes these books go like this.

[A]

It is. I don't. Let me get into the Hunger Games, okay?

[B]

Please, please, please, Because I've been talking for a while. Please.

[A]

Things that. No, no, things that happen as we get down in there, right? We go in, he fights some goblins he likes. Is like cramming stuff is in. In his inventory. He gets a motorcycle, all sorts of wacky stuff that is.

[B]

I mean, that's the most.

[A]

Happens a little bit.

[B]

That's the most relatable thing about Dungeon Crawler Carl is the way that he picks up.

[A]

I know. He plays. He plays inventory like you play inventory.

[B]

He plays inventory like I play inventory. Because, you know when you're playing Baldur's Gate 3 and you stuff every rotten. In every rotten carrot in your inventory that you can find, eventually you have a lot of gold, because the minimum amount of gold that somebody will give you for a rotten carrot is one gold.

[A]

Yeah. And he decides, well, like he goes into like a guild hall donut, becomes a sentient cat who can talk and has amazing stats, also puts bad constitution bad constitution, which specifically is about how often you can use potions, among other things. And also they're learning from this guy named Mordecai, who is Kind of there, you know, you learn a little bit that, like, there are these other alien species that have been through other dungeon crawls before. And sometimes when you get far enough, then you get kind of roped into the game. No one has ever won the game.

[B]

No one's ever won the game. And you get a bunch of expanded lore, stuff about like. Like, humans are one of, like, four or five different. If you're thinking about it in dnd terms, humans are, like, one of four or five different races who have just been, like, artificially seeded across the universe.

[A]

Yeah. It's big. Like, alien seeded the Earth energy. Yeah.

[B]

So, like, occasionally you'll run into humans from another planet who are like, humans, but they look kind of weird or whatever.

[A]

But it also is a good excuse for Dinnerman to be like, yeah, I mean, it is weird that these monsters wear tuxedos, but, like, we're all in charge of these planets anyway, so everybody has tuxedos.

[B]

Yeah, like, everybody invented tuxedos.

[A]

I. Okay, there's a. There's an intergalactic syndicate that runs the dungeon crawler stuff like this that runs

[B]

this year's iteration of the.

[A]

There are corporations within the syndicate who run each iteration of the game. You're specifically not allowed to badmouth the syndicate or the sponsoring corporation.

[B]

I mean, you. You can badmouth them, but then they can do whatever they want to.

[A]

Yeah. And so there's this whole, like, additional intergalactic politics plus hunger games level to

[B]

this book, which I'm gonna assume in like, one of the 800 page sequels to this book that we start to get more into than we do in this.

[A]

Yeah. I will say that is the part of. After I was, like, kind of past the achievement deluge.

[B]

I've read. I've read the. The patch notes for this game that I'm.

[A]

Yeah, I'm watching, and I was kind of like, okay, Carl and Donut are going on adventures. It's not just like, do they know how to exist in a video game. There are also other characters for them to interact with. It becomes a book proper. And I'm like, okay, I'm reading a book. And the part that was like, I

[B]

love to be reading a book. And being like, you know what? I sure am reading a book.

[A]

The part. The part that then was leaving me wanting, or at least was like, maybe not wanting, but, like, just wasn't landing for me was, well, and then this guy is like, part of this other alien species and this. And the borant corporation that's running this game is like, Short on cash. So they need to kill people super fast to like, make it. Make enough money for them. And like it be. I. The Hunger Games comparison was doing a disservice for me while reading it, because I know well, all the problems I have with some of those books. I know what Collins is doing in terms of like, telling a story about power and control and the way that you can wield a competition like this or a reality show like this, or control the media like this in ways that have resonance with the real world. And Dungeon Crawler Carl is not doing that. And that's okay. He doesn't need to do that. But it also made me just go, I don't know. This is just a weird space television show that I don't quite. I'm not invested in.

[B]

Well, so. Okay, okay, okay. So here's, here's my thing with this book. In the Hunger Games, if we're, if we're talking about like.

[A]

Yeah, no, sure, Books.

[B]

Books where people get thrown into an arena sort of artificially because of power structures and then they have to kill each other.

[A]

It's Battle Royale to Hunger Games to Pubg and Fortnite to Dungeon Crawler Carl. Like, it's a. It's a recursive line. Right, Go ahead, go ahead.

[B]

But here's the thing about Hunger Games is that we, you know, you read Suzanne Collins talking about her inspiration for that, and it's like watching the early stages of the Iraq war, watching like the 24 hour news cycle that is happening when. When the war on terror is happening. And like, ostensibly this is news, but also it's being turned into content. It's being turned into sort of entertainment of a sort. And then she extrapolates from there. You know, what if that. What if there was a. What if I made explicit sort of what society makes implicit. And there is a. There's an. There's an upper class who never needs to like, directly put anything on the line to make this system exist. And then an underclass who like, fights for the entertainment of the upper class.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

I think what. What this book is, is doing, and I'm not trying to weigh in on like, the success of either Hunger Games or this in like, accomplishing the goals. But I think what Dinnerman is tapping into is a similar sort of thing. But it's specifically about like the attention economy and about. Specifically about streaming.

[A]

No, you're right, you're right, you're right. Yep. No, you're totally.

[B]

And you know, every couple of chapters opens with like the number of like, viewers and like the, you know, the,

[A]

the statistics, the followers and the followers

[B]

of, of Carlin, of Donut. And especially with Donut, you get her like, paying attention to the number of followers she has and also, and, and tracking, you know, in real time. You know, I'm, I'm gaining some. I'm losing some, like Carl notes to himself. Like, it's, it's going to be a problem like the extent to which Donut is like preening for the, for the cameras and trying to chase this, this cloud.

[A]

Well, and there are references to like, so one of the rules is you get to change race and class when you make it down to level three, which does not happen, which is book two.

[B]

Book two is four, three.

[A]

And. But you are starting to gain followers and patrons and stuff in. Which is an evolution of what is happening in, in Hunger Games. Right? Because like, yeah, because before modern Internet,

[B]

yeah, you get like, little gifts from, from people who decided to sponsor you or, or whatever.

[A]

Yeah. Which is the equivalent of like sending a package to the Survivor island and, and Dungeon crawler. Carl is way more aware of Twitch and YouTube. Right. And yeah, there's some awareness that like, when on level three, Carl has to. By the time, okay, they have followers now, he better not pick a race that is going to alienate. Even if it's like, advantageous. They better not pick something that's going to alienate their followers.

[B]

Well, because. Because people are already following like Carl the, The oaf with the bare feet and the no pants and Princess Donut the cat. And so if you, you know, you, if you change races at this point, is that. Is that dynamic going to be the, the same way that it was? But, but, but I think.

[A]

No, no, I hear you.

