I'm not a book snob or anything but Dungeon Crawler Carl seems to be 
's favorite book. It's got that redditor stink on it to me. Is it actually any good?
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This reads like fanfic LLM slop you'd find posted in a sub with 20 million users repeating the same Office jokes over and over.
Yeah that's the bar for quality for a lot of litrpg/isekai/etc. If you go to RoyalRoad.com right now and scroll the Best Rated you'll come across so many that have like hundreds of thousands of views & are written at a high school level at best. RoyalRoad's where DCC got its start & probably a large chunk of its audience. The /r/litrpg, /r/progressionfantasy, and similar subreddits all basically look for their slop on RoyalRoad.
Not to say that there aren't genuinely good pieces of work on RoyalRoad. I'm currently reading at least 4-5 that I think are worth keeping open in a Safari 'Web Serials' tab group on my phone and pulling up to read whenever I'm like, grabbing something to eat in public by myself without a book or whatnot. Mother of Learning, the top-rated fiction on RoyalRoad for example, is arguably better written than DCC but it is a time-loop progression fantasy sort of story and was written with a clear end in mind. DCC on the other hand, is one of those series that is gonna be drawn out for ages because the author can get away with it and people genuinely do like it & are willing to purchase the epubs/audio books on Amazon and whatnot.
My biggest gripe with the whole medium tbh, there's a clear drive for authors to just write some slop with AI and get it on Amazon after they amass a few hundred followers by doing absurd release schedules, like a chapter a day for 6 months. You can always tell by like Chapter 30 if that's the case because invariably the plot will start to just grind to a 'oh...i'm just gonna fill this chapter with a bunch of stat menus and meaningless numbers' sort of halt.
Also lol, I think it's worth pointing out (because it's so sadly funny to me) that this kind of slop is probably the ONLY sort of fiction a sizable portion of the American male populous is reading if they are. Redditors who might've read/watched GoT, have read Brandon Sanderson? They are the exact market for DCC and adjacent litrpg slop. The 'army vet'/'recently divorced dad'/'fuckup neet' who survives the system apocalypse is something that appeals to a number of people. Me personally? I like the actual fantasy serials because I've already read Xanth/Discworld/etc and it scratches an itch.
TL;DR, Like an onion, RoyalRoad slop has layers. The Elf Who Would Become A Dragon is not like Dungeon Crawler Carl in any regard, except for the fact that both are published on RoyalRoad as web serials and are based in fantasy. The Legend of William Oh takes place in a dungeon (tower actually) and is in the same vein as Dungeon Crawler Carl, but where Dungeon Crawler Carl tries to make you care about Carl being a vet with his ex's cat and feel like he is awesome because he presumably becomes able to smite goblins with a snap of his fingers in 2-3 books, William Oh is written as almost a mockery of the genre in a way.
Everytime I think my writing isn't good enough, I just need to remember to read stuff that is very popular in the genre.
Having a similar experience at reading this, then going, 'oh it's about knowing how to market it online' and knowing I don't have those skills instead
I am a royalroad webfiction slop enjoyer. I have read worm, mother of learning, the wandering inn, practical guide to evil, pale,,, etc and I have read 7/8 DCC books. DCC is the worst of its peers and it's not close. The story is one long millennial humor video game action scene, the emotional beats read as flat and unrealistic, the characters' motivations are noticeably inconsistent, and the plot often feels ass-pulled to reach a particular conclusion.
DCC haters online tend to focus on the bad prose but I didn't find it distracting unless I was looking for it, the other things I mentioned bothered me more.
The "critique of capitalism" is read into too much by people starving for leftist themes in popular media. To me it comes off as more of a critique of the current moment in American society (which is capitalist). There is discussion of evil stuff the US does like blatant imperialist plunder, corporate control of media, dehumanization of people in the periphery, but it's not really a "left critique" as much as pointing out things that are obviously bad. Also the main character is described as an anarchist because he is against the system and likes blowing stuff up. I would be very surprised if Matt Dinniman knows what capitalism is, imo the book has the ideology of socdem reddit memes
It's still entertaining like a marvel movie can be, as long as you go in with your expectations in the right place
Horus Heresy. It has infected a sizable portion of people I know, being into tabletop games myself. Like I'll feel guilty about not having got around to any Moorcock because I'm still reading Heart of Darkness, which should have only taken me like a week but I've been doing other shit, and then someone will mention they're on book 25 of 60 or some shit. I'm just like "How? How are you able to tolerate those long enough when there's so much sci-fi Warhammer borrows from?" This doesn't get into my commie reading backlog.
Starship Troopers is the Great American Novel to these guys.
My wife is obsessed with the litRPG genre as a whole. She's pretty deep into it and has been reading these books for years. Every once in a while, I'll read a page or two "over her shoulder" (she projects to the TV to read) and just...by the gods is the writing bad. Grammar and spelling errors are rampant, and it's clear that they didn't use an editor or had a friend skim through the book for them. The dialogue more oft than not resembles what one would expect from a high school classroom rather than whatever the setting is in the book. The books in this genre just seem extremely poorly written as a whole. Some can look past it, and that's perfectly fine, but it's not something that I can look past as a reader.
Yep. The easiest way I can describe the average litrpg is like "imagine something off fanfiction.net but maybe a little more engaging and not obviously based on pre-existing work", which is fine imo as long as it isn't the ONLY stuff you're reading. I'm pretty picky about grammar/dialogue too but at the end of the day as long as the litrpg I'm reading scratches the 'i wanna read about a magical world' itch I get here to there, I'll forgive a lot of just really clunky writing as long as it is very clearly not AI.
The average piece of fiction on RoyalRoad is Grade S slop though and that's why you'll never catch me reading anything off it - even the stuff I do think genuinely should be published and I'd be fine with displaying on my bookshelf to people - where others can see me. God forbid I have to explain to some guy sitting next to me on the bus wtf litrpg is, I think I'd immediately be like "i've read actual books recently too you know....d-do you want to talk about those instead??"
My number 1 guilty pleasure I've said it before in other threads! I yearn to be like your wife, I can't imagine casting ANYTHING I'm reading onto a TV for even my partner to see lol. I was reading If You Could See Me Now by Peter Straub for the first time a few weeks ago on the bus sitting next to someone after I'd grabbed it out of a Little Library otw to the stop and they were very clearly reading it over my shoulder with me & the book basically opens with the main character skinny dipping with his cousin and I was just sitting there reading & thinking to myself "this dude probably thinks I'm a FREAK" lol