‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 512

Colors by Audrey with edits and everything else by me.

Kat might be in shock.

I will be stopping in Manchester, NH, at Cafe Momo (1065 Hanover St, Manchester, NH 03104) on Saturday, Aug 6th @1pm

I'll also be in Boston, MA, at Scoop N Scootery (112 Massachusetts Ave, Arlington, MA 02474) on Sat, Aug 6th @4pm

45 Comments

I WANT TO HUG HER

(but seriously, Kat, that’s what happens to normal people. And heroes. It’s about time you started getting used to actually not being omnipotent)

Well, at least she looks pretty cool as a ghost or whatever she is now. (… and reading the alt text now, it must have looked really cool in your head because it looks pretty cool to me as it is now.)

Ditto, I love the way it looks.

Freak out hacking in 5… 4… 3… 2… *hides*

“Hello Kat, this is your conscious, shut up and have a skittle.”

Because you need to fear the rainbow, and understand that you can’t be perfect or it’s too obvious you’re a rainbow. 😛

Artist, you monster! XD Though i think the coloring is lovely! Is she crawling in that panel, cuz otherwise i think that left leg should be a little lower and that knee near the other one! :3

She’s trying to stand up; you usually use one, if not both, of your legs to give you a boost up.

Yeah, she’s crawling out of the bush. Probably so she can look at herself without any beanches poking through her. they tend to get in the way…

Noooo I’m in Boston Friday and Saturday but I fly out in the morning! :'(

oh and Kat died thing. Buck up, Kat. Dying builds character.

Yep, builds character. You know what they say, what doesn’t kill you-…

…Oh…

…Um….

Come on Kat, expecting a 100% esone run with a party that focuses on killing was never going to happen without hacks of course.

Oh, man…
This can’t possibly be good.

Does not compute
DOES NOT COMPUTE
DOES NOT- (Kat.exe has crashed. Please send an error report)

Next words:
“I didn’t hack!” or “I almost hacked….”

I’m predicting “-lost?!” said by Bandit. This is not how he thought this day would go.

No, the ghost state still looks pretty cool.

I totally agree. I vote for it.

I think the ghost state looks fine.

Lot of people saying they like Ghost Form Kat. I’m gonna have to agree too. Must have looked absolutely awesome in your head could it looks really good here. Easy to tell she’s no longer in normal playing mode…

Now that I think about it, this premise is kinda similar to Danganronpa 2/3. The Remnants of Despair were also villains, but they could be and were rehabilitated somewhat. But the Future Foundation still wants to kill them, for past crimes.

A perhaps: maybe the reason the ghost state isn’t coming out is two reasons:
1) Heavy dark outlines. Need to be lighter and more transparent. The heavy outlines make her look too solid and defined.
2) Shading on her form. A game ghost state probably wouldn’t have much form, so any shading would be less opaque, more transparent maybe?

Just a couple thoughts. : )

I agree with the outline. I think if you drop that for the finished image it might help a bit since it would make her look less there.

I disagree on the outline. The hand may seem heavy compared to the rest, and maybe could be thinned a tiny bit, but you cannot drop the lines for the other frames even a tiny bit without making her disappear into the background. This isn’t a reality form of ghostliness, so much as just a visual cue to the gamers “You died; be more careful next time!” When running around in ghost form in World of Warcrack (for example), the characters are colorless, silvery, and see-through, BUT they are also still very substantial so that we can see them, particularly as their entire environment is also silvery and shades of gray.

Aneeka has gone for a different stylistic representation of death than WoW’s shades-of-gray-transparent (still transparent, but very watercolor-y and gorgeous…and I see I’m not the only one to like it a lot), but the fact remains that the players of this game still need to SEE where their character is, in relation to their environment. Even if they’re dead, they’ll still have to be able to navigate the terrain while a ghost, and that requires understanding the body/terrain relationship.

This is a computer game, after all, and it’s going to have stylistic choices like that simply for ease in game-playing.

What about a more blurred outline as though it were difficult to see where the ghost began and the environment ended?

On the bright side, there’s no reason to keep Bandit from opening a can of “whup’a**”. Plus, you never know who you’ll meet when you are dead. Especially if you’ve never been dead before.

A true hero isn’t someone who’s every sword strike lands home.
A true hero isn’t someone who blocks or evades every attack, never being wounded.
Those are fantasies. Unreal. Things that can never come to pass.

A true hero is someone who does their absolute best despite all the unfairness the world throws at them.
A true hero stands back up after they fall down, either wiser or more determined. Sometimes both.
A true hero will not turn from death, and will do all that they are able to achieve their goals. (Pro-tip: hacking here won’t help your goals, so don’t bother)

Kat, this looks like as good a time as ever to emphasize which side of the line you walk.

Scary thought: D as her new Esone.

I can’t get over how pretty the pages are.

I see two possibilities here… ok 3…

1. Kat snaps and hacks.
2. Kat snaps and goes on a killing spree becoming fullblown Morto or whatever and cackling maniacally while covered in digital blood
3. Kat manages to accept it and move on like a reasonable person

(4. Kat’s about to snap but then freaks out over Danni)

5. Kat kills Bandit irl.

That’d be part of 1

Clearly, there is only one thing she can do: Bring down the system again and revert it to an earlier save point.

