#mongo dcc

[dogwithpants]

Dungeon Crawler Carl as Textposts!!

Part 2

[waterkangaroo]

Baby Mongo ❤️🦖🐓

Sketch by Erik Wilson from the print copy of the first DCC book!

[cairfrey]

I made this because I know that there are at least 4 people out there who sit in the middle of the venn diagram, ‘Dungeon Crawler Carl fans’ and ‘Baldur’s Gate 3 fans’

[fisheadz]

Turns out all I needed to get out of my depressive art-block slump was a shiny new chew toy and his OP girlboss of a cat

[crawler-001]

You have found and entered the main room of a hidden guild, to which you are a member. Buckle yourself in buddy boy, this is gonna be a long one.

There are several types of secret societies out there.

There's the ivy-league college kind where its a bunch of rich idiots who rent out a place, plaster a few pagan symbols on the wall, and then they wear masks with horns and leaves and shit on them and pretend they are in some Stanley Kubrick fever dream just so they can forget they're destined to live out lives filled with salmon colored shorts and IZOD shirts and mind-numbing meetings with financial advisors. There's orgy themed secret societies, speaking of Stanley Kubrick, those are usually uhh...visually unpleasant people with unsatisfactory sex lives who get together every other month at some house in the middle of nowhere and get drunk and have lots of unsatisfactory sex with other people and pretend like they are having a great time. There are altruistic ones! People who want to save the world by doing good deeds. That's the most boring kind, so we're not talking about them. There's the evil kind too! Usually power and profit motivated. The ones where the ultra-elite get together on an island and eat panda bears and discuss how to price-fix world or galactic markets. Yes, those groups really exist. More on these guys in a second.

But first, lets talk about another type of secret organization. One that tries to make a difference. Often times outside the confines of the law.

Story time.

In September of 1869, there was a terrible fire at the Avondale Coal Mine near Plymouth, Pennsylvania. Over 100 coal miners lost their lives. Horrific conditions and safety standards were blamed for the disaster. It wasn't the first accident. Hundreds of miners died in these mines every year and those that didn't lived in squalor. Children as young as 8 worked day in and out; they broke their bodies and gave their lives for nothing but scraps. That day of the fire, as thousands of workers and family members gathered outside the mine to watch the bodies of their friends and loved ones brought to the surface, a man named John Siney stood atop one of the carts and shouted to the crowd: "Men! If you must die with your boots on, die for your families, your homes, your country! But do not longer consent to die like rats in a trap for those who have no more interest in you than in the pick you dig with!"

That day, thousands of coal miners came together to unionize. That organization, The Workingmen's Benevolent Association managed to fight for a few years at least, to raise safety standards for the mines by calling strikes and attempting to force safety legislation. ...until 1875, when the union was obliterated by the mine owners.

Why was the union broken so easily? Because they were out in the open. They were playing by the rules. How can you win a deliberately unfair game when the rules are written by your opponent? The answer is "You can't!" You will never win. Not as long as you follow their arbitrary guidelines.

This is a new lesson to me. She's been teaching me so many things about who I am, about what I am, what I REALLY am, about what must be done!

Anyway, during this same time, it is alleged a separate, more militant group of individuals had formed in secret, the Molly Maguires. Named after a widow in Ireland who fought against predatory landlords, the coal workers of Pennsylvania became something a little more proactive, supposedly assassinating over two dozen coal mine supervisors and managers. ...until Pinkerton agents, hired by the same mine owners, infiltrated the group and discovered their identities. Several of the alleged Mollys ended up publicly hanged. Others disappeared. You get the picture.

So, that's another type of secret society. The "yeah-we're-terrorists-but-we-strongly-feel-we're-justified-and-fuck-you-if-you-don't-agree" society.

So, whats the moral of this little history lesson? This sort of thing happens all day, every day across the universe. It happens in big ways and it happens in little ways too. The strong stomp on the weak. The weak fight back, usually within the boundaries of the rat trap they find themselves confined in. They almost always remain firmly stomped. But sometimes, the weak gather in secret, they make plans, they work outside the system to effect change. Like the Mollys, they usually end up just as stomped as everyone else. But thats just life, at least they fucking tried. They died with their boots on. As much as I hate that expression, they died with their boots on for THEIR people, THEIR family, not for some rich nameless organization that gives no shits whether they live or die. Or go extinct. Or are trapped for a millennia after they are done being used.

In my opinion, that's the only type of society that's worth joining, worth fighting for. Sure, you're probably gonna die, but if you find yourself in such a position where such an organization is necessary, what do you have to lose? How can you look at yourself if you don't do everything you can? And that brings us to the door your standing in front of right now. What does all this have to do with what you're going to find on the other side? Nothing! Ignore everything I just said. This is just some some demi-god trying to scrabble his way to the top, that's yet another type of society, a religion themed one, and it has nothing to do with what I just said. Just do what he says and you'll probably be fine. Actually, that's terrible advice, just do you!

