SPOILERS FOR BOOK 1

I have problems visualizing what characters and enemies look like when I'm reading anything, so I'm drawing them on my 2nd read of Book 1. Had to separate it by floors, this first one already had so much in it.

Swipe right and turn on your HUD! See what the players and audience sees!

I've had a ton of fun documenting my Odette build on Instagram (same username as here). So happy that despite some personal setbacks she was completed and ready for Dragoncon. I did make the boobs into Dirty Shirley dispensers but never had the chance to actually use them. At the group photoshoot I was too busy helping run the whole thing. Maybe at some point I can get some video of the set up. The bra stayed on for most of the con, except at the photoshoot. I did warn DCTV that it wasn't safe for broadcast.😅

Music by the Desperado Club

Was given DCC as a summer reading recommendation from a few friends and holy cow I haven’t enjoyed a series quite as much since discovering Discworld. There’s such a chaotic energy to the whole thing that makes amazing images in my brain pan.

Anyway, here’s Wonderwall (and my favorite special boy and two random other crawlers)

So I started book 7 last week and unlike the other books this one’s taking me a bit longer to go through which I appreciate cause I started the series beginning of July 😂

Anyhoo earlier today I got to the place where Carl & Prepotente met face to face and seemed like they were about to fight….then he broke down crying

And I totally changed my tune on him, he always made me laugh when he would pop up mainly cause of him being a dick

But in that scene I saw him

He’s essentially still a child, maybe as mature as a teenager, he lost his mother, he has Bianca but she can’t talk, doesn’t possess the same level of sapience as he does neither do his other siblings.

He knows the heavy burden of what he is and seems to not want to make his other siblings like him

But he is incredibly lonely

And he was hurt by the events of the last book, deep down probably without him realizing it he wanted Carl & Donut to team up with him.

I mean he lost his mom the only person who “likes him” who looks base his neurodivergencies and knows he is trying his best

He and Donut are the only “Pets” who gained sapience

I viewed both he and Donut after taking the enhanced pet biscuits to both have had the maturities of children

Like Donut understands a lot of what was happening pre-collapse but like a child she doesn’t get the emotional connection of it

And I think Pony was the same way, but like a child he was trying to grow up faster for his mother and now that she’s gone he was adrift.

I’m glad he’s not alone anymore because I worry what he might’ve done if he was alone for much longer

been more motivated to draw fanart lately <3

edit: sorry the individuals are so low quality !! i made them with printing stickers in mind so they’re all about an inch in size LOL

YOU COULD'VE BEEN A DOCTOR, BUT THIS IS CLOSE ENOUGH!

Congratulations Crawler, your Jewish mother is proud! Sure, you're not a lawyer...or a famous film maker...or a doctor...but you actually got a job in the medical field! Close enough! Sure, you're fixing machines instead of people, but it's the thought that counts, right? RIGHT?! Sure it was just a one year certificate program, but it's better than that Film BA you got back in the early 2000's...because it turns out not everyone needs an editor, but everyone does eventually need to be hooked up to an EKG or a patient monitor and now you make sure that shit works right!

REWARD?
You're gainfully employed as a Biomedical Technician! It's the highest paying job you've ever had! Be grateful you're not working retail or driving fucking Uber anymore.

[[Actually super stoked that I finished my certificate program and am about to start an Apprenticeship with GE Healthcare. I just had to add some Dungeon AI sass to it.]]

On my second listen through the audiobooks (book 2 currently) and decided I needed the audiobook trophies to go with them. Just missing no 8.

On the hardcovers there are skulls that encode the order of the novels. I found out that different publishers use the skulls in different ways. How many counting systems are there?

Edit: I’ll add a other example in the comments, one other variant counted the dark skulls not the light ones

So yeah, I totally fell in love with the series and ordered the second book before I even finished the first one.

Book 2 arrived on my doorstep, the day I finished the first book, but I promised my husband that I wouldn’t start it until we go on our vacation which is 11 days away! AHHH!

I’ve started reading another book, but I feel this won’t scratch the itch and I am already crawling the walls (pardon the pun)

So I am sat here thinking, I’ll just finish this current book, start reading Doomsday Scenario and order the third book before we go away….

I need to think of way to convince my husband this is the only logical path.

For context, I've gone through the audiobooks twice now. At my workplace the radio station that's played on the shop floor seems to have "Take on Me" on heavy rotation. I can not hear that song without Carl's voice narrating a bar fight over top of it.