[B]

No, I, I think what the book, because the Hunger Games was playing in this, in this too is like, you know, how much do you play for the cameras to get something that's going to give you an advantage in this game? Like, how far do you let yourself get into the game when you know you are playing it on someone else's terms? And like, no matter how successful you are within the, like, the framework of the game, you still don't actually have power at the end of the day. Like, or you only have power that you can sort of achieve yourself accidentally by sort of like hacking the, the systems of.

[A]

Of.

[B]

Of attention and of. Of game mechanics.

[A]

A critical difference in this world is that every, you know, they're running with a counter where like every floor of the dungeon is going to close after a certain number of days. So they have to make it further down.

[B]

There's like a whole thing about like you shouldn't go down before the work class is like, there's a lot of. There's a lot of weird. Like this could have been. This could have felt more organic than it. Than it did.

[A]

That. That to me is side note within a side note. The. The things that are like rules for the sake of rules don't land for me in the same way. That's like, this is. I would play a game if I wanted that. I want the like part of it.

[B]

That's. Yeah. Because once you're talking about like the meta game of a made up game in a book that you're.

[A]

It's really tough.

[B]

It's like, oh yeah. We just need a reason for Carl and Donut to like hang around on the same floor for literally hours after they've discovered the stairway to the next floor. Right. I don't think they. I don't think they needed to do it that way. I don't know why I say they like anybody other than Matt Dinnerman is involved in this. Like, I'm already caught up in.

[A]

Oh, but sorry. What I want. And this will hopefully tie back to the point you were in the middle of making. I apologize. Is that the. A key difference for me compared to something like Battle Royale and Hunger Games is that every day or so the. You could go into a safe room in this game. This world, which is not. Is that weird thing where like they're not in a virtual world. It is literal and real. But they can pull up a UI in front of their eyes and they

[B]

can like you and you can. And you can watch someone else pull up their UI in front of their eyes. Like the way you can tell that somebody is like reading Wikipedia when they're supposed to be on a zoom call or something.

[A]

Yes. And you can also like pick up a table and then just make it disappear into your infinite inventory.

[B]

It's interesting that they implemented an inventory system and the only rule is like, if you can pick it up physically, you could put it in your inventory.

[A]

But there's not like, there's no encumbrance.

[B]

Carl can't be encumbered.

[A]

No. And there's. There doesn't seem to be limited slots or. Or there's a reference, I think to others. Other versions of the crawl or other characters having weird slot.

[B]

Well, you have you and you have stacks of things. Like you can get maxes out at like 99 or 999 or something. It's weird where it draws the line of like, where are we going to have Game Logic and where aren't we?

[A]

You can go into safe rooms that are sometimes Waffle Houses and sometimes Taco Bells and sometimes something else. And you can actually watch an episode of like the official Dungeon Crawler World TV show. There's going out into the galaxy.

[B]

Yeah. It's a version of the. The end of the day sort of projection stuff that happens in Hunger Games.

[A]

Yeah. But you're getting. But they are getting more information about like, have they made the edit? How has the edit treated them?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Are they like, like. And so that is.

[B]

Who else from previous edits is still alive and like.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. So there's like a little bit more of them being able to play to the cameras. And I think that is getting to what you were saying earlier that this is just a little bit more aware of the modern attention economy. It's like there's like that whole stuff with that. Like there is the. The grow. The maestro character. So they go on one TV show and that person kind of likes them and then they go on a different TV show and that guy's kind of a butthead.

[B]

There's just a lot to talk about with like the physicality of all the people.

[A]

Oh my God.

[B]

Jeez.

[A]

But the second guy is like pitched towards 12 year olds. They all go glurp. Glurp.

[B]

The second guy is a Pewdiepie. Like.

[A]

Like.

[B]

Like a. Yeah. Openly like.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I think think if we are despite Matt Denman, despite what he seems to think is funny, I think we. We can infer that his sort of. That his heart and his like.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

His worldview I guess is in a place that. I won't say the right place. I will say a place that you and I as people can sympathize with.

[A]

Y.

[B]

Because of the way that he feels about people who exploit other people for like. For content.

[A]

Correct.

[B]

The. The. Just the way that he seems to feel about incels and other like whenever it. There's a like a humanity at the heart of Dungeon Crawler Carl.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

That I think you see the first time in that first boss battle that he does with like a. Like there's a whole thing about how a lot of monsters in this dungeon are like real people who were caught inside buildings at the time that everything got collapsed and then they've been like repurposed. So there's like some. A lady who only speaks Spanish who is like a sort of a. She was clearly kind of a shut in hoarder kind of person.

[A]

Yep, yep.

[B]

And now she's been like those, those, those personality traits have been like, rendered grotesque, but she still, like, maintains a memory of what her life was before.

[A]

That's not a thing that the book, like, keeps up evenly, though.

[B]

It doesn't keep it up evenly, but

[A]

I know, I'm with you with your point.

[B]

But it's always, it's always there in like the back of Carl's mind and he's looking at like the number of humans who are still alive, like, ticking down. He's thinking about it. Like, I, I do think it, it adds a. It adds more. It adds more. It makes me more sympathetic for Carl's character than like literally any character trait that Carl brings to the table himself. Like, I think that though the, that he can feel for those people and that he can still, despite his, like, you know, his status in the game, that he could, he can still remember the like, context of what is happening. Like the scale of like, mass death that has happened. The fact that he can keep that in his head, I think is, is, is way more interesting for him and as a character than the fact that, like, his dad was mean to him or whatever.

[A]

Correct. Yeah, I agree with that. Because there's a couple other instances that makes me think of. Right. Like he is constantly thinking about the, the number ticking down that they tell you about, which starts, I think, at like somewhere around 13 million or so. And then maybe by the end of the book it's like just shy of a million who are making it down to level three. I don't remember.

[B]

I think, I think that's right.

[A]

But he. There's one fight that they have. So, like, there's a couple different things. One is that they encounter some other human dungeon crawlers who are willing to kill.

[B]

And

[A]

that's like a whole like Batman esque line that he draws.

[B]

Yeah. Because when you kill another crawler, you get like a little skull icon.

[A]

Yes, yes.

[B]

And that, you know, and, and we do even in this book run into people who have a skull icon for a reason that ends up being sympathetic. But Carl, Carl does decide early on, like, this is, this is the thing I don't want to do. I don't want to be. I don't want to be identified as a player killer, you know?

[A]

Yeah, well, because it's public. Yeah. Yeah. And then there is he. The other big group of characters we meet are these. They're not even the main staff at this nursing home, but they are largely the Maintenance and, like, nighttime staff at a nursing home that were all outside with patients, and that's why they didn't get crushed by the building. And so, like, they are here to care for these people, but they're not the, like, day in, day out doctors. So even they have, like, a kind of moral boost of, like, willing to do the extra thing. Yeah, he cares about those people. And then there's a fight not long after them that is with a bunch of alien species. There is a, like, oh, the. The women of this species seem to be of kind of like, not on the same level here. But he does have to fight them. And his line is always that. That they're not human. Like, he's always, like, he will stop himself if somebody is human. And he takes particular umbrage about anybody, you know, crossing that line. So, yeah, I'm with you. There is a, like, a through line of a morality that is interesting and certainly makes the book a little bit deeper than, hey, check out these. This book that gives you a spell. And check out these potions and check out your weird feet and check out this. These funny boxers.