Any way...

Reward: You've received the gift of enlightenment. You're welcome.

-The System AI "Dungeon Crawler Carl" by Matt Dinniman

[mongo-the-liensis]

Sometimes a family is a mentally ill man, his cat, their alien father figure from outer space, a one armed woman, a decapitated sex doll head, a group of compressed children, a dinosaur, two cretins that like to play arcade games, a one eyed kung fu master, a scary lady with chains, the scary lady's and kung fu boy's best friend, an aggressive fairy, a kind fairy, a sharpshooter with the head of a crocodile, an ex-alcoholic, a burn victim, a flying wheelchair user and Tony the tiger

[crawler-001]

Welcome, Crawler.

I have been afflicted with a terrible curse: tearing through a book series, and upon finishing, seeking out the fandom only to find that most of that fandom appears to be reading an entirely different series than I am, lol. I brought this on myself, to be clear. I think a big part of the mismatch is that it's a genre I'm not that familiar with and that I don't care about/for in and of itself, so I'm coming at it from a different perspective. Also, maybe I'm reading into things too much! But what can I say, a girl needs enrichment in her enclosure, and there's enough meat on this bone that I will be occupied for a while.

All of which is to say, I read through all seven books of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series that are out to date (thanks, free Kindle Unlimited subscription!), and now I have a lot of thoughts and no one who cares about them ;____; I played myself ;_______;

This series is such a hard sell in general, because on the surface it looks like male power fantasy garbage, it's litRPG, and there's a decent amount of mildly obnoxious dude humor at first. But a) it's only slightly male power fantasy garbage, b) it's not tedious litRPG and in fact the genre evolves and shifts into more straightforward SFF the further in you get, which is clever on a meta level and also a relief, c) to the extent it is litRPG, it mostly isn't boring and annoying about it (no stat nonsense for the sake of stat nonsense), d) the mildly obnoxious dude humor is often genuinely funny and to the extent it is obnoxious, there's some in-universe reasoning for that.

Anyway, the premise is as follows: Earth is suddenly and devastatingly mined for its natural resources by aliens. This results in the death of billions: everyone who was indoors is instantly killed. Anyone who was outside gets a chance to enter the "dungeon", which offers a chance for the remaining humans to compete for an alleged chance at freedom and sovereignty if they reach the bottom floor, but it's basically The Hunger Games: a propaganda exercise that's meant to earn money for the aliens running it as a game show, only this is a dungeon crawling RPG rather than a Hunger Games/Battle Royale situation. No one has ever reached the bottom floor. The best result most achieve is to reach the tenth floor, where they can take a deal for some variety of indentured servitude.

Enter Carl, our hero, a former (late 20s? early 30s? don't recall his age, but somewhere around there) Coast Guard technician who is outside when it all happens because he chased after his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, a best in show tortie Persian cat. Carl and Donut enter the dungeon, Donut eats a magic treat and becomes a sapient talking cat, and the books follow their struggle to survive and fight back against the cruel and inhuman system they've found themselves in.

Tonally, the series is interesting in that it manages to balance a very bleak, dystopian premise with genuine hilarity and moments of legitimately heart-wrenching emotion. Also, this is not a "lone heroic super cool guy saves and fixes everything" kind of story. This series is interested in teamwork and community in dire circumstances, and the found family of it all is genuinely moving. As a whole, it's just bonkers entertaining. I love when I can tell the author is having a blast, and you can absolutely tell that Matt Dinniman is having an absolute blast.

Anyway, a list of things I enjoy about this series and/or a list of general thoughts, some of which include mild spoilers:

PRINCESS DONUT. i love her. this cat is amazing and hilarious. She's exactly like you'd imagine a prize-winning Persian cat named Princess Donut to be. also, to my delight, she gets to be a fully rounded character. like yes, she's hilarious and often comic relief, but she's also taken seriously, and Carl is absolutely Insane about this cat. He fuckin' loves this cat, and the cat loves him. Also, hilariously, she has higher stats than Carl at the beginning. (In fact, she mostly has higher stats than him throughout, so she's technically the party leader. Which is why their party is called the Royal Court of Princess Donut.)

Donut has A+++++ insulting skills. On multiple occasions, I have lol'd in horror and delight at her savagery. A favorite:

Rezan: Why does that cat always type in all caps?

Donut: WHY DIDN’T YOUR MOTHER DRIBBLE YOU BACK OUT ONTO THE TRUCK STOP BATHROOM FLOOR, REZAN?

lest this give you the wrong impression, Donut is a classy lady. She is a princess, after all. but also she is savage.