Weirdly, this comment made me think about all the times I’ve done that in single-player games – even those that don’t normally allow for savescumming, like Minecraft.

You can recover. You can get that 100% back. You will lose it again… and then gain it again. You can get more Esones (I can think of a couple nearby, actually). You’ll hit more setbacks… you’ll overcome them.

Anything less and no one is going to think you’re a hero.

Incidentally, a Jake a tree by now?

Indont think either jake or jane will become trees they have too much to add to the story still

On the other hand turning people into trees is an erbanna ability maybe reverting them from trees is another erbanna ability … One that requires 100% ?

The tree thing was a… Mani ability I think? It wasn’t Erbana it was just a way Kat’s dad pissed off her mom who was an Erbana player without ruining her score.

Leaves the question- how is she going to feel about bandit attacking her? And what’s she gonna do?

Hopefully, this will be that moment of relief for her that one could often experience when they no longer had to worry about holding up some unattainable state of perfection. That point at which she receives an epiphany that she can, in fact, relax and enjoy the game she’s playing from here on out, and start to ease off her need to be ‘the best’..

Or it could simply inspire wall-punching rage. >_>

I find for me, it goes about 50/50 in situations like this. xD

so how many of Bandit’s fans have now switched to Kat?

This could be an interesting reveal point.

Kleya has some kind of reason for wanting to be in the game as a hero and as ‘herself’ (rather than just in the game period, which she could do). That has necessarily been hidden for dramatic effect, we needed to be able to access the viewpoint of all the characters who think that Deconstruct Me actually existed and was led by ‘the cyborg’ and was largely responsible for the global catastrophe. At the same time we have to find redeeming elements in Kleya’s character. If we actually knew what Kleya was up to here, we’d either think everyone was fools for believing the official TENka narrative or we’d know that the official TENka narrative is true and the cyborg is an irredeemable monster.

I’d still find Kleya interesting if she actually did destroy the world and somehow (intentionally or not) was leading a band of expert hackers who joined her ’cause’. Especially if they’re no longer around because she got upset and killed them all…which, given what we’ve seen about the power differential between TENka (let alone technologically illiterate hacker hunters) and the hackers, would be the only way they could plausibly be no longer around if they ever existed at all. Even small fry like ‘Superbug’ seem able to hold out indefinitely against anything TENka can actually do about them. Which suggests that almost nobody actually killed in the hacker hunts was a real threat…meaning the hunts didn’t stop the hacker attacks, certainly not the really dangerous ones. And whether or not Deconstruct Me actually existed, people capable of evading the hacker hunts and using their technical skills to ride out the global disaster in relative safety certainly did…but most of them would have little reason to associate with the TENka Cities (or their Citizens).

So why DID the hacker attacks stop? Possibility one is that Kleya simply decided not to kill everyone after she realized that was a thing that really might happen. But that doesn’t explain her current actions, if she wanted to set up a bubble society of survivors dependent on pleasing her, she could easily do that…but that society already exists and Kleya isn’t the one that created it or demands it worship her. Which leads to the theory that someone in TENka was behind the hacker attacks, invented Deconstruct Me, and instigated the ‘hacker hunts’ as a way to purge the world of competing technical competence.

It probably wasn’t Bandit…but Jake works for whoever it was and probably suspects at least part of the truth.

Still, it remains unclear what exactly Kleya is trying to accomplish. Maintaining a 100% Erbana was apparently just a goal she set for herself to satisfy her OCD…unless it was a crucial part of her plan in which case she’ll have to reveal what she was trying to accomplish with that. But even if she just has to come up with some other way to satisfy her OCD, she is going to be constrained by what is compatible with her actual motivations.

It’s not a loss. It’s a temporary setback. It’s just a marker that something slowed you down at one point. It’s a reminder that you can’t be perfect all the time, which is normal. Perfect normality cannot be accomplished at the same time as perfection. You want to win the challenge you set for yourself? Accepting that delays in the schedule occasionally occur. Failure happens. The challenge’s goal, however, requires accepting that, without believing yourself to be a failure. Not every plan can go perfectly. Shooting for that is one thing, getting that would be to blow your cover.

Calm down, relax, think, and limit yourself to what you’re supposed to be: a very talented player. The thing to remember about a temporary setback is that it is, well, just that: temporary. Next time, have something ready that prevents combat in the first place. (But don’t take up the moniker Dame Branch as that’ll be just bragging about what you were wanting to leave behind.)

Cue kats freak out

wwwWWHAAAT I binge read this last night and today and– noo X_X I needs moar pages!

Such a good webcomic >3<

This is why, if ever I had had a chance to talk to Kira/Kleya/Kat, I would have argued against this plan in the first place: pacifism is hard and ultimately untenable when it comes to defending those you care about, and plenty of heroes cause harm to those who deserve it. FAR more reasonable to go for a Kesti alignment: you can help people, doing what you need to do as the situation demands without a requirement to kill or avoid killing. She is now freaking out over losing a 100% Erbana that I don’t think was really logical to try for in the first place. Sure, Erbana might be the “nicest” alignment. But “good” and “nice” are not the same thing.

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 512