Hi hello, was scrolling through your blog bc 🤝 Fellow Joehills Enjoyer, & I saw you also like DCC so I hope it's ok for me to ramble a bit here ^^;
I gave the series a try after a couple hermits mentioned it, read through books 1-3 over the course of a week in a blaze of hyperfixation & it was fun! I was enjoying it! The Iron Tangle as a setting was fascinating!!... But at least once a chapter there'd be a joke or unnecessarily misogynistic one-off remark that made me take -1hp of damage. I get that the Dungeon AI (much like reality's current GenAI scourge) is just Like That™ so eventually I tuned it out, but it still kept piling up & it wasn't just the AI doing it, until finally in early book 4 Carl's internal monologue referred to Katia's cocktail as "some girly drink". Such a minor thing compared to other stuff, but I was just. Done. Tired of it all. Closed the tab.
But I really enjoyed the premise, & I miss Princess Donut :'), so I'm sometimes tempted to pick the series back up. I just wish I could know, without spoiling anything, whether the *screams externally* of it all ever stops? Or is it a grin-and-bear-it kind of situation that can ultimately be pushed through for the sake of a good story about the hells of entertainment megacorporations?
(feel free to delete btw)
I still have half of book seven and book eight to read, so I can't speak to those, but I haven't noticed it much in the later books? I also never paid *much* attention to it though, so I may be tuning it out unconsciously.
I will say- I doubt the jabs from the SysAI will stop, because its whole thing is caricaturizing and being provocative/inflammatory, but the character of the SysAI does become more complex as the books go on and it cools down on the caricatures as that happens.
I think what helps me tune out those moments is the actual woman characters that we get- because there are *so* many, and they're some of the most well rounded and human women I've read in fiction lately?
Before I started DCC I read Red Rising, and it was SUCH a slog because it felt like every woman character in the book existed to further a man's story, and/or was masculinized in order to be made respectable. I did not pick up the second book. In DCC there's a story with every woman we meet, and they're anything and everything. Katia in particular has such insane growth in book three alone, and she just keeps getting better and better the more I read. If you've read through the beginning of book four then you've met Juice Box, and she gets one hell of a story and character arc too.
Idk if this was helpful, I hope it was 😭 it sounds like you haven't read book five yet, and if you miss Princess Donut, I'd say give it a go! Book five is a real hitter for her, and it remains my favorite book in the series so far.
