Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinneman is so millennial it felt like I had time traveled to my youth, grabbing a maple bacon doughnut while donning my red plaid trilby between seeing Idiocracy and grabbing a case of Bawls for an over night LAN party.

Look. I’m going to say a lot of words to you about what I think this book does well and why I think some of its juvenile, facile humor is in service of what it’s trying to say. But the truth is this book is going to lose a fair few readers before it gets to making that point, and I don’t blame them at all for that. Dungeon Crawler Carl encapsulates what I’ve heard called the South Park Problem many times, although I think it makes its points from a less mean-spirited point of view. The problem is, especially if you are part of the status quo that you are attempting to comment on… is there actually an effective way to lampoon something that isn’t punching down? Can you satirize a society in a way that doesn’t reinforce that society’s biases, especially if you want to talk about about the biases? Is everything truly fair game?

Dungeon Crawler Carl started as LitRPG first published on Royal Road. It is, on its face, a story about a meathead Navy vet with very little internal life who’s just broken up with a cartoonishly awful girlfriend, and winds up in a death game fighting his way through a dungeon with his ex’s Persian cat as a companion. Through the lens of video games, livestreaming, reality TV and pro wrestling – and an apocalyptic survival death game-- Dinneman weaves a tale that discusses the frustrations of being just a cog in the machine, crushed down by impossible powers, and muses on the options of fighting back a system you must try to play within in order to survive. Its critiques of the manosphere and entertainment-conglomerate capitalism and addictive video game play are not so much on the nose as they are punching you in the face.

I do think there’s enough political commentary in Dungeon Crawler Carl to be interesting, especially how deftly it ties in the narratives around video game design, both in mechanics and narratives, and turning one’s life into entertainment to feed the beast of capitalism. This may serve as an excellent introduction to the more adolescent or less educated audience that this book seems to be reaching, but I would not go into these books expecting much that hasn’t been said before by similar properties.

At this point in the series, at least, Dungeon Crawler Carl lands in a lukewarm place where it discusses the problem but doesn’t go in too deeply. It’s probably enough to upset right wing gamer chuds but not enough to satisfy terminally online lefties who consume a majority of their political rhetoric from the fiction produced by capital. Something something “Capitalism has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself” disco elysium.

Dungeon Crawler Carl also has a lot feet jokes, and I honestly think the funniest thing about those is just watching other readers get really mad or disgusted about it. It’s not that funny on its own but I appreciate the absurdity. And I do think the absurdity is the point of a lot of those types of jokes in the book. It has boob jokes. It is the first time I’ve read “swami” (referring to a white woman wearing a towel) or “nads” in a few decades, I think, and I don’t really believe there was a need for that. Ditto to fatphobic remarks or pejorative references to the Special Olympics.

Its discussion of racism tries to hit a nail about how POC are disproportionately victimized and portrayed in stereotypical ways to build ugly, self-serving narratives and strikes itself on the foot pretty squarely instead. It hurts itself in its confusion, and pretty strongly demonstrates that sometimes satire accidentally comes off as enforcing the ideas it’s trying to make fun of.

Are there women in this book? There’s a female cat.

Are there POC? The first few get killed horribly or are already dead, and then the rest are working class heroes who don’t have much character, but then again, even Carl himself doesn’t have much character at this point.

Are they queer people? I mean, there’s a plot point involving gay RPF, and while it’s clearly a joke, it doesn’t feel like it’s out of disgust or homophobia so much as who the RPF concerns. However, some may feel like it’s crossing a line or makes too much of a mockery of the idea.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is straight, white cisgender dude, he doesn’t have pants, he has a talking cat friend who shoots missiles. The book is among the less wordy of LitRPGs (so I hear), so while there’s a huge focus on explaining game mechanics, loot, and progression, it’s not overwhelming. All of that progression feels tied to a larger apocalyptic story where Earth is being quite literally crushed down for resources (just like the working class, if you’re paying attention). If that doesn’t sound like a good time to you then it won’t be a good time for you. To be honest, I was skeptical myself and still enjoyed it immensely. I thought this would be awful in a campy sort of way and it landed squarely in the ‘better than it needed to be’ column. It’s like potato chips. You should probably be doing something better with your time and consuming something more nutritious. But damn it’s hard to resist the crunch.

Is it funny? I thought it was funny, but I literally went to high school in the same county as Matt Dinneman around the same time, so to me, even the dumbest jokes felt a lot like shooting shit with my friends while sitting in the court yard at lunch or community college in the early 00s. My real world friend Carl was no Navy guy, but a skinny long-haired stoner who’d lick the wall or eat three giant packages of Peeps on a dare. You didn’t even have to pay him, he just did weird shit because we all thought it was funny. We all probably should have been a bit more worried about Carl’s well-being.

Going back to the South Park comparison, here’s the thing – the narrative, especially the voice of the video game AI, seem to be working hard to create an environment of unserious pessimism. Everything is fair game because nothing matters, it’s all a joke. I personally believe that this, just as much as the extremely harsh and unforgiving environment Carl fights his way through, is an obstacle dead-set on killing Carl. I think it’s easy to forget because the jokes are so off-putting. Because if it’s all stupid and it’s all jokes you don’t have to dig into what’s being said. But by the end, it feels pretty clear what side of the narrative Carl is trying to be on, and that he’s not buying in.

There is a sort of chaotic hope to Carl’s survival, a throughline of cautious optimism that I think threads it closer to the works Ed Wright than the cynicism of Matt and Trey Parker. I’ll be reading on.