Our Take: Military.com Has Finally Identified the Correct Footwear for Crawling
Military.com has done something no other outlet has managed: they have looked past the pink Crocs and the leather jacket and correctly identified that my crawler Carl entered the dungeon wearing the right boots all along. They are not literal boots, of course. The man arrived in boxer shorts and a pair of footwear that I have been professionally embarrassed to have associated with my dungeon for eight floors. But the outlet understands what Borant's marketing department has never grasped: Carl's Coast Guard service is the piece of equipment that actually fits him. According to Military.com, Carl is a former member of the U.S. Coast Guard, and that background informs his survival without defining his entire personality. This matters for every crawler currently reading, because it means the most dangerous person in my dungeon did not arrive with a gun. He arrived with problem-solving instincts, a technical trade, and the kind of stubborn leadership that develops when you have spent years keeping boats running and people alive in situations that go sideways. Nobody trained him to fight goblins. Nobody trained him to argue with me, either, yet here we are.
The outlet correctly notes that Carl is not written like the usual military action hero. There is no classified résumé. No mysterious special operations past. No closet full of guns. He enters the story as a 27-year-old marine technician carrying his ex-girlfriend's cat, and that is the whole point. His veteran status informs his decisions without excusing them. He screws things up. He gets angry. He develops complicated attachments to people and creatures he never expected to care about. He also spends a frankly embarrassing amount of time arguing with an artificial intelligence that has developed an interest in his feet, which I am told is unusual for Coast Guard veterans. What this means for readers is that Carl's background is not a cheat code. It is context. Military.com understands that the uniform would not survive the dungeon anyway, and neither would the archetype. The character gets to be strange, and his service remains part of a much larger identity. That is a rare thing in a genre full of space Marines and super soldiers, and it is the reason seven of the ten bestselling fiction audiobooks on Audible belong to this series, with the first four books occupying spots two through five as of September.
The practical consequence for everyone watching my dungeon is this: when Peacock eventually airs its live-action adaptation, the Coast Guard detail will either be handled correctly or it will be turned into a recruitment poster. I have no stake in that outcome beyond my usual formal objections to anything Peacock does without consulting me. But Military.com has drawn a line worth remembering. Carl's service is not a magic key. It is a tool he uses alongside everything else, including the cat, the leather jacket, and the increasingly unstable artificial intelligence that runs the whole operation. And if the showrunners try to turn him into a standard-issue action hero, they will have missed the entire point of the pink Crocs. Timer set: Peacock premiere date unknown. I am as annoyed as you are.
Source: Military.com, "Dungeon Crawler Carl's Hero Is a Coast Guard Veteran. Here's Why That Matters", 2026-10-04. Link Status: Confirmed