[B]

Well, honestly, like, the.

[A]

The.

[B]

That Carl is able to think farther outside of himself, I think makes me like him more as a protagonist than Katniss, because so much of Katniss is wrapped up in, like, which boy do I like better? And also my sister and also my mom and like, that. She is. Even though she is a symbol of this resistance. And she. I. I think she can. She can think about, like, the.

[A]

The.

[B]

The larger good that she is fighting for in some context, like, at the end of the. The day, like, narratively, her. Her aperture is so narrow. Like, the.

[A]

The. Yeah.

[B]

Like, she.

[A]

She

[B]

From. From beginning to end. Like, I think she wants to, like, quit being. Being a symbol of anything, which. Which I think is. Is, like, totally relatable. And I'm not trying to, like, dump all over Katniss Everdeen and say that, like, Dungeon Crawler Carl is a better, like, fictional character. I just. I. I think it is in terms of things you can do to get an audience on, like, on board with your. With your stuff.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, I think I. Yes, in context, I think Katniss, like, it serves a purpose that she is that way.

[B]

Yeah. And I think. And it does its own. I think it does its own work to, like, get the audience on board with the character and what the character wants and what the character is, like, concerned about.

[A]

Yep. But no, Carl is much more like, oh, I'm in control here's some injustice, I suppose I can't abide it.

[B]

Yeah. So, like, to the extent that you get on board with Carl as a character. No, it's not about how his dad was mean to him. It's not about how his girlfriend was cheating on him. Honestly, every time that the book goes anywhere near Beatrice, his. His former girlfriend, it's like, let's. Can we stop? I feel like we're getting towards, like getting into a space where I don't want to exist.

[A]

Yep. Yeah.

[B]

Where this is just like a two dimensional, like two timing lady that we just are supposed to hate. Yeah. I don't know. Like, to the extent that character stuff worked, I think that when Carl is able to take a wider view on the situation and on what has happened to his planet, like, I think that that, that works better for me. Even though it's only like little tiny, little teeny, tiny breaks in between, like, oh, I'm gonna throw an exploding jug at this goblin. Now you know which is most of what the book is.

[A]

Yeah, we should talk about that. We had to take a break, Andrew. We're not on a break. But we had to take a break.

[B]

We had to take a break. We couldn't. We couldn't white snake this one and just go continuously for three hours and

[A]

talking about Dungeon Crawl, which is fine, but we definitely had more to talk about. Specifically, we felt like we wanted to spend just a little bit more time actually doing the plot of the book because we had such strong feelings about its vibe first.

[B]

Yeah, we had. Listen, we had a lot of vibe feelings. And I'm gonna be honest. Like, I went into this recording kind of being kind of wanting to. In a defensive posture because I know this is already a popular thing and a lot of people already like it. And if you like it, it's fine. I final vibe thoughts is, are I like this better than I expected to like it?

[A]

Sure.

[B]

I am not rushing to pick up the rest of them. I think. I think seven more very long books about this would be too much.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we're gonna go through it a bit more, I think. I know. I personally know folks who did not finish this. Like, like, made it a little ways in. They were like. I know there are folks in our community who are like, also another folks in our community who were like, yes, but also Andrew's gonna hate it. Yes. Like, it's just kind of.

[B]

None of you were right.

[A]

None of you were right. The beginning.

[B]

The beginning is the hardest part to get through.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And we just like to totally. Because that's when the total stuff is. It's is at its. At its most obnoxious, I think.

[A]

But you know, so we're gonna. We're gonna start trying to go through the plot a bit more. We're not gonna hit everything, but I feel like that'll. That'll make sure we catch everything that we might have missed.

[B]

So we already talked about world gets destroyed.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Big like five page bold text description of what the deal is. It's like aliens are like mining Earth for all resources. And the most efficient way of doing this is just to destroy every structure for some reason is to take all matter and rearrange it into a dungeon.

[A]

Well, you first. You flatten everything. First you seed the planet with creatures for millennia that make all of the resources that you want. Then you spend about 50 years in their culture so that you understand their

[B]

fantasy tropes and so you can write cool, funny little achievements and like pop culture references and have them all be really fluent and really, really funny the way that they always are in this book.

[A]

Dungeon crawler Carl, as we said in the earlier part of the episode, it's all shared culture because they seeded our planet. So like they get all the references too. And the languages all make sense and

[B]

everybody knows about tuxedos.

[A]

Yeah, all that silly stuff.

[B]

So I think the. The less you think about this, the better the book works, the more you accept that they just want to get him into a dungeon and occasionally do social commentary via the fragments of culture that gets. Get.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Mishmashed all together.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

The better time you're gonna have.

[A]

Yep. I. I've. And I wasn't always able to have that better time, but I think. I totally agree. So he goes into the. He goes into the dungeon. He's got Donut with him. He kills some goblins.

[B]

I'm sorry, what's the. What's the cat's name?

[A]

Princess Donut Chunk or whatever.

[B]

No, no. What's the. What's the Cat's Fool?

[A]

I don't actually know.

[B]

Princess Donut the Queen and Chong Greg.

[A]

So he goes and he meets.

[B]

I am gonna need you to say the full name of it.

[A]

I'm never gonna remember.

[B]

No, it's not that I need you to remember, it's just that I need you to say the words.

[A]

Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk.

[B]

There you go. You did it.

[A]

He meets Mordecai, who we may have talked about earlier, who is his kind of guide. We'll see him in all the guild halls throughout the Dungeon. At least for several levels.

[B]

And in a. Similar to Hunger Games sort of thing. Like the. You will meet several representatives who work within the system or are part of the Borant Corporation or whatever. Like alien.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Body like. Like.

[A]

But now they're a rat. But now they're a goblin. But now they're.

[B]

Yeah. And it. Like, whatever. But occasionally you get a sense that, like, oh, we're all different kinds of oppressed here. Maybe we'll. Maybe there will be different opportunities teaming up. There's not a ton of that in this. In this specific book, but the ground is all being tilled to do that in future books.

[A]

Yes. And I think it's also being sown here to continue that metaphor that the voice, the wonderful voice doing all of the achievements and things. I can tell you from the audiobook, they put a little digital stank on it to make it clear that it's some sort of computer character.

[B]

It's an AI. They refer to it as an AI.

[A]

They refer to it as an AI Mr. Director. And so it is my understanding that this becomes more of a character in later books. And it is not just the voice of the Borant Corporation. I think that's really what I'm trying to drill down here. It is like a separate entity somehow. Or part of feet that loves feet. And so Carl's gonna go out there. He's constantly getting reminded of how many people are dying.

