I love hearing from authors about the choices they've made about their characters, particularly when it has to do with a book or series I love. In the case of Dungeon Crawler Carl, Matt Dinniman recently spoke about why he chose the Coast Guard for Carl's military background, and his reasoning reflects a bit of his real-life experience.
Among the topics that came up at the Audible: Goddamnit, Donut: A Totally Professional Panel with Matt Dinniman and Jeff Hays panel at San Diego Comic-Con was why Carl was in the Coast Guard rather than some other military branch. As it happens, Dinniman has encountered quite a few people from the Coast Guard in the Pacific Northwest part of the U.S, and as he pointed out, we don't see many service members from that branch in fiction:
I’m always character first. I was in a band with a couple Coasties, and up in the Pacific Northwest, where they’re everywhere up there, and one time I overheard a conversation about like, there’s always marines, there’s always army dudes, and every once in a while there’s an Air Force guy, Navy guy, but there’s very little fiction that features Coasties.
It's definitely nice to see the U.S. Coast Guard get some prominent representation here in the form of Dungeon Crawler Carl's main character. But from what Dinniman went on to say, it sounds like it was also about the toughness of these soldiers, which he wanted as part of Carl's character:
I thought that was really interesting, those dudes, every single one of them is just hard as nails, and they’re full of grit. And I thought what if I take a character that has that background, but is also just kind of just coasting to life.
(The pun about coasting through life was absolutely acknowledged during the panel.) I do think Carl being a bit aimless was a great starting point for a character who's about to embark on a wild and chaotic ride. And as Dinniman pointed out, he's a blank slate:
He’s like a blank slate. He allows things to happen to him, he’s very passive because he doesn’t want to – you know, he’s finally comfortable for the first time of his life after so much tumult.
In terms of pairing a former Coast Guard soldier with a cat, Dinniman's reasoning for that also came from his personal experience -- not just with cats, but with cat shows in particular:
I’d been doing cat shows for a long time, and I know that world very well, I know how psychotic cat show people are. Instead of pairing him with a cat show person, let’s go a little bit further, let’s pair him with a cat.
Ok, this was something I've been meaning to look into, because I'd heard Dinniman's background involved cat shows, and I needed more information. In an interview he did with Audible in 2025, Dinniman talked about traveling around, attending cat shows where he would draw portraits of people's cats to make money. In the same interview, he noted that he'd once been stared down by a Persian cat the entire time he was there, which prompted him to plan to include a cat in something he wrote someday. I wish I could meet that cat. I bet he or she knew exactly what they were doing with that stare.
As we wait for the next (two!) Dungeon Crawler Carl books and news about the DCC TV show that's in the works, I love learning little tidbits about Matt Dinniman's characters (like how he decided to keep Carl and Donut together) and the world he created.
