5 Most Devastating ‘Dungeon Crawler Carl’ Moments, Ranked
Michael Hein has been covering entertainment, fandom news, and trending topics since 2016 on outlets including Rogues Portal, PopCulture.com, and ComicBook.com. He has provided live coverage of red carpet premieres, conventions, and up-fronts, and has interviewed major stars including Charles Dance, Patrick Stewart, and Chloe Sevigny. An avid fiction reader and writer, Michael has been diving deep into all the biggest book-to-screen adaptations of the last decade, from Game of Thrones to Foundation.
Sign in to your Collider account
Warning! This articles contains spoilers for all of the Dungeon Crawler Carl books!It's no mistake that Dungeon Crawler Carl seems silly and irreverent on the surface, then leaves readers emotionally devastated at the end of each floor. Author Matt Dinniman uses age-old tactics to misdirect fans, catch them off guard, and subvert their expectations — all to amazing effect. The series not only blends science fiction, fantasy, and game mechanics, but also seamlessly balances action, comedy, and horror. The result is a story that can feel like a soaring adventure in one moment and a cataclysmic tragedy the next, without breaking your immersion or feeling forced. This unexpected depth is why so many readers are raving about the series, and why it has become such a massive success.
Just as Carl and Princess Donut have climbed the ranks of the top-performing crawlers on their intergalactic reality show, Dungeon Crawler Carl has climbed the charts over the last six years. It went from a serialized online story to a self-published book series, then to a break-out success in all of its forms. The story still isn't over, and while Dinniman will undoubtedly break our hearts again in the final two volumes, there are already plenty of devastating moments that will go down in fantasy history. Read on for the top five most heartbreaking scenes from the eight books in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series so far.
5 Protecting Donut's Feelings
At number five, we need to start in the seventh book, This Inevitable Ruin. Here, a long-foreshadowed series of events finally culminates in Princess Donut becoming the most powerful crawler in the dungeon. She is able to single-handedly battle with gods, using enhanced spells cast from the top of a tower on the seventh floor. It's here that she casts "Rolling Battle Formation," captures two gods, thousands of enemies, and about half the remaining earth crawlers in a massive ball of flesh. It's not pleasant to be inside, but it grants all the earthlings immunity, so Donut is forced to leave her friends in there while she deals with other threats.
Meanwhile, Donut makes one of her most shocking displays of strength here by using the spell "War Crime" to combine her "Astral Paw" with the borrowed spell "Binjabi." With these she is able to lift a giant mass of thousands of enemies and drop them on a trap created by Li Na. However, Donut says that she can "feel them" as if she's using her own paw to make this attack, and afterward she develops a compulsion to wipe and clean her paws, as if the sensation never really goes away.
The System A.I. is uncharacteristically loose with the details on the spell "War Crime," saying: "Intention matters, and for this spell, we respect that." As ominous as that sounds from an attacking perspective, it actually turns out to be true in a more wholesome way for Donut. She worries that her friends will be angry at her for using the "Rolling Battle Formation" spell on them, but as soon as they're freed they lie to her, saying they were unconscious for the whole ordeal. Later, Florin admits to Carl that they were actually conscious and aware of the whole horrifying battle, but he implies that all the crawlers have agreed not to tell Donut.
"'As far as Donut is concerned, no. We didn't feel anything, mate.' He hesitated. 'Just don't... Just don't let her do that do us again.'" The characters take note of Donut's new tic and continue to comfort her throughout the series, and the lengths they'll go to in order to protect the princess from her own guilt is incredibly heartwarming.
4 Katia's Backstory
Book seven might be the most action-packed entry in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, so the plot line involving Carl's Bedlam Bride tattoo and Katia's magical drug addiction helps to break up the pacing a bit. The two share a dream that exposes their tragic backstories to each other, but because of all the magic involved, Carl seems to process and remember it all in fits and starts over the following days. It's during one of these interludes that the audience finally gets the full story on Katia's history with drugs, failed adoption, and terminal illness.
Carl and Katia watch her memory in the third person, unable to interact with the events they're watching but able to discuss them with each other. The two see Katia spending time with a terminally ill infant named Annie, whom she was trying to adopt. They see Katia confront her former partner Fannar, who had sabotaged the adoption by reporting Katia's past drug addiction as well as Katia's own cancer diagnosis, which she was keeping secret. The final scene of her flashback is in the hospital, the last time Katia was able to visit Annie.
"'And here is the worst moment of my life because I know it's the last time I will ever see her,' Katia said. A moment passed. 'It's also my favorite memory, and it is where I keep coming back to.'"
A scene like this always runs the risk of becoming too melodramatic, but Dinniman pulls it off spectacularly in this case. There's an added twist of tragedy as Katia and Carl both acknowledge how much they have in common, and reexamine their own trauma and stress responses through that lens. Finally, just when the grief becomes overwhelming, a monster from the dungeon comes crashing into the dream to remind these two crawlers that they're not safe enough to dwell on their pain yet.
