‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 374

Referencing several pages here:

Reminder: For the names in panel 3 of Page 372, I'd like to replace the 5 random names with my fans! If you're a part of the AneekaChannel or my Patreon, you can be entered into a drawing for those on Feb 27th. See the corresponding links (once logged in) to learn how to enter. Thanks!

RESULTS FROM THE SURVEY:

First off, thanks to everyone who participated in the survey. I received almost 400 votes and it was very informative.

Shipping: Looks like I will have a solid 25% of the books heading international, with the top 3 being Europe, Canada, and Australia. Shipping to Canada seems to range between $11-20, depending on how many books ordered. Europe and Australia are higher, ranging in $17-24. I hate charging shipping that cost as much as the product itself. I used to live abroad and that always drove me nuts. Several of you mentioned using Amazon fulfillment; I looked into it and it's not really a viable option. It saves about $2 for Europe and Australia and only if you order the book with nothing else with it. If I had to ship the books to me, personalize them, then ship them to amazon and have them ship them to you, it wouldn't save anyone on costs. I will continue to look at other options and see if I can bring the shipping costs down somehow.

Swag (other than the NAV books, including the new one, book 3):

Plushies beat everything else into the dust, which really surprised me. Unfortunately, to produce a run of them seems to require a minimum order of like 1,000 and 10 grand. Haha; not happening. I'd need a kickstarter just for that. But, I know a really good seamstress who might be able to make a very limited run (like, maybe 20-50?). We're looking into possible costs and patterns right now, so we'll see if that pans out. Verdict? Possible; will look more into it.

Downloadable Wallpapers and bookmarks were neck-to-neck for the second winners; both are easy to produce once I think up something cool to draw. Verdict? Doable and will happen.

Tshirts and my fantasy series books were tying for third. The former surprised me since I've heard from several others who've done Kickstarters with T-shirts that they're not worth the effort. Not enough people order them. There's a good t-shirt place local to me, though, and they allow small orders. Also, I think I've discovered a way to make them glow-in-the-dark orange (well, the D shirts, at least). Now I just need to come up with a suitable design. Oh, and I'll only do one design for the Kickstarter which will be D for now (unless, of course, over a 100 people get one; I could score a better deal then and get two designs made). Verdict? Tshirts are possible. The fantasy series are a definite since I already have them.

Buttons, charms, posters, and mini-figurines were vying for fourth. Buttons and posters I can easily do since I already have the materials. Charms are possible, but I'll be limited to 2 designs, maybe 5 depending on how many people order one. I might make this a stretch goal, though. Mini-figurines I haven't had time to research yet. I probably will push it to a stretch goal, anyway, and not worry about it right now.

As for the Kickstarter-exlusive custom art stuff, there's enough interest in all of them to merit them. It all boils down to my time, however, and how much I can realistically do. There will definitely be the 6 game spots for the alignment short story, and probably several of the other options, but their limits will be severe, probably 1-3 spots, just so I don't over-promise myself.

And for the winners of the preferred characters in the art:

First - D and Kat (game avatar) were tied for first (okay, Kat had one extra vote over D, but I'm calling it a tie).

Second - Danni, game avatar

Third - Kleya, hacker style

Fourth - Jane, Bandit, and Kleya (LiFe avatar) were neck-to-neck with one vote difference between the three.

Fifth - Kleya, reality style

(poor Dude comes in sixth, far behind fifth. He is most disappointed in you all. lol).

Thank you again for participating in the survey!

22 Comments

Nice, a Dshirt Tshirt. XD

Lot of art printing Kickstarters fail on the “custom art” option. Trick is to make it THE highest reward tier and strictly limiting the numbers. Its basically a very personal “thank you” to those handful of backers throwing the big bucks at you. You won’t be selling it to “everyone” – just a very select few.

Wow, her father is… I don’t even know the right word.

I know a couple, but I won’t write them here.

Regardless of the word, he definitely shouldn’t be raising a kid, that’s for sure.

Missing a good dental plan?

Here’s a theory: I think that Jake isn’t really supporting Dad. In one of Jake’s memories, Kleya’s mother pleaded with him not to let someone find them. My hunch is that’s exactly what he’s doing; he’s pretending to support Dad to keep him off Kleya’s trial. Jake is conflicted because he knows that Kleya did some bad things, but she’s his childhood friend and he promised not to expose her. I don’t think he knows that the end of the world wasn’t entirely her fault.

I really doubt that he is her father. In part because of his attitude, and in part because no one knows where her father is. (page 243) It’s possible that Jake lied, but I doubt Brandon wouldn’t know if it was him.

It IS her father.
That or they both have the same tattoo on their right arms.

http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-302/

Wow, I tried looking for a picture of her father where the right arm is shown to make sure, but didn’t find this. Guess I can discard a few theories of my own.
I wonder why he’s hiding the fact that he is her father…

Dun dun dun!

Call me crazy, but..

You’re crazy!

Ahem, thank you. Anyway, I still think she’s the patsy for someone else’s evil scheme. Or at the very least, a convenient person to blame for something that wasn’t actually her fault. But ‘patsy’ fits the narrative better.

I think you’d be suprised by how much damage someone with superpowers could really do if they were frightened and alone, cornered by those who want to hurt them.
Especially if they have been conditioned to win at all costs and aren’t the kind to consider consequences before acting.

And make no mistake, in an age of wireless communications between all sorts of devices more advanced than ours, including self driving cars and helper robots, a genius hacker with a Hakkido DOES have superpowers…

The geomagnetic stuff is almost certainly not her fault, but it would seem to me that she has left a trail of bodies behind her. Many of them simply caught up in the unintended side-effects of whatever method she used to “win” against the army this latest time they found her.

