Ok look I know everyone is freaking out about "This has always been a tragedy."
And like, yes, it's a beautiful poignant reminder.
But I'm not shocked by it?
It's an apocalypse story. But it straddles the line between being a during the apocalypse story and an after the apocalypse story in that there is no happy ending,
because there is no way of undoing what has been done.
Dungeon Crawler Carl isn't a story about building the infrastructure needed to survive loosing everything. It's a story about losing everything.
Like, best case scenario is that Carl brings the rest of the universe into the same amount of destruction as they visited upon the earth.
The best case scenario is that everyone is struggling in the mud to rebuild.
That's the choice that Carl made when he disabled the locking mechanism. To bring everyone down to the situation that he is in. Which, to be clear, is an apocalypse.
Here's what we know about the remaining human population:
There's 20,000 earth humans trapped in indenture contracts of the dungeon, futures uncertain.
Even if there are other crawls, which I doubt, the reward is to become a citizen of the syndicate, and I get the feeling that is about to become a very fraught status.
I don't know how many people remain on the surface of the earth, other than the 120k children and pregnant women in the kinder facility, but there are no buildings, no cars, nothing that was under a roof.
This isn't a story about winning. This is a story about bringing everyone down with you.
And that, from most angles, is a tragedy.