I stayed up until 2am to finish A Parade of Horribles. Great jokes, tense situations, emotional moments, and I’m not even going to get into the plot due to spoiler prevention, other than to say these levels include a race game and an arena challenge, and Donut acquires some new hats. Nope, I’m zooming out to maximum meta level to review this.
I said something unfair when I last wrote about the Carl books, that they might appeal to magas. That’s incorrect. The Carl story is the tale of a bodhisattva trapped in a cycle of hell worlds, trying to save others. The heroes in the story go to lengths to help their fellow beings in a world run by the cruel and greedy.
What I meant to say was that Carl is a great story about a manly dude who loves fighting overbearing enemies in order to secure freedom for himself and his people. He likes videogames a whole lot too, and is familiar with various kinds, which is a major advantage in this world, and his gamer skill influences people to like and trust him.
So a more accurate statement is that Carl manages to harness the “manly gamers fighting emasculating power trippers” energy that swayed a lot of people inclined along those lines to fight for the “please daddy more corporate overlords” side. The Carl series is self-aware enough to understand strategic distractions. As a strategy fan, that’s one of my favorite aspects of this series.
It refuses to champion sexism or other kinds of structural violence though. The good guys in Carl cooperate, stand by their found families, and do their best to save others. And sometimes they drop the ball. Sometimes innocents meet their doom accidentally, or because they’re in the wrong section of the trolley puzzle, and sacrificing them will better someone else’s odds.
The story is told in breakneck-speed inelegant prose that irritates readers who prefer prettier writing. Full of rapid cuts and catchphrases, inspired by someone who has seen plenty of action films. Chekov’s Guns are everywhere, and the plotting is tight and smart. In an alternate universe where GamerGate never happened, people would consider it yet another anti-corporate leftist dystopia.
In recent news, a videogame hired Anita Sarkeesian as a consultant, and was inundated with protest letters. Sarkeesian did a series of videos showing that a lot of early games relied on sexist tropes, because they drew a lot of inspiration from fairy tales with endings like “so then the brave hero was rewarded with a princess for a wife, and he lived happily ever after.” Which led to lots of games where one played a dude trying to save a princess, because that was a traditional and culturally appropriate happy ending.
I still have not seen Sarkeesian’s videos. I refuse to, because I’m a hypercritical fact-checker and don’t need to have both sides of GamerGate mad at me. I’ve summarized my secondhand understanding of the content, and here’s my summary of the reaction: a lot of feminists favorably inclined to Sarkeesian took the position that “many games contain retro pre-feminist tropes; therefore all gamers are anti-feminist.” Culture warriors reacting to this have been clogging up my social media, demanding these boycotters (who are probably not among their social media friends) apologize for disrespecting Sarkeesian.
I'm seeing their posts because I sided with the feminists, because people opposed to women having rights have zero appeal for me. However, I frequently regret it. On this side you’re not allowed to enjoy books like Dungeon Crawler Carl without some youngster popping up in your face to scream about how according to her idiosyncratic splitter logic combined with her philosophical viewpoint that her authentic feelings outrank facts, evidence, and the authentic feelings of anyone who can’t scream as loud, liking a book about a gamer equates to patriarchial fascism. Instead I must read, and pretend to like, stories like that ghastly one about the grrrl couple fighting to save their fetus from its own DNA.
Occasionally there’s some great art on this side, like an Octavia Butler or Ursula LeGuin story, but a lot of it’s just as bad as the unfortunate-trope-riddled pulp shlock that their ideological opponents enjoy. Which leads my cynical brain to conclude that a lot of this culture war saber rattling is actually stealth marketing for rancid art that wouldn’t get noticed without ideologues nagging people to consume it because it farts in the general direction of their enemies.
The main reason I’m here is because I know a lot of admirable feminists and women of accomplishment in real life, and I applaud them. They never have screamed misogynist allegations at me for checking facts or liking videogames or reading the wrong books or complaining about AI slop, but that’s a frequent thing when I hang around with internet feminists, which is something I probably need to decrease.
Meanwhile, here comes the Carl series barreling straight up the middle of most of that. The characters benefit from some tech and are oppressed by others. Women can be inspiring girl boss characters but they can also be villainous, slutty, ridiculous – just like the men characters. There’s plenty of diverse representation, with zero preachy speeches about the importance of diverse representation.
That’s probably why Carl is such a big viral hit. And it’s also probably why Carl is not popular with the science fictional literati (as of yet, anyway). Or maybe it’s that inelegant prose that I mentioned. Or maybe it has too much fact checker appeal – personally, all those Chekov’s guns and interwoven plots and “hey, I didn’t know that!” trivia moments make my face light up with a big doofy grin. So do the dick jokes and poop humor.
All of my favorite science fiction in recent years seems to come from writers outside the science fictional establishment hivemind. Ready Player One, Andy Weir, and now DC Carl. Books that get lots of scorn for being commercial, inelegantly written, appealing to base troglodytes who play videogames rather than refined intellectuals with credentials permitting them to theorize, because futurecrafting is Serious Business.
What I know is that I picked up DC Carl 1 due to the buzz, read it on an airplane, laughed out loud in public. Bought the other seven books. Read them all in rapid succession, and THEN turned around to read them again. Just in time for book 8 to appear, which I finished last night. I read 45% through 75% while traveling to and from a five-star BTS concert, and then I came home and continued reading until 2am.
I don’t experience a five-star concert and a five-star book every day mind you, and there was also some rather good chicken. It was quite a day.
Now I’m ready to barrel through the rest of the Hugo nominees with all of that five-starriness lingering on my aesthetic tastebuds, and I have this feeling most of it’s going to fall way short of my most generous expectations, because my standards are a little bit higher having encountered DC Carl.
I don’t recommend DC Carl to everyone. It’s full of grimdark humor a lot like Monty Python, or Dethklok, or South Park. This is juxtaposed with emotionally hard-hitting rip-your-heart-out moments (there’s a big one in Book 8 having to do with the idea we are all the main characters of our own story). Still, sensitive folks who quiver at the thought of train cars filled with blood and viscera should probably stick to the cozy stuff.
I do recommend DC Carl to non-gamers. It helps if you know your way around Dungeons & Dragons and the “roguelike” videogames based on it, with later volumes branching out to cover trading card games, racing games, and team wargames. I’m not sure it’s essential though, as long as you’re clear on the concept that (a) humans create simulations of dangerous adventures to entertain each other; (b) some aliens decide to make this even more entertaining by including real danger alongside the simulation, but everyone still has to play by the simulation rules.
Don’t worry if you’re fuzzy on the details. Most DC Carl readers are, and there are plenty of internet discussions to help you sort out the Expanse references from the ‘80s music trivia and Gossip Girls easter eggs.
 |
| Lately I'm into Labubu fashion design, because YES my tastes are THAT TRENDY! Here's my Labubu Tribute to DC Carl |
No comments:
Post a Comment