‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 365

Danni may or may not be figuring Kleya out at last.

The Game Tutorial in text-mode, for those that missed it last update.

EDIT: Changed the first panel's dialogue.

36 Comments

you’re -> your

Panel three, Danni’s last balloon: shouldn’t it be “your” instead of “you’re”?

I am really curious about the solution Danni thought of. She probably doesn’t know about Kleya’s fans saying “You’d be such a cool villain!”. I was laughing when I read that page. 😀

Btw, panel 3: Is this _your_ (not you’re) way of…
Somehow this happens a lot on the internet.

Hmm… I suspect Danni’s actually about to give some very useful advice, and that’s Kleya’s not going to like it.

P.S Panel 3, last bubble, typo (you’re)

Spelling mistake. “Is this you’re way..” should be “Is this your way…”.

While Danni obviously doesn’t know the circumstances, she’s almost certainly twigged what Kleya’s up to:

“I… don’t know what to do. I… can’t stop hurting people. But I *hurt* people. But… what if… deep down… I’m actually evil. A monster. Something that is completely, utterly… Unlikeable. With no hope of change.”

Couple that with her “Nice” special in the Game Trials and choosing the pacifistic route, and it doesn’t take a genius to work out that she’s terrified that if she engages in violence (even in the VR-within-a-VR setting of The Game), she’ll like it and be utterly ruthless and hurt others (possibly including her team-mates); so she’s trying to be ultra-nice both to prove to herself that she can do it and win friends through doing so.

Except, of course, in The Game, winning friends and making progress are both largely dependent on being effective in combat. She has to strike a balance between the two extremes – and with her ability to read the code running The Game, she could potentially anticipate NPC attacks and deal with them swiftly and efficiently while protecting her teammates, then move on.

In my experience teaching college students, people aren’t fast to catch on. In general they’re incredibly dense and slow to learn anything, even if the answer is beating them in the face and screaming at them. It’s not that they aren’t smart, mind, they just find it hard to see beyond their own thoughts and ideas and needs and world. You just have to repeatedly demonstrate to them in a thousand different contexts one fundamental truth and the bright ones will eventually be enough aware of their surroundings to put two and two together. Danni’s not a genius by far, but she’s bright enough that she’s just passing the threshold of understanding.

So, yes, it doesn’t take a genious. It just takes someone that can see beyond themselves :-). And so really, she’s pretty smart if you think about it.

It does take people time to work through their beliefs. It colors the personal reality of a person so much they can completely miss the obvious if it doesn’t match how they think things should work. In that way everybody is stupid. We all suffer from it.

I also have found, from personal experience, that the experienced often forget how hard it is to learn something outside their own personal experience. I know I have struggled to learn new skills…then got pissed when a new person had a hard time learning what took me months to perfect XD. Life lesson from that is to remember what it took for you to become the pro at whatever you are doing now. If you can at least try each time you are put in that position…then you are doing better than the vast majority of people.

To return fully to Danni…she is just doing a thing that has been a long time coming. Forming a relationship with another person. Perhaps she just never found someone before who needed a friend so badly, or perhaps it is because they do have similarities. But they are bonding.

I wouldn’t have phrased things quite such a manner, but I have noticed that people will not pick up on hints about others even when quite blatant. They tend to assume everyone else is just ‘normal’, until you do something to do otherwise. I actually like teasing people with references to things I did in the past, and it’s shocking how oblivious they can be.

For instance I donated my kidney to a child once. I bring this up all the time in subtle hints. I wear a shirt that says “living donor, see inside for details” all the time, no one catches on.

I once complained about a pain and a friend said it could be my kidney. after a conversation that was quite amusing to me I said flat out “I gaurentee that my left kidney is not bothering. It hasn’t bothered me for since last January”, with very blatant emphasis, and he did not get it.

