‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 375

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Still overwhelmed with desire to murder her dad, btw

also, Kleya, that’s not a good way to play! don’t ignore messages from your teammates even if they are your old friends who betrayed you. You can’t fail this!

I’m beginning to suspect that “he”, whoever that is, is the one who really caused the Ending, while Kleya was just a scapegoat.

Or an unwitting pawn.

You know, I’m really starting to be disturbed by all the people who are insisting that Kleya couldn’t possibly have done anything wrong and it all must have been someone else’s fault. You do realize, don’t you, that you’re completely proving Kleya’s point? Because the story is told from Kleya’s point of view with her as the protagonist, you perceive her as the hero, and therefore you conclude that anything bad that happened must be because of some as yet unnamed villain scapegoating her or something like that. The corollary of that is that this unnamed villain must be an unfeeling inhuman monster. You’re doing exactly the sort of thing Kleya is talking about – you’re just assigning the roles differently than she does.

It seems to me like you’re kind of missing the point here.

while I’d have to agree that it’s perfectly possible, that she caused it. the reason I believe what she did do was not a Malicious act with full knowledge of the consequences is the way we see her acting and it being from her view point we can get a better idea of what she’s thinking when she acts out.. I’m not saying that she can’t do any wrong, but on the other hand I don’t believe she is malicious and intent means a lot here, like the difference between manslaughter and murder. the first you never meant to kill the person, you may of meant to harm them, but it wasn’t supposed to be fatal even though it ended up being so. where in the latter the goal was to kill them. Honestly I think Kat falls more into the manslaughter category. While I don’t have enough evidence to even speculate on her actual involvement in bringing about the end. I do have enough to believe she wasn’t doing what she did do with the intent to cause the apocalypse. An example is when she shut down the game and life servers for a brief period after the angry mob was storming her for her decisions both to allow Danni to stay over that other guy and the path she took in the tutorial. she didn’t blast everyone and overload the server out of malice or spite, that was self defense, she could of done it right away when she found out the group didn’t go the way she wanted or even right when the angry mob showed up, heck she even could of used the sponsored exit direct to her new apartment that was setup for her and avoided the crowd all together. but she didn’t do that as she knew Dani couldn’t afford to go that route and didn’t want her to have to suffer the mob alone and thought she could handle it.

Really good point, Kessy Athena. On the other hand, it’s also clear when it happened she was still a child, one who had been set a terrible example and lessons by her father. I’m pretty sure she did it. But it was still largely his fault, it sure seems like.

Do you think Dr. Grace, I think that’s his name, is the dad? The guy with the face paint?

@DanaA: I believe that it’s been strongly implied that Dr Grace and Kleya’s father are different people. For example, a strip with Dr Grace talking about Him… http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-105/

It sounds to me like both of you are still trying to excuse what Kleya did because you’re thinking that bad people do bad things. Like I said before, good and evil are things that people do, not things that people are.

Let me put it another way. Kit, if you’d said that to Kleya in person, I’m pretty sure she’d be furious with you. If you try to deny Kleya’s guilt, you’re also denying her the chance for forgiveness. Kleya knows exactly what she did and why. Far, far better than any of us (except Aneeka.) Kleya is going to have to live with that for the rest of her life no matter what. And probably a lot of lifetimes yet to come. Trying to explain her actions away or pin the blame on someone else will not change that.

We don’t know what exactly Kleya did, but I forgive her. Even if she was actually trying to wipe out all of humanity, I still forgive her. Because she’s admitted that she was doing something deeply wrong, has taken responsibility for it, and is trying with every ounce of her strength to do better. No further punishment is necessary or even possible. Nothing imposed on Kleya by other people could ever possibly come close to comparing to the punishment imposed on her by her own conscience. But that is only possible with the admission and acceptance of guilt. You cannot try to put things right until you’ve admitted that things are wrong.