[B]

Yeah. There's like a counter. A counter of the remaining humans who are alive. It starts at like 14 million from the like billions and billions of people who live on Earth.

[A]

I think we may.

[B]

And car. And Carl periodically looks at it and he's like, that makes me sad to look at that number.

[A]

Yeah. Did we already talk about.

[B]

It's like that. Is that. Am I am.

[A]

I know most of what he does.

[B]

That's pretty much what it is.

[A]

You were a little less glib about it in our first part of the podcast, but yeah, that's what it is. I don't know if we talked about how donut eats a snack and then instead of turning into a horrid monster, turns into just a cooler cat.

[B]

Yeah. Just like a sentient cat who can talk, but it's still a cat. And so you still get a lot of mileage out of a bunch of like Garfield tier sort of cat human interaction jokes.

[A]

Well. And a lot of the sassy. The cat from Homeward Bound. Like a lot of cats rule, dogs drool kind of stuff going on.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Throughout the book.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And then. Yes. We Talked about the first boss that Carl kills, which is this big woman that is a mashup of Earth stuff and weird dungeon stuff.

[B]

She's like a specific Earth woman.

[A]

Yeah, she's a specific person. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And it's. And then. And Mordecai is like, yeah, they're gonna like mix and match and chop and screw stuff to like, like recombine it. But yeah, every once in a while you're just gonna run into someone from Earth who has been amped up or repurposed in some way to be a dungeon boss.

[A]

In his I will loot everything mindset, they find themselves in like a goblin camp where he is allowed to be there because of some weird tattoo that he got from killing goblins which doesn't quite make sense.

[B]

I don't understand why any. Because they've already got the thing where Princess Donuts charisma score is very high. And so she can charm any, pretty much any low level enemy that is not hostile to them.

[A]

But there's also these like territory.

[B]

They're also weird tattoos and.

[A]

Yeah, and she's got a weird crown on her that we talked about. Will get paid off in a future book. But no, he like loots all the goblin tables. His. His big thing is explosives. So he will, you know, send a vehicle of. Full of explosives into a room that has a boss in it, explode it, and then that boss is gone.

[B]

Yeah, but which, I mean, I can respect the strategy.

[A]

There were babies. There were goblin babies in there.

[B]

There were babies in there.

[A]

And Donut's like, that's fine.

[B]

And Carl's like, that makes. And that makes me sad in a way similar to the way that the number makes me sad.

[A]

Yeah. I think I mentioned earlier that there are crawlers who kill other crawlers. That's his like his line. But they do get ambushed in one of the Taco Bell safe rooms. You can't get attacked in a bathroom though. There is a bug that makes people explode when they use bathrooms briefly.

[B]

There. There are a bunch of. This is.

[A]

This is good. This is why I'm going through it. Because it's like triggering a bunch of things.

[B]

Well, because. Okay, because recently we watched the movie Deadpool and I'm going to talk about this in. While we. When we do our overdue Special collections episode about the movie deadpool as well. Patreon.com overduepod it always rubs me a weird way when you create something very contrived in your world and then your. I never do this main character talks about the contrived thing. And you are. The audience is meant to be like, oh, the main character is really smart or clever or funny or whatever, because they devise something in response to this contrived thing. But you're just like, doing your. Like it's one guy doing shadow puppets against himself. Like, it's.

[A]

Okay, can you give me the example there? Because that's all fiction. If you zoom out.

[B]

Well, I mean, it's. It's all fiction, I guess, but, like, there are all the. These convoluted rules about, like, you know, when you get attacked in a safe room, like, stuff gets teleported a certain amount of the way away. Or when you try to attack somebody in a safe room, you. They freeze for X number of seconds, and then you have that amount of time to get away. Or when you put something in an. In an inventory, like time freezes. And the book is full of examples of Carl, like, using these little rules to his advantage and doing stuff that the game doesn't want him to do, which is just what playing video games is like. But, like. But you, Matt Diman, are the one who made all these rules this very specific, kind of complicated. And then your character is like, I'm so smart, I am using the game's rules against it.

[A]

And it's fascinating to think about it that way because that goes back. I think that, Andrew, that resonates with my dissatisfaction with the lit RPG like, stat convention because you know that that to me, is an abstraction of character traits that you could show me with action. What this is, is an interesting. Okay, because the way you put it, it's finding exploits and finding ways to cheese and finding ways that the system will allow you to accomplish something even if it doesn't feel like the intended way. That is video games. That is speed running. That is.

[B]

It's speed running. But like.

[A]

But no, just enjoying a game sometimes.

[B]

Imagine to imagine, though, if you will. So that. That is video games. It is video games. And we'll talk about. I want to talk for a minute about Carl, the character's relationship to video games, too. Yeah, for a sec. But it's. I think it's one thing if the player is given a game that somebody else made and then the player figures out how to. How to cheese that. It's another thing if, like, I am Shigeru Miyamoto. I am John Romero. I am another rockstar video game developer. And I am gonna sit you down and beat you at this game that I made because I build all these exploits into it that I know how to. To like it feels more like cheating.

[A]

Well, and I also just feel like.

[B]

Does that make. Does that make sense? Does the distinction I'm drawing. I know I talked about John Romero and nobody.

[A]

I know what you mean.

[B]

Nobody's talking about John Romero.

[A]

I know what you mean. And I don't even need it to be that the designer is trying to beat me at it. I just feel like the conversation that a. The conversation that's a metaphor that the player is having with a game when they poke at the edges and find funny stuff and find stuff that is entertaining to do or easier for them or whatever that is different from a character in a game going, oh, I. It's like weird. That's why I've never clicked with Metal Gear. There's stuff like this in the Metal Gear series where he's like, put your controller on the table and I'll make it dance. And it's like. It's just. He's using the Rumble. That's funny because it's like a one off. But it. This is. This is not a great comparison. But I feel like the.

[B]

I don't know. I'm glad, I'm glad to mention. I'm glad that you got to mention Metal Gear because that stuff is the one that sticks with me even though I've never played a Metal Gear game ever in my whole life. Is There is a PlayStation era Metal Gear where it would look at the names of the other saves on your memory card and be like, oh, I see someone likes playing ape escape like during a boss battle to like freak you out.

[A]

There's a thing that.

[B]

And it reminds me of that. That escape room that you did where

[A]

they put my face.

[B]

They took the Facebook profile picture that you had to use to sign up to do the. And they grabbed it and they printed it out and they made it part of the puzzle.

[A]

Part of a Stranger Things puzzle. It was so weird. I was with the kids. It was so I think that's great.

[B]

Anyway. Go.

[A]

I just feel like this, it's. It's different if you are the player or even if you are watching someone stream it or whatever than it being part of the story. Because that's just a different thing that games can do. So. Yeah, it just never. It never felt as fun for me to watch Carl do kind of this bug exploits and things.

