Stop Calling Creation Slop

Content Warning: Fictional Child Death

In the past few months, a couple of my coworkers began reading the first book of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, and assuming it’d be my kind of thing, asked me to do so as well. The book was described as a LitRPG^[1] somewhat reminiscent of Hitchhiker’s Guide or Discworld. This sentence is a series of flags that I cannot tell are red or green beforehand due to my positive opinion of all those things on their own, and negative opinion of many things described this way. And believe me, there are some parts of this book that are truly unoriginal reference-bait that feel specially-crafted to be copy and pasted into a reddit post with a non-transparent PNG of a character from a media property being namedropped.

The following paragraph will contain spoilers for this book.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is also a book where the main character is ambushed by a pair of ICE agents^[2] and leaves a lethal trap for them after escaping. Later, he is forced to appear on the equivalent of a far-right manosphere podcast/talk show, where these agents are also guests. It’s revealed that his trap went off, nearly killing the two agents as well as their hidden young daughter. The agents killed their own daughter in this moment, and used the fact that her death was partially caused by Carl’s trap as a means to garner sympathy for themselves and build excitement towards the idea of them getting revenge on him from an audience almost entirely comprised of young, angry men, raising this talk show’s ratings in the process. Carl calls them out on this unforgivable behavior, takes control of the conversation, shames the show’s host and turns the audience against him in response. These events are a subplot and go basically unmentioned during the “main events” of the first book.

So when I saw many people on BlueSky calling this series “enjoyable slop,” I had to begin writing a whole blog post about it. Because, quite simply, no. The main appeal of the book is a dude cool enough to be a power fantasy but still dorky enough for chronically-online nerds (the demographic is me) to relate to him (I don’t) parading around an RPG world kicking ass and indulging in humor both dark and crude. It is also explicitly anticapitalist while criticizing the ways anticapitalist messages are used by corporations for profit, and argues for the importance of seeing and reaching out to the humanity in others even in situations where violence is the only option available. In an era where “AI-generated media” is mass-produced without a single thought, with the sole intention to fill space and profit off of exploiting an audience’s attention span through algorithms that prioritize engagement and retention above all else, I fundamentally refuse the idea that anything created with an artistic intent and a message to share can be what we describe as “slop.”

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has become a self-referencing content farm beyond parody, where they advertise some of their biggest films by live-streaming a row of empty chairs with actors’ names printed on them. I think the decision to scrap the majority of the Kang plotline following Jonathan Majors’ arrest ridiculous.^[3] There are few comic book characters whose depictions couldn’t be easily retconned, and Kang the Conqueror is far from being one of them. This decision, no matter how much I disagree with it, shows one thing: Marvel Studios knows people will care. People will care if a major antagonist was played by another actor. The studio chose to radically change their years-long production plans rather than intentionally stray from the audience reaction they are aiming for. And no matter how much I repeatedly state I think they made the wrong decision, it makes it undeniable that the MCU continues to be created with intention^[4] even as circumstances change.

And that isn’t slop. It’s not always made well. It’s not always to my taste. Sometimes it’s one of those, sometimes it is neither. But my opinion doesn’t change that these products exist for reasons other to take up space. They tell crafted stories that share ideas and emotions. Yes, they are still products, and one of their largest goals is to generate a profit. You and I are not obligated to engage with any piece of media just because there’s a possibility there’s a message we need or want to hear. But I think we are doing ourselves a disservice by completely dismissing any art that we see as shallow. We now live in a world where there are things published with literally zero intention. Anything created by people may not “be that deep,” but I will let it hold onto whatever meaning it does have.