‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 337

Yep, Dr. Grace is the main reason this underwater City exists.

Like I mentioned under this comic, TENka City was built with a lot of opposition and controversy due to the horrific failure of the previous one. Dr Grace, in order to appease all the extra protocols, mandates, and regulations, and get the needed funding, decided to get TENka, one of the most prestigious tech companies of the time, to not only work on his City and give it state-of-the art tech, but to agree to live there to prove it was perfectly safe. The move was supposed to be temporary (the contract was for 3 years or until the City was filled to capacity) but then the Ending happened and yeah, they're now stuck there.

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Okay, this is the best update in a LONG while
1) FINALLY SOME INFORMATION
2) SOME POLITICAL INFORMATION
3) SOME POLITICAL INFORMATION THAT SOUNDS RELIABLE
4) there is no widespread panic, thank g-d, this setting is already confusing enough to not want to deal with what panic would do to it. I, the reader, selfishly want this society stable
5) SECOND CHANCE TO CHOOSE AGAIN????
6) second chance for Jake to try and understand Kleya’s actions?
7) PLOT ADVANCEMENT AHEAAAAAAAAAAAD
not that I wasn’t glad to have some Reality and setting building, but IT’S ABOUT TIME H*** YES
*happy dance*

And now I actually read the comment too and it would seem really super suspicious if this wasn’t the out of universe information )=
maybe giving out spoilers/worldbuilding in comments isn’t the best policy

It’s not really a spoiler, since it’s tangential. It’s implied in the comic, but not really important to the plot, so putting the exposition in the comic itself would be gratuitous. Keeping us in the dark would promote wild speculation, which is great, but could also lead to a lot of misconceptions and complaining about problems that don’t exist, which is not so great. I don’t mind either way, since I like the exposition but I’m pretty good at reasoning it out on my own.

It IS plot-related, as in, now we know that Dr Grace is not Kleya’s dad, not the main villain, not responsible for the collapse of society and generally not relevant to the main plot.
How do we know this? Because if this information was plot related, it would have been in the comic itself / would have been withheld from the comments until the appropriate moment.
I was excited about new political information, as witnessed in the above comment, and all plot possibilities. And then I learned it was not relevant.
This is. Kind of not good writing.

@LIliet: We already knew that Dr Grace was not Kleya’s dad. Kleya’s dad is this president guy. Dr. Grace is the intelligence operative leader of the group searching for Kleya. My guess is Dr Grace is the face of Teneka as his cover. There is nothing spoiler-ific based you having all of the same information we do it all comes from the comic or Aneka’s comments below the comic which she states when it is cannon to the story. I appreciate that she doesn’t go wall of text in the actual comic, and instead places additional information below the story to enhance the experience.

I disagree.

I do not think this story has a main villain, unless we count Kleya. While Kleyas dad is important, what he is doing now is not important and most clues point to him being dead. And I think Dr. Grace is certainly still relevant.

Interesting – so D wiped out the results of their group’s alignment scenario. Does that mean they’ll have to retake it? 🙂

If only Kleya had more money, she’d be able to use a private upload server (thus avoiding hostile crowds who could make her unintentionally lose her cool again) and give Danni some Game tutoring (in that scenario, getting onto terra firma asap might help).

Ideally, she’d negotiate with Sandra to see if there are any programming tasks which could be done remotely (or even sneakernet code back and forth between the broken computer and Sandra’s net-connected terminal), which would help earn her money, but knowing Kleya, that won’t occur to her (or she’ll think that even then, there’s too high a risk of her RL self being tracked down).

My impression is that Kleya doesn’t especially care about money. She cares about being honest. After all, money is just bits on a hard drive somewhere – I’m sure if she wanted to she could pretty easily give herself as much as she wanted. And I bet she could do it with a very low chance of getting caught, too.

And if you think about it, what good is money to Kleya anyway? Sure she could get a private upload server, but she’d still have to deal with hecklers at some point. Would a hero run away from a hostile crowd? Really, once your immediate material needs are met, money is just about social status. And I don’t think the sort of social status that money gets you means a hill of beans to Kleya.

I don’t think it’s going too far out on a limb here to speculate that whatever Kleya did during the Ending had a lot to do with her temper. I think that for her, being not a villain means in large part learning to keep a handle on her temper. Although I could only guess if she’s thought that through consciously or not.