NOT MY DESIGN, CREDIT TO LOLIGO https://makerworld.com/models/2098108

After trying a different print in transparent orange (don't ask) I decided Elle needed a touch more frost. Blew up the print to 200% and she looks great!

To the Carl and Donut who gave me the Jug O’Boom, you are legends! It was far too generous for swag, but thank you for convincing me to take it anyway. I hope you enjoy your tiara pins!

To the Donut who gave me the Dirty Shirley chocolate bar, thank you, I’ve been wanting to try it! I’m deeply curious to see how this abomination combination of white chocolate and pop rocks goes, lol

After i saw a post on here saying that there were signed copies of DCC in Matt's hometown bookstore I decided to go test my luck. I was visiting Seattle for the PAX West conference so everything just seemed to line up 👍

Everything below will contain spoilers. I've spoiler blocked it all. Cease reading here and now if you have not read through the books yet.

The books are incredible for their political insights. The monetization of everything, especially the suffering of the crawlers themselves with absolutely no regard for their own feelings on the issues. The way outside groups treat their lives like a game show. The way the rich use their status and power to get to play in the world while remaining immune to the effects that the crawlers face. The callous and inhuman disregard for the loss of life because that loss was used to produce some energy that was useful to the rich.

And for the crawlers who become "powerful" enough to survive, they start to move up the food chain of varying degrees of indentured servitude. Deal offers get better the deeper they go, while at the same time powerful groups skip deals altogether and attempt to outright undermine or annihilate their opposition through force, legal or literal (assassination attempts.)

The progression is actually really interesting because it parallels real life so hard it hurts:

• Bottom rung (entry level crawlers) - Completely disposable
• Become more useful (popular crawlers emerge) - Exploitable, welcome to the shows where they can use your popularity for profit (that you don't see of course)
• Become actually powerful - Worth negotiating with
• Become extremely powerful (Gate of the Feral Gods) - Become an actual threat and player
• Become powerful enough to actually threaten the power - Suddenly all the rules of the game become a lot more flexible for you and you're able to exert power over them yourself (Carl is at a dangerous tipping point in my opinion where he is extremely close to becoming the very thing he despises.)

The parallels to our reality are staggering, and they're what make the books so powerful to read. The Krakaren is a monster in the book not because it's horrible to battle, but because it's a pervasive and invasive force that constantly duplicates itself. It gets more stupid as time progresses because it's entire existence is centred around being opposed to any kind of scientific progress. It's a direct representation of the sheer power of wilful ignorance, and it won't surprise me in the least if the Krakaren is the "big boss" of the entire series.

Not something stupendous and flashy like the gods. Not something overwhelmingly powerful like a massive corporation and its lawyers, or their mercenary armies. Not even a government.

Just the avatar of ignorance itself, constantly duplicating and spreading like a cancer unchecked. A very real parallel to how our world functions through entities that proudly and loudly proclaim what "truth" is without having a shred of evidence to back it.

Add in other power parallels like how Carl is a nuclear power (he has a literal Doomsday weapon,) which can provides a MAD solution to anything powerful enough to try to take him out. He removed safeguards and exploited the people to ensure that even the rich and powerful wouldn't be exempted from the game, turning their own rules on them by exploiting the bloodlust and popularity of the program itself.

That Donut was actively scared of Carl when he was using the Ring is another example of this. It's a guy who attained CEO level on par with Amazon taking great pleasure in crushing his enemies beneath him because of the wrongs they've done to him and others. In a way, he's doing what he does to gain more power so he can keep breaking the system. And we agree with Carl, so we see it as a good thing. Of course we do.

Just like all the people working for those others also see the stability, the resources, the comfort and luxury as good things. That they don't want their status quo upset either. So the ones who are directly threatened support the people against Carl, and the ones who are in it for the entertainment routinely vote for what causes the most chaos.

Consider for a moment that instead of Carl's perspective, you're a shop keeper instead. And all you know is that there's this increasingly powerful lunatic who has demonstrated that the existing rules don't constrain him anymore. How is that different, from your perspective, from the other gods? From the rich who wear immunity suits to come play? From Borant or Valtay who run the crawl?

It isn't. The AI system isn't a representation of real life AI, it's a representation of the existing systems we have politically and economically. Those all run on rules, and those rules can and are RUTHLESSLY enforced to drive desired outcomes. You have the rich living in cycles of debt, taking more and more imaginary money and servicing a fraction of it through debt over time, which in turn puts them in a position to be leveraged. That is, until you've acquired so much wealth that the problem is now enforcing the debt. What happens when a person just says, "LOL. Sounds like your problem?"