[B]

Yeah. Because it's because this bug has been set up specifically for you to exploit

[A]

as it is for me to watch a streamer find a, like a really unique way to get out of A weird situation. Like, it's just. It's my relationship to the. Either the character in the story or, in that case, the person playing the game is just very different. And this book is conflating those things in a way that doesn't always work for me well.

[B]

And I think I find it more like there's similar stuff that goes on in the Hunger Games series, too. Like, you're right. The author.

[A]

How do you exploit the game design?

[B]

Makes these little clockwork murder games and, as we've talked about in those episodes, like it. It seems like even though she is commenting on the inhumanity of it all, it does seem like the part of those books that gets Susannah Collins out of bed in the morning is designing the little murder puzzles. But in those books, you always have, like, groups of characters who are sort of bouncing ideas off of each other, and they are like, those characters are all bringing their own perspective and experience to the table in a way that makes it feel more organic, where this feels more like a Da Vinci Code, Robert Langdon thing, where just, like, I sat around and, oh, it's all about it. I thought about it really hard until I came up with the. With the fix all by myself because I'm so smart. And it just. There's something about it that rings hollow or is, like, less satisfying to me.

[A]

And some of it is just that I don't know the rules of the. The rules of, like, why this is a game that has inventory this way just don't quite make sense to me. And so it's because you start with,

[B]

like, I'm making a lit RPG book, and then you work backwards.

[A]

Yeah, No, I understand. Yeah. And it has.

[B]

I get what you're saying.

[A]

It has ups and downs. Because, like, to your point, we're gonna keep doing this because it's the easiest comparison Hunger Games has. The thing where it's like, is the game master, like, on the side of the rebels? Is there, like, a. A weakness in the game that they put there on purpose? Is there, like, it's all. It all. There's an explanation for all of the design.

[B]

Yeah. And there are a bunch of, like, power structures buzzing behind all the. All the design stuff. And, yeah, like, the people who are running or funding or whatever the game are not all in lockstep with each.

[A]

And as I said earlier, some of that. There's illusions to that here where, like, oh, they're killing people too fast because they don't have enough money. And, like, sure, maybe that's why it's buggier. Maybe that's why the bathrooms are exploding. Maybe that's why they put in a rule where if you pee on the floor, you get attacked by an elemental monster. Like, I don't know. Okay.

[B]

Oh, and then Carl's. Carl's relationship to the game is.

[A]

Oh, he played what.

[B]

We get. We get. We get. We get confirmation that he, like, plays Call of Duty and isn't very good at it. Right. Like, I think, yeah, Donut mentions.

[A]

Well, and he played DND while he was in the military.

[B]

Played DND when he was in, like, school and in the military. And I just, like, Carl is usually like, yeah, I don't. I don't like. I played a little bit of this.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

The internal monologue. But then he has, like, really perfect, like, full understanding of all these systems. It's like, Carl, it's okay. It's okay if you're a big dork. Like, you can just admit that you're a big dork. Instead of a cool action movie, he's

[A]

more likely to be like, listen, I was in the military. I know how to kick and punch.

[B]

Okay?

[A]

But so, yeah, he kills all those goblin babies and he gets away with a goblin motorcycle, which becomes important later in the book. They run into those other crawlers who kill people. Frank and Maggie, I think are their names.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

As Andrew said, they get jumped in the safe room. They will become antagonists throughout the series.

[B]

I think I would be more interested in talking about them if we were going to do any more of these books, which I don't think we are. Like, there's a. So the.

[A]

I mention them mostly because this book does not have. Is not structured in a. Like, a lot of other first books of series that we read that have a. Like, and here's the big bad of this book, which at the end of this book is revealed to be just part of a larger operation.

[B]

You sense from really early on that they've mentioned that this game has 18 floors or whatever, and the rate at which they are moving through floors from, like, I don't know, a third of the way through the book. Halfway through the book. I don't know when you got the sense that they were not moving fast enough, but they're not covering enough ground to do this all in one book. And for it to be like dungeon crawler Carl return to the dungeon in the next book where he's doing another dungeon. Like, obviously from the outset, he's really digging in and planning to, like, stretch this thing out over, like, the entire series is the crawl.

[A]

Yeah. And he doesn't. But what I. What I would note there is that it is also not structured where it's like, I think he could have. It might have been a more impactful ending to just like, get me to the third floor and like, let me like, have a full experience of that floor. Like you could have narratively. I'm thinking of some of the books, series we've read where it's like, maybe it's on an academic calendar like Percy or even Harry Potter or something like that. Right. Where you have kind of these built in endings.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Of something that then makes sense for both a restart of the next book and a feeling of closure and this book to your, you know, series of events. Andy Weir style comparison is just like, yeah, he's just gonna do some boss fights, he's gonna meet some people. A bunch of things are gonna be thrown at you that might be important later. And maybe this, maybe this style of writing kind of evolves over the series. It's very possible as he does more of it.

[B]

The essential cadence of the book is just like, Carl gets in a scrape, he gets himself out of the scrape with some combination of like, luck and cleverness.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

In between scrapes, he will occasionally make acquaintances with other people. Like the. The big other group other than Frank and Meg.

[A]

The nursing home people. Yeah, we talked about.

[B]

Yeah, the nursing home people who Carl meets and like, begrudge. Not even begrudgingly protects, but just like, protects them because he feels like it's the right thing to do. Even though, like, logically he knows that it's not going to help him.

[A]

Yes, yes.

[B]

Win the game. Except insofar is that he's like tugging on people's heartstrings with the whole, like, audience, like Streame.

[A]

What do you think about thing about the boss fight with the nursing home people? Andrew, the big ball of pigs. What do you think about that? So this is like the third boss fight where the first one is.

[B]

He like makes a. He like makes a table and like squeezes.

[A]

He makes a little house out of impenetrable tables and then he squeezes the ball against the ceiling. But he's also got these magical shurikens that he had affixed to everything. Okay, so this part didn't work for you.

[B]

I guess Any, any given boss fight is fun to read in the moment it's happening. But then when you try to like pick them apart and well, yeah, talk about them individually, it's just like. Yeah. Carl takes an item that he got or invented a chapter and a half ago and uses it to defeat the boss that he's been.

[A]

Yeah, he's.

[B]

He. That is now in front of him.

[A]

There's a. And. And I would say like maybe video game note. Most of these bosses at best have two phases. Like they don't. There's a reason that a lot of bosses even going back to the old nes have like multiple things that they do.

[B]

Yeah. And I listen and I can't. I also can't complain too much about like Carl just got this weapon and now he uses it to defeat the boss. Because that's the way they all.

[A]

It's all video games, baby.

[B]

That's how it works. That's every Zelda is like, listen, we hid the boomerang in here. And also for some reason we designed it so that everything in here is weak against boomerangs.

