Heartwarming / Dungeon Crawler Carl

Dungeon Crawler Carl

• After Donut the cat gains sapience, Carl politely but firmly tells her he is not dealing with this shit and that she can go another way. She breaks her snooty stage persona to earnestly apologize. Now that she's intelligent, she knows that he was looking for ways to rescue her from Bea, even though it would have brought him nothing but heartache from Bea's lawyer dad. Donut loves him for this as much as she loves him for spending time with her curled up in his lap while he sucked at Call of Duty.
• A group of senior citizens from the Meadow Lark Retirement Home were outside due to a fire during the Collapse. Several of their caregivers have stayed with them and have been doing everything they can to keep them alive. Carl immediately agrees to help them in whatever way that he can.

Carl's Doomsday Scenario

• Despite Mordecai's complaints about being Donut's manager, he immediately does everything in his power to make sure the party fights effectively and efficiently.

The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook

• The Reveal that there is a Secret Legacy of crawlers, each essentially the same exact person as Carl, passing down their knowledge through the Crawl in the hopes that one day someone will be able to burn it all down. They also pass down words of encouragement, philosophical discussions on what it means to be alone, and reminders that they are all in it together.
• While Donut revealing she knew about (and hated) Bea's plan to sell her off, there is a heartwarming silver lining. For most of the series, Donut has come across as a carbon-copy of Bea, from what little we know of her. This reveals that she's inherited Carl's Undying Loyalty and would never abandon him.
• When Carl gets dragged into a battle between a Province Boss and an angry god, all his friends disobey his orders to save him.
  Donut: I wasn't just going to abandon you, Carl. Who do you think I am? Miss Beatrice?
  Carl: No. You most definitely are not.

The Gate of the Feral Gods

• When Donut is broken up about not even being allowed to say goodbye to Zev, Carl promises that despite Loita's insistence to the contrary, they will see her again.
  Donut: You shouldn't promise things like that. You shouldn't make promises you can't keep.
  Carl: We will see her again, Donut. I keep my promises.
  Donut: [rubs her head against him and purrs]
• Carl finally realizes who the bizarre pacifists are who sponsored him: An organization founded by (and still run by) the second owner of the Cookbook. In the epilogue, Porthus argues with a colleague in Carl's favor that betting it all on him will prove to be the right choice in the end.
• Carl has been getting worried about how addicted Donut is to her social media board. Near the end, he realizes that Zev has secretly been using it to communicate with her.

The Butcher's Masquerade

• Donut finally gets to see Miss Beatrice again, and lets out her feelings about being betrayed and set up for abandonment. In the process, she declares that Carl is her person, and "always has been."
• Every time Donut has mentioned the Ninth Floor, Carl has dodged the question of what they'd do when they got there. Here, Carl finally answers: He is not abandoning her, and they're either getting off that floor together or not at all.
• After the death of Miriam Dom, Prepotente calmly says that while he knows Carl won't understand, he has to get revenge for her, and will cut his way through the monsters created by her death. Carl meets his eyes and says simply "Why do you think I wouldn't understand?" Prepotente nods and goes to work. Despite Carl's worries, Prepotente never blames them for what happened.

The Eye of the Bedlam Bride

• Odette finally gives up on helping Mordecai. Not because of cruelty or apathy, but because she realizes she truly has given him everything that can possibly help him; no matter what happens, his contract will be up at the end of this season, and she's set aside a large trust for him.
• Knowing they couldn't survive on the ninth floor, Mordecai adopts the changeling children with birth defects, bringing them into the saferoom as attendants (at pretty significant cost) and hiding them. He spends a lot of his free time playing with them, including letting them put makeup on him.
• The end of the floor was designed to force crawlers to murder each other over the limited keys, winnowing them down to, at most, a fifth of what they started with. Instead, Carl figures out an exploit with the stairs to get past the need for the keys, the AI gleefully allows it, and over thirty thousand crawlers descend to the ninth floor. To reiterate: instead of thirty thousand dying, thirty thousand survive.
• Carl puts in an emergency action before descending to the ninth floor, politely asking the AI to let the population of the galaxy vote on the various action items that have been suggested. Turns out, Carl's the first person to treat the AI like a person instead of a malfunctioning computer and it okays the request.
• Donut is a little disappointed that her new sponsor is a garbage company. As it turns out, that's just a front for the fifty thousand former crawlers who are coming back as mercenaries to help Donut and Carl during Faction Wars.