I never thought that Kleya was completely blameless — I think that she’s just getting was more blame then she should be getting. I refuse to think that our protagonist– who was about fifteen at the time it all happened– ended the world without somebody shoving her. I remember her saying that she doesn’t know why it all went so bad; she just wanted her dad back. She did something a little bad, then someone or something started a chain reaction that ended the world and made her look like a monster.

You refuse to think that our protagonist ended the world without someone shoving her? Why? Because she’s the protagonist? Because she’s the hero?

Yes, Kleya just wanted her dad back and doesn’t know how things went so wrong. Adolph Hitler just wanted justice for the way Germany was humiliated and scapegoated by the Allies in the Treaty of Versailles, and I’m sure he didn’t know how things went so wrong in the end either.

If you insist that monstrous things can only be done by actual monsters, what you’re really saying is that people can’t change. You’re saying that a monster cannot repent of their deeds and try to be good. Which is pretty much condemning anyone who’s done something bad to a sort of eternal damnation with no hope of any sort of redemption or forgiveness. You’re also saying that good people can’t do terrible things, which has the unfortunate side effect of defining anything that a “good” person does as being a good act, no matter what it is.

In the end, the most horrible acts of barbarism and cruelty are usually committed by those who are most certain of their own righteousness. It is only with self doubt and constantly questioning our own motives and actions that we can hope to avoid falling into the trap of self-righteousness.

Let me rephrase that. I refuse to think *a child* would intentionally take anyone’s life, even to protect her father.

It’s called ‘knowing how to read a plot’. Kayla just being a repentant ex-baddie isn’t interesting enough to make a good story. It lacks mystery, plot twists, cool reveals. So I find it highly unlikely, since the author thus far has shown herself a fan off all such things. 🙂

Well, Chug, I suppose that just shows that we have some rather different literary tastes. 😉 To me, “Oh, our sympathetic protagonist didn’t actually do anything bad – they were just an innocent victim,” is not a plot twist, it’s a cliche begging for a good deconstruction. Something else the author seems to have a bit of fondness for. 😀

Except the the plot and it’s twists are in the now.
The fall of civilisation is in the past, and a character’s back story can be very dark without affecting the tone of the present… much.

“Found our girl guilty? Impossible! Re-read it.”

I am open to both possibilities. I hope that she is innocent in some sort, it just makes things easier; but if she is guilty but is trying to make restoration, then I hope the other characters forgive her, because at the very least it is in their best interest. Some people do get to a point of no return though, Kleya’s actions have shown that she is not.

I’m not saying Kleya couldn’t do anything wrong. I meant more like something like this: she made a mistake or two, already causing something bad enough to be disliked, then “he” used that to blame her for the Ending.
Besides, it is known that it’s impossible to do some of the things she is believed to have done, like hacking the geomagnetic field or taking out a whole army with just her mind. Sounds to me like someone was working behind the scenes to make it all look this way.

Well, that I can agree with, with the caveat that Kleya’s “mistake or two” would seem to rise to the level of making her her the world’s most wanted criminal – by a lot.

The little that’s been revealed about the Ending so far makes it seem to have not been a single event, but a series of catastrophic and apparently unrelated events that happened at about the same time. Baring massive future plot reveals, the Deconstruct Me hacker attacks (that Kleya is apparently at least partly responsible for), the supervolcanic eruption, and the geomagnetic field reversal shouldn’t have any causal connection to each other. Although I have to say that it seems like one heck of a coincidence that a supervolcano and a field reversal should happen at the same time. But given the level of technology Kleya’s world seems to have, those two should both be wholly natural disasters.

My reading of the bit about taking out an army with her mind is that Kleya hacked and subverted a large number of military robots and possibly other weapons systems and turned them against the army trying to use them, possibly among other things.

It’s certainly true that whenever a major event occurs, there will be plenty of people who will try to use it further their political agendas, whether they had anything to do with causing the event or not. There are plenty of examples of that in real life.

Guess it hurts too much to even read that message.
Then again, Jake should have expected that.