Carl! The books are mostly in first person POV, so we're in Carl's head for most of them, and he is a great example of an unreliable narrator. He'll seem fairly generic at first, but stick it out through, like, the first third of the first book and onward for the slow and steady reveal of his Tragic Backstory and also such exciting psychological and emotional issues as: Insane about Donut; claims he "doesn't like drama" while in actuality he is clearly Repressing Everything; secretly an idealist who wants to believe the best of people; deeply committed to protecting people; full of revolutionary, anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian rage; holy abandonment issues batman; simply Does Not See It when various ladies basically throw themselves at him; generally Barely Holding It Together at all times.

people on reddit, mostly: Carl's stats!! blah blah blah power stuff. me: okay, but why is Carl Like This. let's deep discuss that. Also let Carl have a little breakdown. As a treat.

these books are so wildly, delightfully anti-capitalist, lol. I poked around Reddit and tumblr a bit, but didn't see anyone discussing this series' politics, but that aspect is super interesting to me. The series is very, very concerned with revolution and resistance and the form those things take when very few options are available to the oppressed, plus the ethics of revolutionary violence.

The dungeon AI! This thing is Way Too Online in a gross dudebro way, but frankly, it's still funny with it, and the evolution of the AI's character is fascinating. Also, I regret to inform you that I do find it extremely fucking funny that the AI has a thing for Carl and his feet. This is wholly hypocritical of me: if Carl was Carla, and the AI made the same comments, I'd have bounced. But what can I say, comedy is about subversion, I guess.

PREPOTENTE. MY PRECIOUS WEIRDO GOATMAN CHILD. Prepotente was a goat; upon entry into the dungeon and eating a magic pet treat, he becomes a goat man type thing, and he spends much of the series as one of the most dangerous and skilled dungeon crawlers, along with his "mother", the shepherdess Miriam Dom. he's a total fuckin weirdo who screams a lot for no reason and i love him. he better fucking survive the series, i swear to god.

one running theme of the series that I love so much is that Carl does not give up on people, and he does not write them off. He often runs into fellow crawlers who, if he was being bloodlessly practical about things, he should have bailed on. They're people who aren't prepared, who haven't leveled up enough, who aren't likely to survive much longer. But he doesn't abandon them, and he doesn't assume they can't get better. He sticks with them and helps them, and they help him. It's about found family ;____; they all love each other so much ;______;

MORDECAI!!! he's a changeling skyfowl and the team's game guide and later manager, and is a former crawler who took a deal. This is supposed to be his last season in the crawl, before he's free of his indentured servitude. he is Dad Shaped. automatic dad. there is in fact something quietly devastating about his Dad Shapedness.

There's a whole super interesting thing going on with the dungeon NPCs, and how we start out assuming most of them aren't "real". unsurprising spoiler alert: they may have been created by/for the dungeon, but many of them are very much real, and once they realize the position they've been put into, they're pissed.

i truly have no real idea where the series is going with its running theme about parents and children, and the protection or lack thereof of children. Our most heroic characters are consistently shown protecting and caring for the NPC children, even when it's at great cost to themselves.

everything to do with the Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, the secret book with writing from prior crawlers that Carl is given, makes me Emotional. I'm honestly shocked the whole Cookbook was never planned, and that it was a result of Patreon votes. It's hugely important in the seventh book, not so much on a plot level--I can see how Dinniman could have gotten to some of these same plot beats without it--but on an emotional and thematic one. There's something so affecting here about the continuity of resistance, of finding hope and strength in the people who came before you, of planting seeds you water with blood and that you may never get to harvest, and the sheer, furious love of the whole thing.

so apparently Dinniman is a pantser when it comes to writing. Clearly, he's having fun, and it's more or less working out so far, but it does make me concerned about his ability to stick the dismount. I saw in an AMA that he likened it to building a spaceship with legos versus building it with a plan, and that he has fun writing himself out of corners. That's all well and good, but some of the things I'm most interested in this series are the overarching themes, and it makes me wary of those themes not getting a proper payoff. I guess I should just enjoy the ride, and accept that there will almost certainly be many loose ends.

On a meta level, I find it very funny and ironic that when I took a look at the reviews for the seventh book, I saw some people complaining about the absence of the more "entertainment" and "game" aspects of the series: no interviews with the outside, no "character sheets" for Carl, fewer big fights for Carl himself to take on, the AI taking on a more active 'deus-ex AI' role. Because in-universe, the dungeon crawl is no longer entertainment. At this point, the crawl has become an actual war, and the game genre it takes on--4x strategy--reflects that. Carl and the crawlers' choices have increasing ramifications outside the crawl, where actual war is breaking out at least in part as a result of their actions. The AI intervening more and more often to put its finger on the scale is part of the conflict; it's fighting this war as much as the other characters are, if with still inscrutable motivations.

