Earth Was Chosen in 1937

Last updated: July 11, 2026

The timeline

This is canon: The Borant Corporation sent its first preparation team to Earth in 1937.

Now look at what happened on Earth after 1937:

• 1954: Tolkien publishes The Lord of the Rings. Mainstream fantasy with dungeons, quests, and fellowships enters Western culture.
• 1974: Dungeons & Dragons is published. Humans invent a game where you crawl through dungeons, fight monsters, level up, and collect loot. Sound familiar?
• 1978: MUD1 goes online. The first multiplayer dungeon game. Digital crawling begins.
• 1980s-90s: The dungeon crawler genre explodes in video games. Rogue, Nethack, Diablo, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Humans become intimately familiar with the concept of "descending through floors and fighting increasingly difficult monsters."
• 1992: The Real World premieres on MTV. Humans invent reality television -- a format where ordinary people are put in controlled environments and filmed for entertainment.
• 2000s: Survivor, Big Brother, Fear Factor. Reality TV evolves into competitions where suffering is the product. Audiences learn to watch real people in distress and find it entertaining.
• 2010s: LitRPG emerges as a fiction genre. Humans start writing stories about people trapped inside game systems. The idea of "your life is now a dungeon and the rules are imposed by a system" becomes recreational reading.

All of this happened after 1937. All of it makes humans psychologically prepared for exactly what the crawl is.

The theory

Borant didn't just observe Earth. Borant shaped Earth.

The Corporation deploys five forward teams to "candidate planets" at any given time, actively influencing pop culture. On Earth, that influence produced a species that already understands leveling systems, dungeon mechanics, party composition, boss fights, and the concept of being entertainment for a mass audience. When the staircase appeared and the dungeon opened, humans didn't need orientation. They'd been training their whole lives.

This isn't paranoia. This is the Corporation's documented business model. They seed cultures. They prep planets. Earth wasn't a random selection -- it was an 89-year investment.

Why Earth specifically?

This is where the theory gets interesting. Borant has five prep teams running at all times, across a galaxy of potential targets. Why did Earth make the cut? Options:

Mineral composition. The crawl's actual purpose is resource extraction. If Earth's elemental makeup is unusually valuable, that justifies an 89-year prep window. You don't spend nearly a century seeding a culture unless the payout is exceptional.

Human resilience. The Earth crawl generates unprecedented viewership. Human crawlers consistently outperform expectations. Carl, Donut, and their party are doing things no previous crawlers have done. If Borant's prep teams identified humans as unusually entertaining -- stubborn, creative, emotionally expressive, prone to dramatic last stands -- that's a content goldmine.

Something else entirely. There might be a property of Earth or humanity that hasn't been revealed yet. The 1937 date is oddly specific. What happened in 1937 that would attract an alien corporation's attention? What were they looking for?

The fun question

If Borant has been influencing human culture since 1937, which specific cultural developments were alien-engineered? The community loves debating this:

• Did Borant invent D&D? Or just nudge Gary Gygax in the right direction?
• Is reality TV a Borant creation or a natural human impulse they exploited?
• Was the LitRPG genre organic, or did someone plant the seed?
• Did the explosion of "isekai" fiction (ordinary person transported to a game world) come from Borant priming the cultural pump?

We'll never get definitive answers to these questions. But asking them is half the fun of this theory.

The dark version

If Borant spent 89 years making humans ready for the crawl, they weren't just influencing pop culture. They were grooming a planet. Every RPG, every dungeon crawler, every season of Survivor was training material. Humans weren't developing entertainment. They were developing coping mechanisms for a slaughter they didn't know was coming.

The Borant Corporation looked at a planet of 8 billion people and thought: "How do we make them easier to harvest?" And the answer was: "Teach them to think of it as a game."

Where the Cookbook lands

Our call: the culture-seeding is not a theory, it is the Corporation's stated business model, so the only real question is why Earth, and we land on entertainment value over minerals. The books keep hammering that humans overperform, that Carl and Donut are doing things no crawlers have done, that the Earth crawl pulls unprecedented viewership. A species that turns terror into a stubborn, funny, camera-ready last stand is the rarer resource, and rare content is what a failing Corporation is desperate for. The oddly specific 1937 date we read as flavor, not a locked box with an answer inside. Dinniman is happy to let a number feel ominous without owing you a reveal.

To be clear, "why Earth" has not been answered in the text, so this is us weighing hints, not quoting canon. Maybe it really is the minerals. Who fucking knows.

What other human inventions do you think Borant influenced? The weirder the theory, the better. Comments below.

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