My impression is that Kleya cares neither for money nor for honesty. She cares about being ‘not-hated’; she wants the love and respect of people and she wants to be able to look at herself in a mirror and be able to say she isn’t a monster. In a sense she wants to be the center of good attention, she wants to be praised and she wants to ‘win’ at life.

I agree with you, I have seen that as her character for a long time, but I never really reflected on how much I identify with her in her goal until I read your comment. Thanks for adding another dimension to my reading! 🙂

“she wants the love and respect of people and she wants to be able to look at herself in a mirror and be able to say she isn’t a monster. In a sense she wants to be the center of good attention, she wants to be praised and she wants to ‘win’ at life.”

I think that describes just about every non-psychotic-non-masochistic person on Earth, whether or not they own up to it or not. So in that sense it’s not something Kleya-specific, but rather very human.

And until we have the full story about what happened during the Ending (if we ever will), it’s not really fair to judge Kleya’s motives based on guesses and (most likely) biased information.

She wants to be a center of good attention, but the problem is that she also seems to be scared of crowds in general – social anxiety, sensory overload. In this case, it doesn’t matter if the attention is good or bad, what matters is that there are too many people )=
It’ll take her quite some time to get used to crowds of fans.

Who doesn’t want those things?

In Kleya’s defense I do think she has reason to be so childish. My impression of her relationship with her father, before their falling out, was she lived to meet his expectations. My impression of her mother was while they didn’t always see eye to eye it was Kleya’s mother where she got all her current notions on being a decent person. It is Kleya’s guilt over her mother’s death that has her retreating to those values. Values, maybe, that she learned as a young child and only now is trying to live up to.

We’ve already seen Kleya have noticeable money issues – e.g. borrowing money to get into The Game in the first place (and even more courtesy of the napping fine). It’s not so much that she doesn’t care for money, but wants to be seen to earn it honestly.

Although very self-centered, she’s starting to rediscover the concepts of friendship, reliability and trust – she considered quitting, creating a new identity and starting again, but decided not to for the sake of Mina and Danni.

A private upload server (probably shared with Danni, who’s the only other member of the team to use a public one and who’s survival in Reality is tied to progress in The Game) would mean she’d be less likely to have to wade through dense crowds of people voicing their opinion. She’d still encounter people voicing their opinion elsewhere in LiFe (especially as her LiFe identity would quickly become known to those following her Game identity) and have to deal with Subscribers (since survival in The Game depends not only on performance but on popularity). She’s beginning to realise she can no longer be anonymous and fade into the background.

On top of all that, she’s likely to continue using an array of eclectic, heroic Specials (at least one of which was designed specifically to stop her hacking – although hopefully she’ll work with Sandra’s husband on their design!) which will reveal she’s quite adept at coding. That will throw up another dilemma as people requiring her coding services in LiFe (or Reality – e.g. the Lillys) will probably expect more than “just good enough” but at the same time, she’ll want to continue to hide the true extent of her abilities. After all, she’s barely managing to restrain herself to read only code examination.

On top of everything else, she may wish to place stricter boundaries on what D is allowed to do – she’s had a very close call with this latest incident, and unintentionally endangering the lives of a substantial number of people borders on villainy – certainly not what she’s attempting to do!

I mostly agree with you here, mittfh. I just want to add that I think for Kleya it’s more than just wanting to earn money honestly. I think she approaches what she’s doing in LiFe the same way she’d approach a game. Actually I wouldn’t surprised if that were her way of approaching life in general. She wants to play and win honestly, and money is just one part of that. I suspect that for her, “I’m low on money and need to find some more,” is pretty equivalent to, “I’m low on magic points and need to find a mana crystal.”

I think you underestimate D. I think he knew very well that Tenka City would recover quickly from what he did. That may very well be the reason why he did it. He prolly could have used a less invasive method if he really wanted to, but I think he wanted some things that were bothering Kleya to disappear.

