Personally, I think that the bones that make Dungeon Crawler Carl are there from the very first book: gruesome brutality combined with gut-busting humor, consistent rules and exploits of those rules to advance within the dungeon, and a very human cost that you feel to your bones. However, I also think that the series doesn’t come into its own and become the Dungeon Crawler Carl that’s surging to the top of the zeitgeist until Carl get’s the Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook. Once that happens, “I Will Break You All” becomes Carl’s raison d’être, and not just something he believes needs to happen. However, part of the reason I wanted to do a reread of this series immediately is to see what is consistent before things really kick off in the story.
In Carl’s Doomsday Scenario, we see the first time Carl exploits the desire and greed of the showrunners to circumvent the bounds of the crawl to effect the changes he wants to see, when he helps Tsarena Signet and Grimaldi. This is one of those things not really unique to this story, but part of what makes it special. It’s the sort of move you’d expect John Constantine (comics version) to do. He knows when there’s leverage and how to exploit it. This only gets better within Carl’s story. It’s his superpower, alongside his incredible luck, drive, and the AI’s foot fetish. Several times, characters muse that Carl must just be preternaturally good at reading a situation and thinking on his feet, but not many discuss how often he exploits the Crawl’s meta with this ability. In that sense, that may be what sets Carl apart, because there are many on-paper more powerful crawlers but none of them can effect the change that he does because none of them can see beyond that fourth wall.
As I reread these stories, Dungeon Crawler Carl becomes more and more of a permanent favorite for me. For god’s sake, read it.