I once, while arranging to donate my kidney, had someone else right out of the blue say “hey drew, you donate blood all the time, you should donate a kidney” I couldn’t keep a straight face through the remaining conversation. When I pointed out that it was unfair for him to expect me to donate a kidney when he still won’t come donate blood with me he told me he would totally donate blood if I donated a kidney. I looked him in the face, barely able to keep from laughing, and said he shouldn’t say that, because I’m going to show up in two weeks expecting him to donate blood. I repeated at least three times that I was going to take him up on that offer and he should just wait and see, he didn’t believe me. I got another co worker to make the same agreement. They both acted shocked when exactly two weeks later I showed up, having just been officially approved as a donor, with a list of local places to donate blood (ps, the liars never did donate blood).

That’s without getting into my volunteering, where I even tell people that they can find the details about it on a 20/20 episode on hulu and they still never get around to figuring out why I’m volunteering.

People can be oblivious to hints. It’s quite fun to drop hints just to see how far you can go without anyone catching on too. Try it some time, it’s like my favorite past time.

Danni: Well, then, that answers it… …You’re the leader of a nihilist, destructive, anarchist and omnicidal club of hackers who have ruined my life as I was wounded during the Ending!!!
Well, that’s my guess. Too bad for Kleya’s user.

Again, I don’t think Danni was injured during the Ending, as the dialogue doesn’t support it. Her fans were wondering why she retired so abruptly, which implies the accident happened before the Ending (otherwise they wouldn’t be wondering). I believe Danni’s fully paralyzed and on a respirator (because a power outage could kill her), but if anything, it’s more likely that she’s been that way since before the Ending; nobody would accept putting her on life support after everything went down, even assuming hospitals were functioning properly, but if she was already in that state, it’s harder for people to justify pulling the plug. The Ending did certainly make it worse though, because her parents are rich enough that her life wasn’t in danger beforehand.

I bet her “realization has to do with the whole “friendly fire” incident and why kleya didn’t want to use that avatar a second time… but that’s me and my crack-pot ideas.

Naaaah, she most probably just figured out why Kleya was so upset to find out they’re a villain group.

Yeah, the layout for this one left the speeh bubbles cramped in places, but the actual dialog itself flows nicely, especially for both how the last couple of comics have gone and the two characters involved.

If she can’t bring herself to be a weapon, be a shield.

Kleya for party tank!

Being a tank means she has to attack for aggro/threat/enmity she’d probably do best as a healer.

I thought being a tank was mainly taking the brunt of damage and shielding the damage dealers.

That’s right. And it’s kind of ironic that someone with an avatar from grrlpowercomic forgot the “pull aggro” part of tanking, because that’s what Sidney did just recently. 🙂

But Kleya could be a party shield without being a tank if she has the appropriate spells and potions to enhance the others. And healing, too, of course. I am curious on how conflicted she’s going to be whenever she has to heal someone evil.

She can still be a heal tank.

As for pulling aggro, video game AI doesn’t abide by the Geneva Convention – medic’s are free game.

Actually, video game AI in essence did used to follow it. Or, more accurately you could only gain aggro by harming an enemy. Healing spells, buffs, and debuffs didn’t register. I can’t remember right off hand which MMORPG it was that changed the balance, so that healers, buffers, and debuffers also gained aggro, but I do remember that Final Fantasy XI changed the balance even further, requiring tank classes to actually need special abilities for the express purpose of building aggro to keep the enemies attention focused on them, rather than just wailing away on them. Before FFXI so long as there were 3 tanks for every 2 ‘fragile’ characters in a party the tanks didn’t have to work at it to keep the aggro on them. If the ‘fragile’ chars could trade off on duties so only the tanks were attacking the entire time you could drop the ratio in the party to 1 to 1 instead and still be fine. Also, it was FFXI that caused aggro to become a common term for even beginners to know, as it was the first MMORPG where aggro management was a major thing when in a party. FFXIV isn’t quite as unforgiving as FFXI though, so long as the party tank actually uses the abilities that are designed to build aggor more than do damage (I was in a party where that player didn’t do the job right, and an easy quest nearly got us whiped out).

