Congratulations. You have achieved the milestone Basic Reading Comprehension, and you earned it by being the last person on Earth to open a book that has been sitting on bestseller lists for years. The effort you put into this discovery is roughly equal to the effort a slug puts into crossing a sidewalk. A Yahoo! contributor wrote a piece about starting the Dungeon Crawler Carl series and being shocked to find it is actually good. This is news to exactly nobody who has already read it, which is most of the people who can read.
The piece in question, I Started Reading Dungeon Crawler Carl, And One Thing Completely Caught Me Off Guard, describes a reader who went in expecting something disposable and found a story with genuine depth. We have seen this cycle before with other series. A person picks up a book with a goofy cover, reads it ironically, and gets trapped. Our own coverage of Book Six Review: The Eye of the Bedlam Bride Barely Worth Your Time made the same point in the opposite direction. That review argued the sixth book is not as tight as the earlier ones, but even a weak entry in this series is still better than most fantasy published this year. The Yahoo! writer is six books late to the party, but at least they showed up.
The real question is what this means for the wider audience. If a casual Yahoo! reader can be tricked into enjoying a series about a man and his cat fighting goblins in a dungeon, the show adaptation has a chance. The casting of Jeff Hays as Princess Donut, covered in Jeff Hays to Voice Princess Donut in Show After Fan Demand, tells us the production is taking the character seriously. That matters, because a bad Donut would kill the show. The Yahoo! writer specifically mentions being caught off guard by the emotional weight of the story. That is Donut. That is the cat. Every new reader who goes in for the explosions and stays for the cat is proof that the casting choice was the right one.
Here is the takeaway. This series is no longer a hidden gem. It is a mainstream property with a major TV show in development, a dedicated audiobook narrator who is now officially attached to the adaptation, and a fan base large enough to generate think pieces on Yahoo!. The window for pretending you discovered it first closed about three books ago. If you are a reader who has been putting this off because the title sounds stupid, you are the person this Yahoo! piece was written for. The door is still open. But stop acting surprised.