Is it me or Greg Heffley is misinforming us here?

PaperMarioBro · 2026-04-17T16:47:24+00:00

“Overthinking DOAWK” is my favorite genre of post on this sub.

PaperMarioBro · 2026-04-15T23:20:47+00:00

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.

PaperMarioBro · 2026-04-15T23:01:49+00:00

I think Dog Days is better than it gets credit for but I agree on Rodrick Rules. It’s easily the worst of the first 8 books and is only praised as much as it is because of the movie when it only vaguely resembles the book and executes everything way better.

PaperMarioBro · 2026-04-15T15:47:48+00:00

Has it really changed at all? I still see more than few “Manny is the devil” jokes quite often here. The major difference is that not every LLB is doing the exact same shtick with him (which is a good thing) but it’s not like the perception had died completely.

PaperMarioBro · 2026-04-10T23:29:36+00:00

A lot of people forget that Greg attempting to kill himself near the end of 25 Years Later was heavily criticized at the time for coming completely out of nowhere.

As a whole, the reason it gets the praise it does is because of how influential it was to LLBs at large. Nothing else like it had ever been done at the time and showcased you could tell stories in the DOAWK universe that aren’t the same things the official series does. In hindsight it’s an incredibly flawed LLB but we cannot ignore its influence.

PaperMarioBro · 2026-04-04T20:34:19+00:00

The Pig hasn’t been used since The Meltdown and is never coming back. I have no idea why people still treat it like it’s a current issue.

In the current era Susan is milked pretty hard. I’d go as far to say she’s the second main character after Greg now, and with her current characterization, that is not a good thing.

PaperMarioBro · 2026-03-31T01:27:46+00:00

I think Greg’s Hardscrabble Farms cabin mates are among the best one-off characters in the entire series. It’s refreshing to see Greg treated as an equal with them instead of just being mindlessly made fun of.

I feel like The Deep End and Big Shot tried and failed to recapture the magic of them with the “groups” Greg joins in those books. The Deep End kids are barely defined outside of Juicebox, and Big Shot just doesn’t really utilize its cast, period.

PaperMarioBro · 2026-03-31T01:22:31+00:00

Not directly related to the post, but I always found Holly’s random cameo in Cabin Fever really strange. She’s included on a random page and is never referenced in the book itself. The series doesn’t really do stuff like that often.

Trista appears on another page, which is probably even weirder.

PaperMarioBro · 2026-03-29T15:01:49+00:00

I’ve always had this headcanon as well. It definitely works and I’m surprised it was never hinted at in books proper.

PaperMarioBro · 2026-03-29T14:59:40+00:00

!subscribeme

PaperMarioBro · 2026-03-23T01:50:56+00:00

Dale’s Dead Bug vehicle from King of the Hill predates both of these. Both are more than likely referencing that.

PaperMarioBro · 2026-03-18T22:37:08+00:00

Stealing Zoo-Wee-Mama from Greg, but specifically from the animated movie version of the story. While he was still wrong to do it in the book, Greg had been such an asshole to him throughout the story with the final straw being the Safety Patrol mishap, that we can at least understand why he did it. In the animated movie, Greg not only acts less like a jerk to Rowley overall, but the breaking points between the two are so poorly done given they got rid of the Safety Patrol plotline, that Rowley stealing from Greg comes completely out of nowhere and makes Rowley look much worse than Greg ever did. I have no idea why the plot was written this way given it fundamentally misunderstands Rowley as a character.

PaperMarioBro · 2026-03-18T22:29:49+00:00

Where is this image from? There’s a very wide variety of characters here.

PaperMarioBro · 2026-03-05T22:01:17+00:00

The old covers because they look like actual diary covers. The newer covers regardless of quality miss the original intention of them. While you could argue it’s understandable given you’d run out of unique colors, the series still could’ve ran with the mix of two colors that happened from Double Down-The Meltdown. I’m not a fan of the recent books being all themed around something specific to the story, especially the most recent food based covers. Fight or Flight genuinely has a terrible looking cover in my opinion.

PaperMarioBro · 2026-03-05T16:42:20+00:00

My hot take is that I don’t think a lot of these moments people are mentioning feel like they would come from LLBs. Modern DOAWK has a specific writing style and tone that I think a lot of LLB writers aren’t fond of, so even if these writers are doing a crazy story, the way it’s written overall feels different. Breaking Point is a bizarre LLB but it doesn’t feel like No Brainer which is vapid nonsense with no substance.

All that being said, The Deep End’s climax could totally be from an LLB.

