My Dungeon Crawler Carl rant
I’ll try to keep this as spoiler free as possible, and I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, but I got a lil bit of beef with Dungeon Crawler Carl.
I’ve listened to them all (just started Parade of Horribles) and I have been getting so frustrated at how convoluted everything is. I think that’s supposed to be part of the quirky wacky fun, but the plot lines can be downright incomprehensible at times. That’s something I have a hard time looking past.
It’s so frustrating because I absolutely love Carl and Donut, overall the books are pretty funny (though sometimes the humor wanders dangerously close to random XD territory) and I really like the premise. Aliens coming to Earth, terraforming the planet into a giant dungeon, and forcing all of humanity to survive and compete for the entertainment of the wider universe is such a fun idea, but the execution is just so hard to follow sometimes.
Honestly, what was the conflict between the dirigible gnomes and the camel people in book 4 and what did Quetzalcoatlus have to do with it? Really think about the details of that plot line. It’s basically impossible to follow, and that is so hard for me to overlook. I like it when I know what the hell is happening in a story. That’s just one example, but there are so many. It feels like Dinneman just writes the first thing that pops into his head and rolls with it. A lot. Which I understand is something writers do, but it’s constant, and then the myriad details actually matter to the story.
Who is Samantha? What is her story? To my understanding, she is the demon Summaith summoned by an incel wizard into the body of a sex doll, but he was actually trying to summon a goddess he was in love with but got Summaith instead because of something to do with her daughter that he also summoned? And she’s a slime? But the slime died, and Samantha is sad about that I think? And she’s only a head because she was frozen when Carl and Donut found her and they accidentally broke her head off… why was she frozen again? Like I get that maybe all these details don’t matter but Samantha is a major character. I like the origins of my major characters to be somewhat coherent, ya know?
One of the things that frustrated me right off the bat is book 8 was Samantha’s catch up. I was glad to hear we would get a recap, because honestly despite just finishing book seven I barely knew what was happening half the time, and then her recap made almost no sense. And it was lampshaded like that was the point or something. In chapter 3 Carl looks at something borderline incomprehensible and thinks to himself “I have no idea what I’m looking at.” Like yeah dude, I feel your pain. I wish I knew what was going on too. I just got off the First Law trilogy, where I was never at any point confused as to what was happening, and going into this feels like I stuck my head in a beehive.
I dunno. Maybe I’m just missing the point of it all. Maybe the incoherent plotlines are part of the charm and it’s just going over my head. The overarching stories are easy enough to follow, but the moment to moment plots can be so difficult to understand for me. It sucks because I really want to like these, hell some part of me does because I’ve gotten this far, and sunk cost fallacy dictates that I don’t want to give up now, but I find myself pausing every few minutes in frustration because the nonsensical BS is just relentless. Anyone else feel that way? Anyway, that’s my rant. Just wanted to get it out there because it’s been bugging the hell out of me.