[A]

I. You know what?

[B]

I did not, I did not think this through. I am Ganondorf. I have part of the Triforce.

[A]

I do think it is interesting to think about Dinnerman saying like, oh, I was playing these games in the 90s, I was playing these MMOs and it felt, stayed like it felt. I'm. I'm poking at this world and there's so many. If I take the world as proposed to me, there should be so many more interactions. There should be so many more things I can do. And that is always the like, frustration with certain games or even games that like purport to have very complicated systems.

[B]

Oh yeah, all the ones that like, remember Fable? Remember how oversold Fable was? It was like, this is a game where you're going to play through a character's whole life and every, like every choice is going to be some Butterfly Effect nonsense where like you make a Choice as a 7 year old and then it's going to define in some subtle way the entire rest of the game that follows it. And in reality it is just like every other game that has like a good, good evil like decision making system is a set number of decision trees and it's like the, the narrative shape like starts narrow and then it widens out and then you just kind of get pushed in the end toward the same couple of endings. Like it is not, is not as, as open and as free as you. As you want it to be. And you are always going to run into those barriers. Like even in the most impressive of those games. Like, like if you're thinking about like your, your mass effects or whatever, like games that people really like that have these big good and evil decision making systems or Baldur's Gate 3. Our beloved Baldur's Gate 3. Eventually, you're gonna run into the fact that this system is, in fact, finite. It is not just dynamically responding to you.

[A]

You know what my favorite term for that is?

[B]

Oh, yes. The narrative.

[A]

The narrative diamond. Right.

[B]

Narrative diamonds are forever.

[A]

It's why the middle of most of those series, if there's more than one of them, there's three. The middle one always feels the most exciting because you're still making things bigger, but you also have kind of the. The knowledge you've gained from. It's why Mass Effect 2 is the best one, because, like, things are expanding, expanding, expanding. And then what's less fun sometimes winnowing

[B]

all that down and closing all those loops?

[A]

Only a few things. It can only be this. It can't be every possibility. And so I think when he is designing some of these encounters, it isn't just what my childhood friend, stepdad used to call the stupid game. He used to call Final Fantasy the stupid game because it was Final Fantasy 2 on the SNES. Because characters would stand eight feet apart, and they'd just swing a sword in the air, and then the other guy would blink and numbers would appear and be like, that's stupid. They're not even hitting each other.

[B]

Stupid game.

[A]

Instead, you want to play a game where you're like, oh, if I got a knife and I got a stick, I should be able to put them together and do special knife, stick. And, like, then I could also jump in the air and then I could throw my cat and, like, give me all of the verbs of human existence, but also the inventory system from this game and also the Lex. You know, it's. I, again, I get that. That's part of the appeal, too, I think, is if you're somebody who's familiar with games and you're. You know, you get frustrated when you can't do all of the things you think your character should do. A book can attempt to do some of that in a way that, you know, is more fun.

[B]

I hate Stephen Singer and his narrative diamonds.

[A]

That's a reference for a geographic amount of reference.

[B]

That's a reference for anybody who is, like, flown into any Philadelphia area airport and wondered why everybody hates this guy so much.

[A]

Other bosses that we meet include the juicer who yells, bro. A lot. That was part of the audiobook that I listened to.

[B]

He's like a weightlifter.

[A]

He's like a weightlifter lizard thing. He goes, bro.

[B]

It's. It's a lot of that's funny.

[A]

That's throwing stuff from. It's like he's roided out as references to what the roids have done to other parts of his body. He go, they. They go on the. The ladies show where they get all their followers and patrons. They go down to level two, they fight a tentacle boss. That was that lady, the lady show. She's like a crab lady, but she's not. And she doesn't have big boobs. She just has.

[B]

She dresses like she has big boobs and she's a crab on the bottom, but really she just doesn't have any legs and she. Jesus like.

[A]

And they use a different crab every show.

[B]

And they use a different crab every show. I don't what that's like. Sometimes you're doing. Sometimes you're doing stuff just to do stuff.

[A]

That's the part where I understand there his sympath why Seth McFarlane might be a good fit. It's just like what, what if it was just a crab lady?

[B]

Okay, like, sure.

[A]

You know, what if the monkey pointed at Peter Griffin again? You know, like.

[B]

And again the. The all of the like contrived like people. If this is a TV show, everybody's watching it. We're gonna like while you are crawling, we're gonna like book you on talk shows and you're gonna go do it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And he does this one that's like a. That's like a traditional talk show. And then he does this other one that say like a stupid YouTuber that we. A manosphere YouTuber, but not a very good one. Carl, because of his amazing cleverness and wordplay, turns the audience against the host of the show. Yes. Glurp. Glerp. Craig. I do think that that is like some of the more effective when Matt Dinnemann is doing like social commentary stuff. And again, you know, we talked about this already, but while you're. When you're talking about how this book is different from Hunger Games, what it's responding to in the way that Hunger Games was responding to the 24 hour news cycle. Like I do think that stuff is the most interesting. It is the part where the book has the most to say that's like of consequence. But it doesn't mean that like individual moments or like bit like Carl calling the host pork Boy and having that like somehow ricochet around the galaxy as the most devastating insult to imaginable. Well, I don't.

[A]

Ricochets around the galaxy is a deep fake sex tape between Carl and this jerk host called Maestro.

[B]

Mm.

[A]

And that's fun. That's a fun thing. And Carl has to be like, I'm not gay. I wouldn't be gay for him. This is weird.

[B]

There's. There's a weird. Carl has a kind of.

[A]

Not that there's anything wrong.

[B]

He has a retrograde. Not that there's anything wrong with that thing about. About being gay.

[A]

Yeah. It goes by pretty quickly though.

[B]

It goes. It goes by pretty quickly. I think you could argue that for sort of a. I don't know, for sort of a. Like a former military guy who's like coded kind of conservative in a lot of ways. Like it's, it's. It's true to the character. But. But as we've already talked about, the character of Dungeon Crawler Karl is not very interesting. I don't think he is a great distinctive character.

[A]

I can see why people come out of this book really invested in Princess.

[B]

Princess Donut, the Queen and Chonk

[A]

because Dinnamon is getting. He gets to have more fun with her. She gets to do a lot of more different things. She gets to be prissy cat. She gets to be super powerful in some ways. She gets.

[B]

Yeah, she. I mean she's the. She's the spellcaster. She's a powerful spellcaster always when that is working. Well.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

In an rpg being the spellcaster is always more fun.

[A]

Usually.

[B]

It's just you don't want to be the only one left alive as a spellcaster ever.