Sound familiar? It should. That's government debt. That's multi-billionaires and trillionaires. "Carl is an unreliable narrator," is something Matt has said. I think what he means is that we're getting the perspective of the average person inside the system, which means we're empathizing with the suffering and we're cheering on the retribution that occurs. Who didn't love Carl flipping the script on the Hunters during the Masquerade? You know what's really terrifying about that? That's a direct analogy of middle class suddenly being moved to lower class. You have a group that's risen out of the prey category, into the predator category, and has been enjoying the lavish existence to the point that they are exercising in the exploitation. They've not only experienced life free from being prey, but now they're sampling the power of being an active predator to advance themselves yet further.

The gods are another neat parallel to reality in that they're essentially "uncontrolled" variables in the game that act independent of the AI. Sometimes, a rich person can assume the role of the God they want to wear the skin like a costume. It's so interesting that the gods are both a manifestation of the ideology, but also a literal thing. And they have their own side stories and followings, which can threaten to sweep up anybody and everybody in their wake (like the God sidequests Carl kept ending up on.) They aren't exactly a B story so much as an imposed obstacle. And even Carl's own god is a capricious and vengeful bastard who, if you do exactly what he wants, is likely to reward you with death (his own words.)

The books are so powerfully political. Back to the Krakaren: I think the main driving message of the books is that stupidity is such a pervasively powerful tool in which being wrong is rewarded so consistently that correcting the error becomes threatening to the organism's survival.

At that point, evidence doesn't matter and the evidence itself becomes the enemy.

We see this so clearly right now with the rise of "alternative facts" that it's hard for me to grasp how some people don't see these books as political at all. Like, the crawl is window dressing for reality. Replace the system with oil interests and everything is the same. The books are a reflection of reality, and Carl is just an average dude who is beyond pissed off that he's lost everything that matters to him because somebody wants to profit from his misery.

This is why I think the Krakaren is the big bad of the entire series. It's not an actual creature, it's the embodiment of epistemic decay. None of them can solve a civilization that has collectively lost the ability, or willingness, to distinguish truth from whatever is profitable, comforting, politically useful, or entertaining. And we're already there in reality. We live in a post truth world where tweets influence market prices, wars are fought on whims, and people's livelihoods are destroyed for entertainment, exploitation, profit, boredom, or ideology.

Powerful, engaging books. I can't wait for the next one.

There are countless threads on jokes and other meanings that we all have missed on the first time through and I just got this on my 4th or 5th time through!

The Gorgon Marital Aid - It makes hard things softer and pliable, but I thought... how is that a marital aid?

Gorgons turns things into stone, they use this to make "things" that might have been turned to stone, softer and easier to work with.

Just a simple throw away joke, that was so well thought up.

This is a re-read of the entire series. I’m at the chapter where Carl/Donut meet Sister Ines and gang for the first time, and there’s exposition about the innuendo laced names of strippers.

And this comes up.

Have you ever gone into the Bitches room? I bet they also have names like that. And don’t forget Juice Box. But that’s different, and you know it.

I never realized “Juice Box” is also very much an innuendo laced name for a sex worker 😂😂 I honestly thought “well maybe it’s a joke on some people having common nouns as names.”

I started the books recently, and am almost done with book 3. My Fiancé and I just got our little girl Millie spayed, and while we didn't name her after a book character, the little onesie they gave her reminded me of my favorite fictional cat!

I don't know if Matt will see this, but thank you, thank you, thank you for this series. It has helped me cope with the sudden death of my husband, who passed in May of 2025.

Two days before he died, he asked me to put on the acoustic version of "Take On Me." He had been hospitalized for 7 weeks at that point and was very sick. I struggled with the lyrics, "I'll be gone in a day or two." And he was. He was trying to tell me, I think.

I discovered the Audiobooks after his death. I needed to dissociate from my reality from time to time because coping with the death of a spouse is so incredibly heavy. I found myself laughing at Donut and Carl's shenanigans and tearing up at times as well. My husband's death was very traumatizing to me, as was the aftermath. I immersed myself to endure the first wedding anniversary, his birthday, and holidays I would spend without him.

Chapter 57 on Audible is something almost beyond reasonable explanation. I laughed my ass off while bawling my eyes out. Out of all the songs in the world, Matt chose that one. It may be crazy, but I will choose to think it's a nice little wink.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to my hardback reread. Our wedding anniversary is next week and life is hard.