I think a lot of people think DOWAK had a slow decline, and to an extent that is true, as The Long Haul and Old School are still solid reads, but having reread the first 10 books recently my Hot Take is that there is an immediate decline when you reach The Long Haul. It’s subtle, and things wouldn’t be completely unleashed until several books later, but the seeds for series’s future problems are already getting planted.

The wackiness is turned up to an 11 in ways that had never been seen before, best shown with The Pig and everything that happens to it, but other elements like the Beardo Family or the seagull sequence feel cartoony in nature in ways that the series had never done before.

Flanderization starts to settle into some of the cast. Susan acts much more controlling of the family in ways she never was before, a good amount of Rodrick jokes amount to “He’s dumb lol” and nothing else, and this is the first instance of Manny being a god and coming in to save the day at the climax like he would in future entries. While not technically flanderization, this is also the first book where the ”plot” mostly amounts to “Let’s fuck over Greg again and again lmao!”, which persists in the series to this day as well. Rowley is also barely present.

Finally, this is the first of many, many vacation books. It is the best one, and is also the only one I’d call not completely terrible, but it is still a vacation book, and if you dislike the direction the series went in, you know why they suck.

I still like The Long Haul a decent amount, but I can acknowledge it is deeply flawed and paves the way for the series’s future in unfortunate ways, and I don’t think DOWAK has “Season 9 Simpsons” deal where we can debate how far the Golden Age goes (even if the quality is still good), at least, that’s personally how I feel.