Achievement Unlocked: Getting Five Character Picks Wrong. You barely read the source material and still managed to miss the point, but congratulations on the clicks.
Collider published a list of five Dungeon Crawler Carl characters the Peacock series must not screw up, and honestly, that list is about as useful as a foot-themed trap in the ninth floor. They named the characters, but they forgot the one rule this fanbase actually cares about: Princess Donut is not a gimmick. Our own Audiobook Narrator Explains Why Princess Donut Is More Than a Joke piece already covered why Jeff Hays treats her as the emotional core of the story, not a punchline. If Collider thinks the show just needs to get the character designs right, they missed the part where the entire tone lives or dies on whether the cat is treated as a real person. Meanwhile, Jeff Hays to Voice Princess Donut in Show After Fan Demand confirms the actual casting decision that matters, and it is not one of the five names on Collider's list.
The practical problem is that Collider's list reads like a first-pass Wikipedia skim. They picked the obvious faces, the ones you see on fan art and t-shirts. They did not pick the characters who make the show work structurally. You cannot adapt a dungeon crawl without getting the dungeon master right, but you also cannot adapt this dungeon crawl without understanding that the cat drives half the dialogue. The Collider list treats Princess Donut as a supporting player when she is the co-lead. That is not a minor disagreement. That is a fundamental misunderstanding that will produce a show where the fans spend every episode waiting for the character to be used correctly and never seeing it happen.
The concrete takeaway here is that Peacock should ignore Collider's list entirely and instead read the Book Six Review: The Eye of the Bedlam Bride Barely Worth Your Time to understand that even the weaker books in the series succeed because of character voice, not because of cool monster designs. If the show gets the voice wrong, the list of characters who need to be saved will grow from five to every single one on the call sheet.