[A]

Ever. And there's a couple threats of that in this which is. Was just interesting. But she also is the one who likes. On that first talk show. Yes. I think they gave her some cat food that made her act this way. But she's like really extra playing to the crowd and behaving doing the. The. Some of the more interesting media manipulation stuff from Hunger Games kind of in

[B]

a way in the Dungeon Crawler Carl TV show. Oh, do you want. When they do Princess Donut, the Queen Anne Chunk, obviously it's going to be some stupid CGI stuff. Well, I mean. Okay. Would you rather it be sort of a homeward bound.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Like it's just footage of animals and you hear the animal talking but there's no mouth or anything.

[A]

Always. Yes.

[B]

Or do you want it to be like an Air Buddies sort of the. They make little mouths on the animals move. Is that the way Air Buddies works? I don't know.

[A]

Air Buddies, those mouths move. Also those dogs fart in Space Buddies sucks.

[B]

Well, because they have to fill the rocket up with gas so they can get Back to

[A]

there. Now, this dog doesn't talk. The dog in the new Superman movie for a CG dog works very well. It's well done. The animation's good. Can they spend that cash on Gender Caller Carl? And can they make it talk and not stink? I don't know why you.

[B]

Wait. Why are you watching Superman movies?

[A]

I saw the new Superman. It looked good. I saw it. It was good.

[B]

Really? Okay.

[A]

It was a fun movie.

[B]

All right?

[A]

I heard it was good.

[B]

Is there anybody. Is there anybody's cut that we're all, like, mad about?

[A]

No. No. Because it's James Gunn.

[B]

All right?

[A]

Everyone was stoked.

[B]

Okay, Sun's out, guns out.

[A]

So it's a good Lois Lane. It's a good Superman. I don't remember his name. Corn Sweat. What's his name? I don't know.

[B]

Corn Sweat.

[A]

Corn Sweat.

[B]

What are you talking about?

[A]

Superman actor is David Corn Sweat. Dave Corn Sweat. Okay.

[B]

Yeah. Jim Corn Sweat.

[A]

Yeah. But anyway, so, yeah, I think. And. And Donut is just able to be both vulnerable and strong and playful and gets.

[B]

And literally, I. I am not joking. And also gets to do Garfield stuff.

[A]

And gets to do Garfield. You're right. You're right. You're not.

[B]

And the. And the book leans way into the. Like, into. Into cat. Just like, cat stuff. Just like. Oh, you know, isn't it funny how cats seem like they don't care about you, but then they do show you they love you in subtle ways?

[A]

Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

Ooh, cats.

[A]

Yeah, People love cats. People have cats. Toxic plasmosis.

[B]

Do you remember that chapter of Dungeon Crawler Carl where Carl drinks a mug full of toxins?

[A]

No, but it might have been on the intergalactic sex tape. Think about it. They. They're in. Oh. So, like, they go to level two, they do the. The elderly peeing thing, the rage elemental. And that's when he. He exploits a huge bug in the game, which is why that prompted our large conversation earlier, where he is able to trick this monster into going down the stairs, which makes it disappear.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

He doesn't get any experience for it, of course.

[B]

Yep. Because it. Because it was bugged. And because. And not. Not because he didn't kill it. Because it was bugged. Yeah.

[A]

They finally kill another boss. I guess they did. I don't know if the. If the gerbil was a neighborhood boss. There's neighborhoods, Burrows, cities. I don't know if there's another layer of boss. I don't know why the bosses use this nomenclature.

[B]

Yeah, I don't know either. But yeah, there are at least three tiers, like neighborhood, city and Burrow, I think. Or neighborhood, borough, and city.

[A]

Yeah. And you get. You get.

[B]

There are others above that.

[A]

Yeah. And they fight this, like, gerbil. They, like, turn the kobold dingoes good to, like, help that fight be easier. And then they get a little dinosaur.

[B]

They get a donut, gets a pet named Funny because donut is a pet.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But then she gets a little T. Rex pet.

[A]

And the book just. The book just kind of ends with this. Kind of peters out with them training this monster.

[B]

We get how to train your T. Rex and we also get a lot of teasing about, you know, the next floor is really interesting because you get to pick your race in your class.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And they set this up relentlessly. Like, they talk about it all the time. And then the book ends without that happening. And it's like, wouldn't you. Wouldn't you, like. Listen, maybe you like this book, maybe you didn't. But don't you want to know just a little bit about the race and class stuff? Doesn't that make you want to pay money to buy the second book of Dungeon Crawler Crawl? And if you're already going to do that and read that far, like, won't. Like, shouldn't you just read the rest of it? And if you're going to do that, like, I don't know, maybe. Maybe the next one too. You know, you could just keep going if you wanted.

[A]

It's just so interesting to me how much. So, like, the. The big. Well, I guess we also didn't. We didn't talk about the. Like, we don't have to talk about.

[B]

We don't have to talk about everything.

[A]

I know. I'm just thinking about things.

[B]

We don't have to talk about everything.

[A]

Let me just unpack the ending. Then again, unpack the ending.

[B]

Listen, if you. If you. Because you love Dungeon Crawler Carl and talking about it so much, if you want to do a long read.

[A]

We're not doing the long read.

[B]

If you want to do our long. Our patreon.com overdupodlongread called Pork Boys or Glerp Glurp or whatever you want to call the Dungeon Crawler Carl long read podcast, we can do that. But I am going to need you to say that we're doing that before I agree to talk about this book for much longer.

[A]

The rage elemental stuff which happens amidst this whole thing where, like, there are people from the corporation trying to help Carl. They get whisked away. That's what sends him on the bad TV show. All that stuff, that elemental thing that happened just because one of the nursing home people peed on the ground. Feels like it was supposed to be the climactic end of the book and instead a whole bunch of stuff happens after it, but none of it's super exciting. And then they do the gerbil fight very quickly. They train a dinosaur. They see the old lady with the shopping cart named Agatha, who like we spend five pages of Carl realizing that he had her inventory in his pockets for a while. And so now he seems to think that she's something else than what she's

[B]

come some kind of like corporate spy from. From some other corporation that co. That co hosts these murder games in cooperation with other companies. So they all. And they all work together and they all hate each other and they all.

[A]

Yeah. Matt Deniman has said that he did not plan all of that political stuff out very far in advance.

[B]

I mean, yeah, he. Yeah, he's. He has said that about being a panther. He's just like, I'm gonna drop a bunch of stuff, I'm gonna figure out which. Which is fine. The, the thing I will say in response to the. You are complaining about the way that like every Game of Thrones season is structured where it's like, wouldn't you. Don't you think it should end on a big climactic thing? And what it actually does is like the big climactic thing is the next to last thing. And then we're gonna spend a bunch of time dropping a bunch of little breadcrumbs to like make sure that we've set as many hooks as possible to

[A]

bring you back for next, I suppose. And like plenty of books have a after the big event denouement. That's fine. It's just this felt so like, it does feel like.

[B]

Like this is a bunch of stuff that happened.

[A]

This feels a little.

[B]

Because it feels like the book ends because it has to end.

[A]

Yes, because we ran out of time.

[B]

Not because the story is demanding that it ends.