Panel 3 mistake: Fixed it! Thanks everyone for catching it!

Hmm. I’m still seeing “you’re” in the last balloon of panel 3, not yet “your”. (Of course, “you’re” is correct in the second to last balloon of panel 3.)

Looking forward to see what she’s figured out.

It’s the cache. It should refresh itself eventually.

Could be your browser cache. Hit Ctrl-F5 to force page reload. If it keeps being wrong it probably is the server cache instead, as Aneeka said.

Opinions on the vote incentive, anyone? I thought the doll was cute, but I may need to work on the concept a little; how many NAV fans crochet?

I’m not sure but wasn’t the path that Danni got called Morto, not Mori?

D’oh! Good catch! The Morto path was originally called Mori and my head sometimes forgets the change. 😳

‘Tis fixed now!

I thought it was intentional! Danni mistaking it due her inexperience. And actually I liked it, it seemed to me like a nice detail 🙂 Oh, well.

Yeah, I debated doing that, but Kleya would have corrected Danni, which would require making room for more dialogue, and I didn’t have time to do that big of a change right then. I’ll have to play with it later and see what I can do.

Right. I also thought Kleya was being soft with Danni since they were having a moment 🙂 I know it is still a little out of character anyway, but, goodness! everybody can loosen up a bit once in a while, right? 😉

Huh. And here I thought it’s just Danni misremembering it.

re: The alt.txt: Dialogue looks good to me, Aneeka! Makes sense and reads smoothly.

(I like that doll in the vote incentive too!) 🙂

I sure hope Dahni is going to tell Kleya what 90% of readership… okay, what _I_ at least am thinking: just go on this merry way and you will not be a monster ever again! You are okay! And to offer her help.

also GAME TUTORING GAME TUTORING GAME TUTORING seriously come on

also btw does everyone remember that Danni owes Kleya her life already? Sure Kleya upstaged her in the trials, but Danni only was in them in the first place because Kleya refused to participate unless they included Danni, too.

No offense, but that would be a **really** cavalier thing to say, and it sounds like someone who doesn’t understand what Kleya is going through, isn’t trying to understand, and frankly doesn’t care. Kleya is responsible for her mother’s death, and the gods know how many other people. *Everyone* Kleya has ever known or met is either dead because of her or considers her a murderous monster and would try to kill her on sight. And she knows that they’d be completely justified in doing so. We don’t know the details of what happened or what Kleya’s motives were, but I can guarantee you one thing. **No one** wakes up one day and decides they’re going to be evil. **Everyone** believes they’re doing the right thing. Or at least not an unacceptably bad thing. Whatever Kleya was thinking when she did what she did, she thought she was doing the right thing. Just like she thinks she’s doing the right thing now. Whatever good she may have managed to do so far, she’s just waiting for something to happen and everything to fall apart and people to die because of her again. And she just came within a hair’s breadth of exactly that happening, what? A few hours ago? Maybe a day or two at most? That’s not something you just shrug off.

Several pages ago, Kleya asked, “what if, deep down, I’m evil… Incapable of change” and I think this is the question Danni means when she says “Well, that answers it!” It’s easy to lose track of the question, though, given that we had a long flashback and some other chatter, but I think that’s what Danni is referring to, not a new plan. She’s just going to observe that clearly Kleya is capable of change, since she can go to all this trouble to keep from hurting anyone, even NPCs in the Tutorial.

Also, the crochet Kleya amigurumi was cute. 🙂 Maybe I’ll make one of Kat’s new Game avatar to go with it.

I kinda think it is a little of both. Danni has the answer to Kleya’s behavior…and maybe had an idea of how to promote their popularity. One lead to the other. Remember, this is Danni we are talking about. Not a bad person, but clearly self-centered. So she is naturally gonna latch onto anything that can keep herself alive without costing her parents. What better way than to attach herself to Kleya firmly and make sure Kleya is successful?

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 365