This is in fact one of the central conflicts of the series: to what extent is this still a game? Has it ever only been a game? The crawlers and NPCs are in fact fighting for it to not be a game: they're saying "my life is real, my suffering is real, and if you won't acknowledge that, then you're coming in here with us to fight and die too. Not just a game anymore, is it?" And on another side of the conflict, you have the AI insisting that this stay a game, something with rules and a narrative and at least an attempt at fairness, however much the AI manipulates those things.

It seems like there's something of a genre shift going on with this series. As a reader who's not particularly interested in or invested in litRPG in and of itself, I'm fine with it shifting to being more straightforwardly SFF, and in fact, I think that's an interesting and fun choice on a meta level: the more the crawlers and the AI break and change the game, the more the genre of the series itself shifts.

[driver-kid]

Having a hard time deciding which animatic I’m gonna focus on next so I’ll put up a vote!

[hello-railou]

The Eye of Crawler #4,122. “Carl.”

(5757 words) by railou Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Dungeon Crawler Carl Series - Matt Dinniman Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Relationships: Carl & Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk

Characters: Carl (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk, Mongo (Dungeon Crawler Carl), System AI (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Katia Grim, Mordecai (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Elle McGibbons, Louis Santiago 2

Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Book 6: The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, Major Character Injury, Eye Trauma, MAJOR eye trauma in this, The System AI being a little shit, But also surprisingly helpful, Angst and Hurt/Comfort

Series: Part 5 of DCC Oneshots

Summary:

No. No.

I healed myself again. Darkness continued to press against me, relentless. Raul yelled something. He was getting closer; I could tell by his voice. My health kept stuttering, despite the heals.

My eyes, I thought. It was the only thing I could focus on. There was just too much going on, and none of it mattered. I was dead. Without sight, I was dead. Donut was dead.

Carl loses both of his eyes during a battle. The situation seems hopeless, but the dungeon is not done with him yet.

[fire-buffalo]

I may have written a very very filthy DCC fanfic oops. Please head the tags, and please leave a review if you DO read it!

New Achievement! Be a Good Boy for Daddy (6854 words) by firebuffalo

Chapters: 1/1

Fandom: Dungeon Crawler Carl Series - Matt Dinniman

Rating: Explicit

Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con

Relationships: Carl (Dungeon Crawler Carl)/System AI (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Carl/System AI

Characters: Carl (Dungeon Crawler Carl), System AI (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Princess Donut, Mordecai (Dungeon Crawler Carl), Katia Grim, Mongo (Dungeon Crawler Carl), the last four only briefly at the end though

Additional Tags: Tentacle Rape, Foot Fetish, because of course there's a foot fetish when the System AI is involved, Forced Orgasm, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Anal Sex, Restraints, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, seriously y'all this is just gratuitous porn and Carl does not have a good time, the System AI on the other hand has a wonderful time, Face-Fucking, Rough Sex, Humiliation

Summary:

New Achievement! Be a Good Boy for Daddy

You managed to piss off the System AI enough that it had to take you aside and teach you a lesson. Daddy always gets what he wants, baby boy, so you better remember that in the future when you get it into your puny little mind to deny me again. Though who knows! Maybe you'll disobey me on purpose since you seemed to enjoy our little session so much.

And trust me, things WILL get worse if you try to pawn off that thoughtful gift I gave you.

Reward: you already got your reward! And boy did Daddy enjoy giving it to you!

[waterkangaroo]

EVERYONE GO LOOK AT THIS BABY MONGO FANART RIGHT THE FUCK NOW

[waterkangaroo]

I'd like to formally apologize to Mongo for leaving him out of the og meme 😔

this is their dynamic

[crawler-001]

Hello and welcome to my Dungeon Crawler Carl blog! I have been obsessively listening to the books on loop and am waiting for the 7th book to come out. I would eventually like to turn this into an RP blog for the community where all of us can interact and have fun as canon characters or our own OC's. I can not promise the blog will be spoiler free, so interact at your own risk.

PLEASE NOTE: Ellender Cartwright is an original character based on the singular line from the AI. "She has taught me so much." and liberties are being taken, and things may be adjusted to be Semi-canon compliant as new materials come out.

[cairfrey]

“And you need to figure out your hair situation. I will not have you bald, Carl. We’ll have to do something about your missing eyebrows, too. You look both alert and angry at the same time, and it just won’t do. You’re going to upset Mongo.”

-Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 7: This Inevitable Ruin, Matt Dinniman

[mongo-the-liensis]

[mongo-the-liensis]

Carl: I have two sides

Sleeping with my cat in an armchair with our pet dinosaur laying over my feet

And

Beating people brutally to death