[A]

No.

[B]

And in reality, this, this whole thing is a. It's a ten hour movie of.

[A]

Yeah, some of it is series at its core. For me. I, I think it's just that this book is not set up as a first book for the character of Carl that is going to like he's going to have even some specific character change adjustment lesson, something that's going to impact how he acts in the next book. That's just been kind of low grade happening, but not with a Lot of narrative heft. And so instead, we get way more training a dinosaur than I expected. And yes, I get it. It doesn't behave. I get it.

[B]

Maybe more of that happens once Dinnerman is thinking of. Of this story as a thing, like the unit of the.

[A]

The unit of one book.

[B]

The unit of one book. Instead of the unit of. I'm just gonna write a bunch of, like, forum posts on. On royalroad.com until. Yeah, yeah, yeah, until I'm done. Like.

[A]

And yeah, I think that's probably right.

[B]

Without reading more, we won't know. And I'll just say that I think that life is better with a little bit of mystery in it. Like, we don't. You don't have to know everything.

[A]

I think the first half of this podcast has you sounding way higher on Carl. I think it does

[B]

because I had a day to think about it. I was like, okay. I did okay. The first. The first half of the episode is me giving it the benefit of the doubt. Me saying me, like, rubbing it in all the. The haters faces who are like, oh, I know exactly what Andrew's gonna like and what he's gonna hate, basically based on what he's already liked and hated for 700 episodes. For 750 episodes. It's like, listen, you don't know me.

[A]

You're not alone. You're not a large language model.

[B]

We. Yeah, we have a parasocial relationship. You don't know what I'm gonna like and what I'm not gonna like. Come on. And then the second half is like, well, you know, I. I didn't love,

[A]

But I'm not. Just.

[B]

Just because I had a better time than I was expecting to have does not mean that I think that this. This is a great book.

[A]

And I do think I came away from this read fully understanding why people, like, like it.

[B]

Or at least, oh, I totally understand.

[A]

You know, which sometimes. Sometimes we do struggle to find that on a book that we did that we really don't click with.

[B]

This is like, I. I would read a Wikipedia summary of the rest of this.

[A]

Yeah, I probably would.

[B]

Sure. Like, tell me. Tell me what happens in the story, because I don't think that all the story stuff is bad. I just think the thought of reading 5,000 more pages of Dungeon Crawler Carl, not exaggerating, I'd have to add them all up. But, like, that's you. You. That's the kind of commitment you were talking about.

[A]

This is also.

[B]

I think doing that does not appeal to me at all.

[A]

This is also why I think so many folks have shouted at us about the audiobook book. I didn't listen to it for the whole book, but I did really enjoy my time with it. Hayes's work is really wonderful. I think there is a whole. A sizable portion of the Carl audience that is just here for the audiobook version of it.

[B]

Because I think in that format, it probably does. It does listen a little bit more like an actual play DND podcast does.

[A]

And when you said I would read a Wikipedia article about this, my first thought was if this were a game, I might be interested to watch someone I liked stream it. Like I like. I would. I would be. I would want to kind of check in with them in their feelings on it. You know, I would want a parasocial relationship with somebody else experiencing these books. I don't want to do it firsthand.

[B]

I think

[A]

so, yeah. That's Dungeon Crawler Carl. I don't think we're not gonna go any deeper this episode, Andrew.

[B]

No, but we. I don't know. Will we go down to level three some other time? Who. Who can say?

[A]

Let the mystery be.

[B]

Who can say? Who can say what the download numbers on this episode are going to be and what they suggest about what our future programming should be?

[A]

How many followers do we have versus how many people have not made it to the end of this dungeon vis a vis this episode? Thanks for reading Dungeon Crawler Carl, Andrew. It's an OD Award winner for a reason, and I'm glad that we got to it.

[B]

Yeah. Thank you for reading Dungeon Crawler Carl.

[A]

Yeah, boy, I had a decent time even as I had plenty of things to not find. Great.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So whatever.

[B]

Whatever.

[A]

It can be just silly.

[B]

Whatever.

[A]

What a great podcast it is to just go. Whatever.

[B]

We've been talking for an hour and 45 minutes. Whatever.

[A]

I guess if you have further thoughts, listener at home about Dungeon Crawler Carl or about video games or about books. About video games or about video games. About books. About video games. Send us a forward.

[B]

I'm looking forward to the people in our discord who see fit to, like, yell at us as they're listening to the podcast. Yeah, like, I think this. I think this will be a good one. This is setting a bunch of fun little, like, traps for them to fall into.

[A]

Yeah. Just like Carl. Just like Carl. We're setting Just like Carl. Carl. Toe to tip overdue pod. Gmail.com is the email address for you to tell us what you thought, what you think and what you're going to do. About it. Find us on social media Overtubordo about it.

[B]

That's how you get bricks with notes rubber banded to them thrown through your windows.

[A]

I've got the achievement voice stuck in my head. I can't shake it. Find us on social media Vupod Our theme song is composed by Nick laurengs Andrew if folks want to know more about the show, where do they go?

[B]

Overdupodcast.com is the Internet website. We have the books that we have read, the ones we are going to read. And what else do we have? Patreon.comoverdupada URL We've mentioned a couple of times that's how you kick some money to the show, support us financially, buy us books like every book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. Books like that, in that. Not exactly those books. Books like those and microphones and, I don't know, hosting other kinds of stuff. And in exchange you get to join our Discord community, get access to our long read projects, to our special collections series of bonus episodes which soon will include a blockbuster episode about the 2016 film Deadpool, Mr. Pool and all kinds of other stuff. Patreon.com overdue pod the July schedule is not finalized yet. Getting there though. What are we reading next, though?

[A]

We are celebrating belatedly our nation's birthday with Forrest Gump by Winston Groom. A book.

[B]

What better way to talk about America's future than to examine the one man who is there at every important event in its history in the childhood of boomers.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, tune in for that. I have no idea what this book is like. There was a period in my life where that was my favorite movie that has cooled since as I learned what a boomer was. And so I'm sure it'll be a real fun conversation. Thanks everybody. Andrew to get us out of here.

[B]

All right, Glurp Glerp everyone, until we talk to you next week, please try to be happy. Happy. That was a Headgum podcast. Hi, I am Mandy Moore. Sterling K. Brown.

[A]

And I'm Chris Sullivan. And we host the podcast that Was Us now on Headgum.

[B]

Each episode we're gonna go into a deep dive from our show.

[A]

This is us.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

We're gonna go episode by episode. We're also gonna pepper in episodes with

[B]

different guest stars and writers and casting directors.

[A]

Are we gonna cry?

[B]

Yes, a little bit.

[A]

Are we gonna laugh a lot? A whole lot.

[B]

That's what I'm hoping, man. Listen to that Was Us on your favorite podcast app or watch full video episodes on YouTube. Or Spotify New episodes every Tuesday.