One of the things I love about Dungeon Crawler Carl is that it's nuanced in its portrayal of capitalism while still being vicious satire. Like, some of the \"bad guys\" are just other people trapped within the system, while others are gleeful participants. I think the reason I personally empathize so much with Carl is that he doesn't really care. I mean, he clearly does care, but he recognizes that ultimately, all of these people are complicit in the genocide of life on earth. To Carl, deciding to participate in a system that does that makes you fair game no matter your reasons for doing it. If you're a Hunter, does it really matter why you came to earth to hunt? To feed your family or to get rich or because you were ordered to? You're still slaughtering the last remnants of the human race. You're still committing atrocities. So if you're there and you come across him, he'll still kill you to help preserve the human race... and as vengeance for their extinction.
\nDoes it matter why people commit atrocities... especially when they're in the midst of actually committing them? Does it matter whether the soldier shooting children feels real bad about it? If you have the chance to take the shot and stop him, do you reflect on whether he wants to be there? I don't think you do. You take the shot, you save the kids.
\nWhat about a less lurid example? The Earth's ecosystem is being destroyed by fossil fuel emissions. If you work in that industry, at any level, you are as complicit as the guy who drove the delivery truck full of Zyklon-B to the Nazi camps. If you work on an oil rig, you are complicit in the impending collapse that oil is causing. And you can say you don't have a choice, but there's always a choice. You can not take the job and let yourself or your own family suffer so that you aren't part of making billions of others suffer. You can walk away and go be a monk. But you don't, because you want the most money you can get and, for you, that means working on the rigs or in the fields or the refineries or the power stations.
\nMy grandfather worked in oil. He built refineries and power plants and pipelines - he designed the electrical and control systems for the Alaska pipeline. He had the excuse that maybe he didn't really know how bad it would get, but his industry knew. If he didn't know it's because, like most people, he didn't want to.
\nIf you're the regular person who's forced to play your part in atrocity due to circumstance, how does that make you any different than the innocent person killed by the system you're part of? If you're a conscripted German soldier in 1944, are you as innocent a victim as the guy in the camp you're fighting, indirectly or otherwise, to protect so that it can complete its objective of genocide? If it's a choice between killing you to liberate those camps, or let the people in them die because you and your buddies weren't given a choice and don't deserve to die, is it equally bad to kill you as to let those prisoners die?
\nThese are questions we need to ask ourselves. Carl doesn't - he's in perhaps the most extreme situation any human has ever faced and he does not have the luxury of reflection. Everyone who works for Dungeon Crawler World, everyone who invests in it and plays it voluntarily, everyone who watches it or makes money off merch or as a media commentator, they're all guilty and all complicit. Even Zev is part of it. And all of them are culpable in the extinction of humanity.
\nThat's part of why these books are so cathartic to those of us living through a time when we see the exact same thing happening, just on a less accelerated ratings-driven schedule: humanity is being made extinct for profit and for fun.
\nIt would be lovely to have Carl's certainty and capability sometimes, would it?
\n","wordCount":692,"charCount":3800,"replyCount":0,"reactCount":0,"reactPreview":null,"reactSummary":null,"shareCount":0,"image":"file:6a733e7e500e3c4121c7ae36@kwln.social","attachments":[],"tags":[],"originDomain":"kwln.social","createdAt":"2026-08-05T13:45:34.759Z","updatedAt":"2026-08-05T13:45:34.771Z","id":"post:6a733e7e500e3c4121c7ae3a@kwln.social","url":"https://kwln.social/posts/post:6a733e7e500e3c4121c7ae3a@kwln.social","server":"@kwln.social","summary":"One of the things I love about Dungeon Crawler Carl is that it's nuanced in its portrayal of capitalism while still being vicious satire. Like, some of the \"bad guys\" are just other people trapped within the system, while others are gleeful participants. I think the reason I personally empathize so much with Carl is that he doesn't really care. I mean, he clearly does care, but he recognizes that ultimately, all of these people are complicit in the genocide of life on earth. To Carl, deciding to participate in a system that does that makes you fair game no matter your reasons for doing it. If you're a Hunter, does it really matter why you came to earth to hunt? To feed your family or to get rich or because you were ordered to? You're still slaughtering the last remnants of the human race. You're still committing atrocities. So if you're there and you come across him, he'll still kill you to help preserve the human race... and as vengeance for their extinction.
\nDoes it matter why people commit atrocities... especially when they're in the midst of actually committing them? Does it matter whether the soldier shooting children feels real bad about it? If you have the chance to take the shot and stop him, do you reflect on whether he wants to be there? I don't think you do. You take the shot, you save the kids.
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