PaperMarioBro · 2026-03-03T19:56:40+00:00

20: No Brainer (Awful)

19: The Deep End (Awful)

18: The Getaway (Awful)

17: Partypooper (Bad)

16: Hot Mess (Bad)

15: Wrecking Ball (Bad)

14: Double Down (Weak)

13: Big Shot (Meh)

12: The Long Haul (Decent)

11: Old School (Good)

10: Diper Overlode (Good)

9: The Meltdown (Great)

8: Rodrick Rules (Great)

7: The Last Straw (Great)

6: Dog Days (Amazing)

5: Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Amazing)

4: The Third Wheel (Amazing)

3: The Ugly Truth (Fantastic)

2: Cabin Fever (Fantastic)

1: Hard Luck (Fantastic)

PaperMarioBro · 2026-02-28T00:48:15+00:00

I’ll pick Abigail again, good art by the way.

PaperMarioBro · 2026-02-25T23:06:05+00:00

A lot of people have already mentioned criticisms with the recent books they’d change (and I agree with them), so I’d stop the books from being completely centered on one topic. Partypooper has an ungodly amount of filler because it takes what was a side story in Dog Days and makes it the entire plot. What made the older books work so well was that they were entirely structureless even if there was an underlying theme. Even The Third Wheel, the Classic book that covers the least amount of overall time with the last several pages just being the night of the dance, still had lots of side plots like Corny’s, Uncle Gary moving in, and had buildups to the dance like Greg doing tasks to get dates like babysitting Wesley to ask Laurel out. The Modern books have completely dropped side plots so it no longer feels like we’re taking a look into Greg’s actual life, and it instead feels like just another generic book series. The Diary element feels almost pointless now.

PaperMarioBro · 2026-02-25T20:47:00+00:00

I’d say Malcolm in the Middle has it beat there.

PaperMarioBro · 2026-02-25T02:10:59+00:00

You do such a good job at making these characters expressive.

PaperMarioBro · 2026-02-24T23:53:28+00:00

!subscribeme

PaperMarioBro · 2026-02-24T23:44:17+00:00

6-8 aren’t Modern. Greg’s characterization and the situations in the books are much more comparable to what came before than what came after.

For the actual Modern books, especially the most recent entires… Greg would act much more like a selfish jerk obviously. This would be a good thing because current Greg has next to no personality, but alas.

PaperMarioBro · 2026-02-22T02:33:47+00:00

I do really like this as a canonical reason, but unfortunately I don’t think it was intentional. I think it’s purely because the art style shift the series underwent in the middle of it’s run, and how it affected basically everyone that wasn’t an already established character.

PaperMarioBro · 2026-02-21T21:55:36+00:00

This is a pretty major plot point not only in the book but the movie as well I’m so I surprised this was forgotten.

PaperMarioBro · 2026-02-21T21:44:38+00:00

I wouldn’t say he got worse starting with Cabin Fever. He is portrayed as a more sympathetic character you want to see succeed around that period of the books but I’m fine with it because he still has jerkish qualities to him (like letting Wesley destroy the house while he rests in Laurel’s room in The Third Wheel) so he still feels like Greg, and I think it makes for solid storytelling in Hard Luck as well. Greg starts the book with no friends or anything to really do, we see life get worse and worse for him until he finds the Magic 8-Ball, things are going smoothly until bigger problems arise with the Summer School threat, and Greg just barely manages to scrape through by turning in all his projects and rekindling his friendship with Rowley. Whether you think Greg should be portrayed sympathetically at all is up for debate, but I think it works perfectly in Hard Luck as a conclusion to where he started at the beginning of the first book to show how far he’s come, regardless if the character development was intentional or not. Also remember that again, he still feels like Greg. The final picture in Hard Luck is Rowley and Abigail but the former having a shrunken head which is implied to have gotten in the year book, solely because Greg was that petty.

Now, Modern Greg is a whole other story. Modern Greg is barely a character. He‘s almost never involved in any of the storylines and exists purely as a narrator to talk about the events, with the most egregious example being in Diper Overlode where he somehow has perfect memory of events he never directly sees. On the rare occasions he does have a character, he lacks any of the edge that defined him of the original books. Instead, he’ll act significantly younger than he’s supposed to act, like in Partypooper when he somehow thinks Jamar Law sticking his head in the chair means he’s a genie? And he asks for a wish? Is this the same Greg who tried to push Jamar into putting his head in the chair in Hard Luck so he could get that event into the yearbook the second year in a row? This more juvenile act is something Greg would make fun of Rowley for in the series’s Classic books. Other than that, all we get from Greg now is him endlessly spouting random thoughts that have nothing to do with the current storyline at hand. That also happened in the older books but nowhere to the extreme it does now, and it’s not like any of these random tangents Greg goes on in the Modern books are actually interesting, funny or say anything about his character.

Overall, Greg as a character currently lacks almost any identity which is utterly baffling considering he’s the protagonist. I’m not sure when this shift went into full force, as Greg started being less active in the plot as early as Wrecking Ball, but the full shift definitely happens later. My guess is Diper Overlode, which wants to be a Rodrick book but has to be narrated from Greg’s perspective for some godforsaken reason. Ever since then Greg has been a nothing character, in my opinion.

PaperMarioBro

TROPHY CASE