‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 623

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26 Comments

Wow. Let me get this straight:
The group with (potentially) Jane’s kids kicked her out.
Their resources are dwindling, but apparently they can order stuff from Tenka, because otherwise what’s the point in Jane playing the Game?
So, why would they kick out Jane of all people? If literally everyone in the group were better at earning money in LiFe or the Game, then they wouldn’t have any problems whatsoever.

Or did they kick her out while she was Bloody Mary, because the group was about to be replaced and thus their source of income would be gone, so playing as Jane was a desperate attempt at redeeming her worth to the group? So now that her Special is broken she’s afraid of losing her worth again?

Is she going to be like “Please repair my dolls. Feel free to waltz all over me in the Game with your ‘Nice’ play and be like ‘Haha, stupid Jane can’t kill anything, because I made her sneeze.’ or whatever, just so long as this raises our popularity and we get the resources we need to survive.”? Okay, maybe not quite this way, but I do believe that she doesn’t care what Kat does to Jane’s Game character.

I’m pretty sure the person who was kicked out was Jane’s partner/spouse and Jane was the one who was left waiting for their return.

I think neither. They probably kicked Jane out before she even thought about joining LiFe or the Game.

he was alive to make her special, so she must have joined before that. unless he was a player and shes using his old special, he’d have to be obscure enough for the similarity not to have been mentioned sooner though

Agreed the situation is messed up Alex… but I think you are assuming Jane was part of the Game *before* they kicked her out, which may not be the case.

Consider the alternative where Jane was kicked out – with or without her kids – and only afterward did she find the working Kido that let her get into the Game. She may be surviving on her own with whatever Tenka is sending her, and for whatever reason be unable to return.

I can all too easily visualize Jane’s original joining the game be to try and earn funds not just to survive, but to get Tenka to rescue her and her kids – wherever they are. Killing off her old group could either have been a matter of popularity, or an enraged reaction to realizing that the Game is more important to Tenka than actually saving peoples’ lives… which would give her a very concrete reason for what she is asking Kat to do right now.

Food for thought… so to speak. The Game is all about thoughts for food, after all…

I think she means kicked out of the party in the GAME by Citizen players who didn’t “need” the job. So she killed them instead.

Technically “Bloody Mary” never killed her teammates because they kicked her out first.

That’s what I was thinking.

From my understanding, it was those in the GAME that kicked her out. I think that she may have been the only outsider on the team, and the citizen’s wanted to kick her out. Thats why she killed them all when she could as bloody mary last time she played. That could also be part of why she hates citizen’s so much.
1. Because they seem to have a better life and
2. because they were the kind of people that wanted to kick her from her game group.

The dolls she has may be a re-make of her RL kids, or least kids she was in charge of caring for in there outsider group.

So, from the flashback it looks like her hubby was chosen by picking the short staw to go out, he never came back, leaving her in depression, he may have been a programer and made those doll AI for her character.

There is a likelyhood that she may have already been playing the game before her hubby was sent out. Maybe her griff that he didn’t effected her game play and thus she was then to be kicked out by them? That could be why she had the dolls.

Seems to me, the group of citizens she was playing with told her she was kicked out, and that’s why she went postal on them.
It would be an even better reason if the Game is how she gets some resources from Tenka.

Her speak pattern is one I’m a bit familiar with in how it goes back and forth. So that was an answer to Kats question on the previous page.

Well, that’s my impression of it, but we can only wait and see what else transpires before we know for sure 😉

I really like the flashback-style you used here

I think this happened before Jane showed up as Bloody Mary, or had access to The Game. her husband never returned from the scouting expedition. For some reason, she was deemed to be nonessential to the group, and was kicked out. Since then she has found some way to access the Game, and is cold, callous and crass. She knows they have no regard for her life, so she has less for them.

This is a sign of good storytelling, when sympathy for the most vile of characters can be generated.

When Aneeka was doing her Southern Tour and stopped in Raleigh, one of the things she asked was, “Who is your favorite character?” I think she was a bit surprised when I answered, “Jane.” 🙂

Hmm. I read this as:
1. Group of Outsiders draws straws to hunt for supplies, Jane’s husband draws short straw
2. Jane’s husband leaves to search, Jane waits, he never comes back.
3. Jane gets kicked out of group for reason not yet explained.

But since we’re talking about Jane, I agree with some of the comments that Jane could be talking about getting kicked out of her L.I.F.E. team. Switching topics without warning would be classic Jane.

Also, was it ever stated that Jane’s old team was made up of mostly Citizens? Because I never picked up on that and it makes perfect sense for her to murder their characters if they were.

I don’t know. I think that outside the game, in the team’s private space on the server, she is less L.I.F.E. Jane/Bloody Mary (I’m not sure what gives me that impression, really.) The way I see it is this:

Jane’s person (I can’t tell if that silhouette is male or female, and regardless of sex it may not have been a spouse) draws the short straw and leaves to hunt for resources

Jane’s person fails to come back

Jane watches and waits and completely fails to contribute to the survival of the group because her time is spent watching and waiting for her person

Because she has become nothing but a drain on resources, Jane is thrown out of the group

Jane either finds another group or finds a solitary, stable situation and joins L.I.F.E.

Uh, yes, Jane said they were citizens, just two pages back…

So, along with other good observations people are making about what happened to Jane in the past, is Jane basically saying that the virtual games work to pacify and distract people from the real problems something like giving Roman “circuses” to keep the people entertained?

Yes. But when we were getting the Tenka meeting side of things it sounds like the Citizens don’t have the technical capability to repair and maintain their cities anyway. So they are just on morphine with the game, keeping a riot at bay that will only hasten the mortal wound left on humanity.

Oh wow – took a bit before I looked past the story to notice the art but… there is some REALLY good silhouettes on this page. Great job Aneeka!

Yeah, looks like all those gray dots are out of a job 😛

I think you mean *blobs*?…

Speaking of which, does it seem like Jane’s husband might be wearing some kind of protective gear, like with a helmet? Or is that just a rocking ‘fro? But it doesn’t seem like an easy match for any of the silhouettes in the first panel (could be the one next to Jane, but in different clothes, I guess).

Then again, maybe Jane’s husband was already dead and that’s someone else.

If it’s Jane’s husband who went missing, that had to have happened after she started playing the Game. Remember, he’s the one who coded her creepy doll special.

That’s a good point, but he could have coded it before she started. That could actually explain why it seems to be cobbled together from four others.

It’s possible and likely that Jane played the Game prior to the Ending, and the special might have been coded then or at any rate before Jane regained Kido access.

I feel that, if Jane were competitive in the Game and her husband could program custom specials (however badly), there is no rational justification for endangering either of them if the group had a Kido and L.i.F.e. access. The group also wouldn’t have had such a serious supply problem with two such talents available (particularly combined).

That suggests that Jane must have found a Kido after the events she’s recalling here…though it is uncertain whether she was kicked out of that group or is referring to something else (like her Game team–though it takes a lot of stupid to kick a Morto out and then leave them on guard).

Rather than kicked out, it’s more like they flat out abandoned her

Jane’s spooky rhyme-on-a-dime persona seems to have finally dropped in that last panel.

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 623