I definitely think that she’s a patsy for something her father was plotting. First off, she refuses to hack into or hurt anyone in the game thinking that it will definitely hurt someone in real life. That kind of thing should not happen since I’m pretty sure the user interface for causing destruction in the game would be vastly different from the one used to cause destruction in real life, putting it otherwise would be a criminally stupid design flaw. I think she was conditioned to hack constantly and cause destruction in the game but someone, maybe her father, switched out the game with an interface designed to apply her hacking to real world objects and sat back to watch her cause untold destruction.

There is no doubt in my mind that Kleya did some extremely bad things and hurt a lot of people. Her current emotional state would be almost impossible to explain otherwise. We may not know the details, but I really doubt that the sort of guilt that she’s carrying could be because of her blaming herself for something that’s not her fault at all. Yes, clearly things were going on that she was not responsible for. (Supervolcanoes simply aren’t hackable.) More likely than not there were other people who were up to their own schemes contributing to the situation. (There almost always are.) And I’m sure that at the time Kleya had reasons for what she was doing that she thought were justified. (People always do.) None of that changes what she did or absolves her from responsibility for it. The fact that she is currently a pretty sympathetic character doesn’t change it either. Good and evil are things that people do, not things that people are. It seems clear to me that Kleya did something pretty evil. Good intentions don’t change that. Not realizing all the consequences of what she was doing doesn’t change that either. The path to redemption is admitting that you did something deeply wrong, accepting responsibility for it, and doing your best to make things better now. It’s a long, difficult path, but one that Kleya seems to be walking.

Children often think things are their fault and can carry away tremendous guilt even though its not their fault.

It is possible that she did great harm while defending herself from attacks. It is possible she caused great harm through ill considered actions while trying to do something else. It is also possible she was manipulated, used, or tricked. And its possible that she didn’t do anything as severe as she is blamed for – or blames herself for – but because of propaganda she believes she is responsible as much as any one.

Kleya is not very emotionally mature, and it appears a lot of things went down while she was maybe a young teen. So just because she believes something doesn’t make it true (just azs the inverse is true, plenty of people who have caused great harm have convinced themselves that they are the hero and possibly even that nothing bad is their fault – which again doesn’t make it true.

We simply don’t know as we don’t have enough information.

However, even in the worst case; due to her age at the time and the way she was raised, Im inclined to place more of the blame on her father than on her.

Concur with this… Kleya in a lot of ways comes across as a savant. In her area of expertise, namely coding and hacking, she borders on superhuman. But outside of that, her education seems woefully underdeveloped. Even now, she is talking about being a hero with only a very vague idea of what that means. It boils down to her conviction that she did something bad, so she must be good to somehow right the balance.

My own interpretation is that she did indeed do something awful… But she did it blind, at the behest of others and without real knowledge of what the consequences would be. Then she was proverbially thrown under the bus to cover the tracks of those who planned it, or whatever they planned backfired and she was immediately set up as scapegoat.

Essentially, I think she did play a role, but it seems unlikely that she was any sort of evil mastermind. Her concept of right and wrong as well as her very stunted social skills make me doubt that a lot. More likely she was the patsy set to take the fall when things went south.

Just to give fair warning, I’m going to be asking questions and making arguments that are meant to be extremely uncomfortable.

As a thought experiment, what do you suppose Adolph Hitler’s thinking about what he did was? I’m not trying to go all Goodwin here, but if we’re going to talk about the nature of human evil, I can’t think of a more powerful example in recent history than the Third Reich. The Nazis were not evil pod people from Mars. Hitler did not wake up one morning and decide that he was going to destroy the world just for the lulz. They were all ordinary humans with ordinary human motivations and ordinary human failings, the same as you and me and everyone else. Hitler believed that he was doing the right thing, the necessary thing, for the good of Germany and ultimately the world. There’s no such thing as a comic book style evil mastermind who’s simply evil for the sake of being evil. Even the people who are responsible for the worst crimes in history thought that what they were doing was justified. We like to think that people who are nice, friendly, sympathetic – people who seem like they’re like us, people that we can see ourselves being in their place – aren’t capable of doing horrible things. We like to think that monstrous deeds are committed by actual monsters. But that’s just not true. That sort of thinking is nothing but a tattered security blanket. The truth is that even the best of us are capable of the worst sorts of evil, and even the worst of us are capable of the most selfless acts of good.

No, we don’t know the details of what Kleya did, and therefore can’t make any real judgements about it. No, Kleya is not an objective observer of her own actions and her statements about her past should not be simply taken at face value. Yes, other people were almost certainly involved and bear some responsibility. Yes, a lot of what we’ve heard about Kleya is almost certainly exaggerated or worse.

None of that matters. Blame is ultimately nothing but a game. Kleya did what she did. Nothing will ever change that, and Kleya will have to live with that reality. And I will lay long odds that she knew that what she was doing was wrong, no matter how heavily she’d rationalized it. In the end, all there is is what we’ve done and its consequences.

youforget to leave out something with that many people are linked through the game asa life support without it they arevery likly all but comatose lostin a place that they cant see or ear really anything. to top that everything is ran off L.I.F.E if life crashes everything crashes you saw what happened when she hit a nerve half of the Tenka complex went out and to top it many other cities were reporting malfunctions

Would it be reasonable to run a seperate campaign for the shirts?

Umm, maybe? Depends if there’s enough interest to merit a dedicated t-shirt campaign.

I sounds like an alternative that doesn’t promise anything if only a few people end up wanting shirts.

Dude! Most disappointed!

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 374