One thing that really struck me as I read the series is that the majority of the time, any new character is a woman/female. Not at all in LitRPG harem way (that trope gets specifically called out and discarded in the very first book), just as kind of a default. There’s a _very_ wide range of female characters, and I suspect it’s deliberate.

Yeah, no further than I've read so far, I really appreciated the number and variety of female characters, including both enemies and allies. (Even the team of players who are hunting other players are a man and a woman.) And also the book actively pointing out that it isn't that kind of book, heh. For one thing, it makes Carl's cheating girlfriend feel much less of a stand-in for "all women everywhere" (which could easily be a thing in a book like this, but I think the book avoids it neatly - that's *her*, not women in general, and there's no indication that Carl feels that way, either).

Also agreed that it's breaking out of the LitRPG niche and finding a wider audience. It's actually a *great* example of how a book can do that when it hits all the genre tropes but also has a great deal of things in it to appeal to a wide audience, including humor, a varied cast, and a pretty clever conceit for why the genre tropes work the way they do. And also, it's just good!