I’ve just read all eight of the currently available Dungeon Crawler Carl books, and if there’s one thing you should know about Matt Dinniman’s universe, it’s probably that the AI is into Carl. Specifically Carl’s feet. Not since Margot Robbie’s feet hit the big screen has their been so much of a focus on some footsies, but the AI’s got it bad, and if Dinniman could “rewind time,” it’s the one thing he’d apparently go back and change.
Why? Well, he recently revealed exactly what happened when he was writing Carl for the first time, and why he would go back and rewrite things if he could. Speaking at DragonCon (via Instagram), he called the AI’s foot fetish “one of the biggest mistakes” he could have possibly made, and it goes all the way back to when he was writing Book One, which was published back in 2020.
So, I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but you know, one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made was that scene that I wrote in Book One. Carl is on top of the Dozer, and the guy had fallen off of the goblin, fallen off and he looks down, and I think to myself, ‘You know, I need some way for Carl to describe how big he is without him looking in the mirror.’ So, he’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m a big dude,’ and so that goes to his head, ‘so I’m gonna jump on this goblin and explode him.’
Honestly, it’s a really memorable scene in the first book, and one in which the dungeon is still “happening” to Carl before he figured out how to make it work to his advantage. Dinniman said when he was writing, he was simply trying to amuse himself. This has now backfired spectacularly.
And then I thought it would be funny if the AI like got off on that. And so I put that in the book without, you know, realizing that I was, at that moment, ruining my life.
To be fair, the AI's response was funny, and also set up Carl's relationship with the AI in an interesting and unexpected way.
Yet, obviously, this has had some major ramifications for the fiction writer. The books are growing and growing in popularity all the time, which means he’s getting more fan mail, and some of it is gnarly to say the least. Unless you have a foot fetish, in which case perhaps you’d be all over moments like these:
The other day, if you are in here you should out yourself, I got a letter in the mail to my PO Box that was nothing but five Polaroids of men’s feet. Five different men. And it was actually, what it was, was a wedding invitation. There’s all their groomsman’s feet. So, I have the opposite of whatever a foot fetish is. And if I could rewind time, that is what I would pick.
The author did not share how often he's getting this sort of "fan" mail, but he feels confident in saying that writing a foot fetish into his popular series has now led to him hating feet. It doesn’t quite sound like podophobia, but it also doesn’t sound like he's happy he went there in Book One, either.
Matt Dinniman's been open in the past about why he made certain DCC decisions, like switching out how he had originally perceived Donut or choosing "coast guard" for Carl. So, getting a BTS story about writing the AI is not wholly unexpected. I think a lot of people are also interested in the AI/Carl relationship and where that is going, myself included. It's a bummer it's had some weird ramifications for the author, but I hope he knows it was not fully in vain, and I hope he's not planning to push to change it when Seth MacFarlane turns his books into a TV series.
Hopefully, this foot-oriented relationship will be heading to the small screen. Casting has started for the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, with Jeff Hays set to reprise Princess Donut from the audiobooks. There's a ton of interest surrounding who could voice the AI specifically (though Seth Green, who I think could be a good fit, has specifically mentioned Mordecai). It's a challenging voice when Hays does it for the audiobook, as it waffles in tone and timbre depending on how over-the-top the AI is feeling in a given moment.
Now, eight books in the AI's weird relationship with Carl has definitely cemented, and it sounds as if it's the bane of the author's existence. So, let this be a warning as Peacock’s upcoming Carl series comes down the pipeline: Please stop sending Matt Dinniman photos of feet in the mail.
