Books SFF Bestiary Don’t You Dare Call Princess Donut a Sidekick Ten pounds of tortoiseshell floof and outsize attitude… By Judith Tarr | Published on March 2, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler series, which is about to expand to eight volumes (and counting) has been on my radar for a while. LitRPGs are not my wheelhouse, and I’m kind of allergic to endless series with cliffhangers, and my TBR pile already reaches halfway to Mercury. But one thing I did not know, and it trumps them all. There is a cat. Not just any cat. A champion show cat. Her name is Princess Donut, and she is the Protagonist. Yes, yes, the title character of the first volume is Carl, a human male of the Galoot subspecies as they used to be called back in the days of Heinlein and the Great Old Ones. Carl is the narrator and the viewpoint character. Donut is the heart of the team. She’s the leader. Carl is the (unwilling, frequently annoyed, ultimately resigned) sidekick. Don’t listen to anyone who tries to tell you she’s the co-protagonist or “deuteragonist.” Certainly don’t believe that she’s any kind of secondary character. It’s all about Donut, as she herself will tell you. As soon as I started reading Dungeon Crawler Carl, I understood why it’s such a hit. It’s compulsively readable. The characters are broadly drawn but they have depth to them; they’re not caricatures. They make you care about them. Even the monsters. What could be a mind-numbing sequence of gaming moves with detailed stats and frequent blood, guts, and loot, becomes a surprisingly nuanced commentary on, among many other things, end-stage capitalism. It was painfully relevant in 2020 when the series first appeared. It’s even more so now. But we’re here for the cat, and she’s worth the trip. GC BWR NW Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk is the reason why Carl happens to survive the destruction of Earth and the vast majority of the humans on the planet. She leads him into the dungeon, and quickly graduates from Pet to Dungeon Crawler, with magical upgrade from sentience to sapience, including the ability to talk. She’s still a cat. A tortoiseshell Persian, to be precise. Various fans have tried to explain what that means (and managed to get into the Great Debate between tortoiseshell and calico, since Donut is described as being brown, black, and white—with white being the Mark of the Calico). One points to an Instagram star, Amber the Irish Persian, and that works for me. Just dab in some white if you prefer. Torties are, by tradition, extra. All cats have cattitude. Torties crank it up to 21, never mind 11. That’s called tortitude. Donut has it. She adapts seamlessly to sapience. There’s no shock, no learning curve. She has clear memory of her previous life. For her, it’s all one thing. Sure, it’s magic. But who’s to say she wasn’t already most of the way there? She’s a diva. She loves attention. She’s fiercely competitive. She worked at being a show champion. She works just as hard to be a fan favorite in the game, and she’s ruthless in pursuing her goal. A cat is a predator, after all. Ruthless is what she is. Vain and pampered Donut may be, and she thinks it’s icky to use her claws, but she does what she has to. If she has to get down and dirty, she’ll hiss and mutter and snarl and try to get out of it, but eventually she’ll do it. Especially if it gets her more views and favorites. By the end of book one, she and Carl are just about to really commit to the game by choosing a race and class. Donut has made it clear that she intends to remain a cat. There are indications that she has a range of choices within the species, but she’s also been warned that she’ll lose her fandom if she goes for something big and dramatic. They want her to stay what she is: some ten pounds of tortoiseshell floof and outsize attitude. That’s her appeal. The contrast between the small, pet-presenting being and the extraordinary intelligence and powers. Most of all, her greatest asset, which she brings with her and increases the more time she spends in the dungeon: her charisma. As any cat person (and any cat) can tell you, a cat is charisma. If anyone can make it all the way to the eighteenth floor of the dungeon, no matter what obstacles rear up along the way, or how impossible it is for any crawler to get that far, I’m betting it will be Donut.[end-mark] The post Don’t You Dare Call Princess Donut a Sidekick appeared first on Reactor.