3 Meeting Asher
There is so much tragedy packed into the scene in the sixth book, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, where Carl meets his half-brother Asher. By then, the crawlers have learned that anyone killed in the collapse of earth could be reconstituted into an encounter within the dungeon. The showrunners and the System A.I. do this several times to manufacture emotional moments for the TV show, or simply to break certain crawlers' spirits and get them killed. Carl doesn't know if his father was alive during the collapse, and he fears they'll use this tactic against him.
Rather than springing this encounter on us, Dinniman flips the script by giving it a long, painful build-up. Both Carl and the reader know that he'll be seeing some version of his father well in advance, and the showrunners bend the rules of space and time to make it happen. In the end, Carl comes upon a dilapidated house that he recognizes as his father's, and he watches a recording of his father's final moments. To his horror, his dad has a new 12-year-old son named Asher, and a new wife named Tami-Lynn. To his horror, Tami-Lynn poisoned his father with Asher in the house. It's reminiscent of how Carl's mom attempted to kill his father and end her own life when he was a child.
This was a brilliant payoff to the long-standing mystery of Carl's father and his fate. Throughout the series, Carl often dodges questions about his past and focuses on moving forward. Here, the dungeon did the same, revealing what Carl had missed out on, then turning it into a monster for him to fight. However, there were some other twists of the knife. Carl learns that Tami-Lynn had actually tried to reach out to him a few times, but his ex-girlfriend Beatrice had hidden the letters from him, fearing she would lose him to his own past. Finally, Asher becomes an enemy that Carl has to battle in the dungeon, confirming that he was killed in the collapse.
2 Miriam Dom
The death of Miriam Dom in book five, The Butcher's Masquerade, is a strong contender for the most devastating moment in the entire series. It's tragic, it's shocking, and it has a profound impact on the rest of the story going forward. It's emblematic of the inherent cruelty of this setting, and it's exactly the kind of thing that fuels Carl's righteous fury against the galaxy at large.
We spend very little time with Miriam Dom before we lose her, though Carl and Donut hear about her often in recaps and countdowns of the most powerful crawlers. Miriam grew up on a goat farm in rural Italy, but she moved to the big city as a young woman to pursue a career in music. She finally moved back to the farm out a sense of duty to her aging parents, and as a vegan she was particularly kind and nurturing to the animals in her care. That's how she ended up herding all her goats into the dungeon with her, giving us the series' best character by far — Prepotente.
Once again, Miriam's time in the dungeon was shaped by the cruel manipulations of the showrunners. While one magical "Enhanced Pet Biscuit" gave sentience to Prepotente, another turned the goat Bianca into a Hellspawn Familiar, clashing with Miriam's skillset as a kindly shepherd. To make matters worse, she was pushed into a situation where she was hit by a curse and turned permanently into a vampire. Despite her new powers and her new aesthetic, Miriam remained as kind as ever, right up until the moment when she was trapped in the light of the rising sun. She called Carl to her aid — not to rescue her, but to spare Prepotente from the anguish and become his new ally after she was gone.
This death has continued to echo through every book since, and not just for emotional callbacks. Readers are frequently reminded that Miriam Dom was killed senselessly for the sake of a spinoff TV show, which is trivial compared to the immense loss of the earth crawlers. She was a foil for Carl just as Prepotente is a foil for Donut, and there's no doubt she will remain important as the series reaches its climax.
1 'You're Not My Person Anymore, Carl Is'
Finally, nothing the dungeon has concocted so far has hit quite as hard as Princess Donut admonishing Beatrice on the set of Dungeon Crawler After Hours with Odette. The mysterious talk show host managed to save Beatrice from among the refugees on the earth's surface before the showrunners could get to her. She intended to ambush Carl and Donut with her live on the air, but Zev managed to warn them just in time. Thanks to her, Carl and Donut are able to keep their cool while the cameras are rolling, while Donut still gets the chance to say her piece to Bea afterward.
"'I was so stupid, because I thought since I loved you, that meant you loved me... You don't deserve how sad I feel right now. I still love you. I still miss you, and I hate myself for it... You're not my person anymore,' Donut added. 'Carl is. He's always been.'"
This monologue had a lot to live up to, and it managed to stick the landing. It's especially impressive coming from Donut, who often employs a mean, sarcastic tone with people she likes. For her to voice true cruelty was incredibly vulnerable, and it casts the relationship between a cat and a human in a whole new light. It may be the best use of this series' set-up so far, especially for readers with cats at home.
This list is already under threat of an upset from the ninth book in the series, which has the working title The Beautiful Place. Dinniman is releasing excerpts from the work-in-progress on his Patreon page, and it looks like the emotional gut-punches will continue as the series goes on. In the meantime, the eight published novels in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series are available now in print, digital, and audiobook formats.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.