Warning: This article contains some minor spoilers for the Dungeon Crawler Carl series and A Parade of Horribles.
The Dungeon Crawler Carl books recently got a new entry in the series and I've been loving it so far. Matt Dinniman has always done a great job blending pop culture jokes into these stories, but one particular LEGO reference really caught my eye in A Parade of Horribles. It's about three quarters of the way through the book, so I won't spoil the context here, but I will of course share the joke for those who want to see it.
As someone who has recently gotten into building LEGO sets as an adult, that obvious nod to the brand from the author here reminds me why DCC is one of my favorite LitRPG reads out there.
On the surface, this just feels like a reference to LEGO always putting the little trademark symbol on the word LEGO. If you go to the official LEGO website you'll see it on absolutely every product, image, and line of text that uses the word. It makes sense for the company to do this on its own site, but to see it done outside of that context always feels hilariously sponsored. So the thought that Prepotente is somehow actually a secret LEGO employee is ridiculous.
But like many things in Dungeon Crawler Carl that just feel ridiculous for the sake of being ridiculous, this joke has a bit more depth than that. Prepotente is a goat that was transformed by a Pet Biscuit that was generated by a world-destroying AI. In addition to his transformation into a goat-person and a massive intelligence boost, he was also stuffed with an absurd amount of knowledge that he definitely didn't collect while he was a goat. That means the AI basically scraped Earth's knowledge and lazily filled him with information pulled directly from an official webpage somewhere.
It's unsurprising to find an AI joke buried in a LEGO reference in DCC, but as always, I appreciate the thought Dinniman put into it. One of my favorite things about these books is how well they portray a rogue AI that has been trained primarily on information available on the internet. Something as innocuous as forgetting to remove the trademark symbol in a chat message is just the kind of innocent AI mistake that feels all too real in 2026.
Jacob Kienlen is a Senior Audience Development Strategist and Writer for IGN. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, he has considered the Northwest his home for his entire life. With a bachelor's degree in communication and 10 years of professional writing experience, his expertise is spread across a variety of different pop culture topics — from TV series to books and the latest Pokémon games.
