Catching up with Dungeon Crawler Carl and have gotten through Books 1 - 5 in the last 3 or so weeks (currently I'm well into book 6). I'm enjoying the books so much more since book 4, primarily because Matt Dinniman starts turning up the emotion dial, but also because I just think the first 1-3 books are very misogynistic and rely on a lot of edgelord humour to titilate the audience.
I know a lot of people defend the strange character depictions and off-hand sexism in books 1-2 as "it's satire, the aliens are using earth stereotypes and finding it funny", but I think it's frankly just a case of bad, clumsy writing from an inexperienced author. I say this with love for the series now, but I don't think Matt Dinniman had the chops to execute the themes that the series has now come to be known for - DCC starts off incredibly derivative and with the kind of humour I'd expect only Elon Musk would find funny, with cheap jabs that aim for low hanging fruit as punchlines. Even Donut starts off as the caricature of a prissy stuck up princess, and book 2 makes about a bazillion jokes about "whores falling from the sky" and prostitutes getting mass killed.
I think a lot of people excuse this away because in later books MD clearly gets better at thematic execution and carving out the political underbelly of the situation Carl & co find themselves in, but the opening books are pretty terrible. In fact, to me, the ultimate proof that the misogyny isn't meant as satire (or perhaps fails in its attempt to satirize it) is precisely that MD does successfully pull this off in later books. The misogyny stops being the joke you're meant to laugh at and becomes a way for the aliens to make fun of humans in an "look at you, you pathetic little creatures with your silly misogyny and your silly conventions."
I have much more love for this series now (also i'm just a sucker for Person And Their Pet stories and this is hitting a spot for me), but I'd love to see more acknowledgement of the fact that writers are people too: they are flawed and also internalise social prejudices, or have thematic ideas that they don't particularly execute well. Stories are ultimately the brainchildren of people and people aren't gods. I think DCC gets a lot better at adding depth and fleshing out the world in such a way where the story clearly means the absurdist edgelord humour as criticism, but I'd love to see more acknowledgement that the beginning is quite dodgy.