I would agree money and status and things are not what she is after. Sandra gave Kleya her own apartment a while back, and it also had access to a private upload, and what ever furniture she wanted. still instead of being happy to have her own place or any of the extra’s that did come out of the deal, she abandoned the new apt to go back to the one she shares with the others. We also know from back in the begging she is able add to her bank account balance with out making a normal deposit. and even if she does think that adding to much will get the attention from the wrong people in a way similar to someone who’s adept at counterfeiting could get into trouble if they suddenly have tons of money with no apparent source of it. still she could of made it so she had just enough to cover the fees, instead of having to beg, barrow, and steal the old fashioned way to get the money, and I think still of been under the radar.

another interesting parallel I just though of is that the hacker huts seem to mirror the Salem which trial. because in Salem the some of the rye got infected with some fungus that causes hallucinations, and convulsions, among other things. But the people of the village where so scared of evil witches invading their town and doing all sorts of evil things to anyone they don’t like. that when an event happened that appeared like the often talked about witch attack no one stopped to try to figure out if there could of been another reason, and furthermore when they had found who they thought was to blame all they would listen to then where reasons why it had to be them and explanations as to why it wouldn’t of of been where just passed off as a lie. the Hacker hunts seems like they where on a similar note every one was so dead set on eliminating all the black hat hackers, that anyone who was good at programing was a target, and white hat hackers where probably the prime victims, being as they are engaging in the act of hacking but are not doing so for malicious reasons, that probably lead to a bunch of otherwise good guys messing up the systems either in a panic to keep them self’s from being discovered or they where dragged across the Despair Event Horizon after being hunted for long enough just because of what they could do and no one would believe them when they claim they wouldn’t do that. Which probably only fueled the fire and got the hacker hunters even more determined to take down the “hackers” which in turn caused those who where targeted to take even more drastic measures to protect themselves locking them into a deadly downward spiral that lead to the end happening. Kleya probably had some part in it but I don’t think it was solely responsible for it the systems where already compromised by all the other hackers trying to cover their tracks and get away from the mobs out to get them. Still being as it seems she was one of the more visible hackers at the time it all went down and everyone needed someone to blame she got it all..

Oh man, now Jake has an opportunity to make Kleya be not [in] a villian [group]! D is the BEST at his job!

Let’s just hope he gets it. Or, more likely, guesses it and puts it to the test, then somehow gets to see her relief, and finally becomes sure enough to approach her about her intents.

But then again, that would more or less end this comic I think, and we don’t want that…

Look at the possibilities though. The comic could move on to be the continuing struggle of the young couple to fix the world and become the GREATEST HEROS EVER!

While Jake’s likely to find further evidence fuelling his suspicions that Kleya is the girl he once knew, he’s unlikely to confront her directly – instead wanting to study her and try and draw his own conclusions about her actions.

Added onto which, there isn’t exactly a shortage of other plot points to be revealed at some point during this tale: further information on Kleya’s background, what exactly happened to her dad, how did Deconstruct.me start and what did they do, how the cybog rampage started (and was it connected to The Ending, where the Earth’s geomagnetic field went haywire?), does Tenka have an ulterior motive (after all, they are a private company who appear to be single-handedly running what’s left of the civilised world – I find it hard to believe it’s completely altruistic), why are they so dominant (after all, only one company being able to build a completely immersive VR system without competition for presumably several years before the events leading up to The Ending seems slightly supsicious), and probably at least half a dozen threads I can’t recall offhand…

YES! I thought it was a good thing, but I did not remember why – that Kleya wanted to be in a hero group! Yes please let this happen aaaaaa

The problem is that even though D erased the files from Tenka, D could not erase the results of the battle from the collective memory of all the fans. With so many fans witnessing the battle, this is definitely an exception to casual rule of thumb: ‘Pics or it didn’t happen’.

Hm. “Undo what I did” seems to have been interpreted with a wide scope. I do hope the actual intent, preventing Kleya frm damaging the crowd, was also accomplished….

I suspect Kim is the voice telling Jake that Kleya killed her mother after seeing the attack on the hospital on tv. So while she was loyal to Kleya’s mom and seemed to want to protect both Kleya and her mom earlier, we’ve seen that she’s quite prepared to hand Kleya over to the president now… We’re assuming that’s Kleya’s dad, who seems to have had a complete change of heart since Kleya was young, whether he was brainwashed or not. Kim is probably a reasonably good person, since Jake seems to have no problem working with her, but she also seems to be firmly in the opposition where Kleya is concerned. (I still like her better than Dr. Grace, though.)

@mittfh, I also wish Kleya could get some coding work done for Sandra, but I think that’s going to be difficult.

I don’t know if you guys realized it, but, if I am not mistaken, this is the first comic that actually shows D as the virus. They mention the virus, and then, in the next panel, D shows up in a menacing position. We are all so sure that D is the virus that we didn’t realize that, I think.

Not A Villain Webcomic

Webcomic of a semi- reformed hacker trying to redeem herself in a post- apocalyptic world she may have created.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 337