She did not even read it?
…
wat

Yup. It’s stupid. Whatever the message, she should have read it, if only to know where she’ll have to defend herself. She’s a genius, but for all things related to social interactions, she has the wit of a goose -__-

Did she just said her evil father is always treated as a hero? What a revelation!

I’m still suspicious that Kleya became some kind of transhuman half/machine cyborg. She seems to interact with code on a visceral level, and that Hakido seems to have been a really big deal.

It may explain some of the animosity towards her, as we rightly ought to fear an intelligent machine that has motivation to hate us. That, and if my kid meshed her personality with a computer, I might have reason to think the result wasn’t my kid anymore, depending on the details. That could explain her dad right there. He’d want to kill ‘her’ and get his ‘kid’ back.

Makes me wonder what D really is.

People are people, no matter what sort of body they happen to be wearing.

I agree, but good luck convincing the masses of that!

I also agree, I don’t think dad thought her getting the Hakido working was bad or that he had lost his daughter to it. Honestly I think her dad was some expert programer/hacker/computer nerd himself so he saw the whole thing as good. which I think better explains why all her memory of him are good. if the dad hated what she became I don’t think he’d be as caring and supportive of her and that would be reflected in her memory’s especially the shift in tone from before to after, but that never happens.

Ouch, Kleya, that’s harsh! (both to Jake and to us readers)

And the questions never end… good thing, maybe, since that means the story and comic goes on for a long time 🙂

Not harsh, just hurt. “He” wants her dead, remember, and she has no reason to know what Jakey is up to now, or anything about complex feelings, if she is just getting in touch with her own. Jakey has had to lie really low just to save his own neck. As for a Daddy wanting his kid back?–whoa, he was the one to teach Kleya to win at all cost. I am attributing absolutely no healthy parenting feelings to that person. Forget it. Sociopath from the word go. He names his kid “Key” and plans to manipulate the world with her from the minute she’s born.

Its Kley-a but I see your point.

Actually, I really doubt she’s using her real name in L. I. F. E.
“Kleya” is just an alias. We don’t actually know her name.

Thank You, for remembering that. Few people seem to have.

…Kleya, a key of clay, perhaps. One that can be transformed as needed.

You forget that’s just her avatar’s name. She’s in hiding, so she wouldn’t use her real name.

I’m confused, that’s Danni’s character. Is she logged in? Did someone else log in for her? Am I capable of surviving the wait for the next volume?

That’s not Danni, that’s The Dude. He’s wearing his Game avatar and playing chess.

Wow, really? It looks so much like Danni’s!

Especially the hair.

Emotions aside, Kleya may have been protecting herself from any snoopy, subversive code that Bandit may have buried in that e-mail. He’s known to be associated with Tenka and savvy with code. She doesn’t subscribe to channels for similar reasons, as communication is a two-way street, even if it has no business being so.

Status: Deleted without being read.

I don’t know why people seem to keep associating chip-tooth guy with Kleya’s dad… All her memories of her dad are him being proud of her. (Granted, if she actually did kill her mother as seems unlikely, it would make sense he’d change his view of her, but not to this extent! and we still dont know if it’s even true she killed her mother, if she did it was obviously a horrible accident and not intentional)

Seems more likely “he” is Tenka…and Jakey is with him… Kleya knows Bandit works for Tenka, that all matches up. (unless her dad is Tenka? which still doesn’t make much sense to me since Tenka seems to be treating her as more of a rival than world threat, using “world threat” as an excuse to eradicate her)

I know Tenka is the company, but someone has to be running it…makes sense he named his company after himself lol

We’d certainly need much more info to confirm any of this…can’t wait to see more *-*

…but, Kleya! Why did you delete without reading? D: what if he was just saying happy birthday, or something….lol

I seriously suspect there is far more to what is going on than even Kleya knows is going on.

If nothing else she certainly isn’t the evil monster she and others seem to think she is. What ever happened is likely something less far clichéd than she did simply really did do it or was framed.

What she is blamed for deliberately doing would require a complete monster and while such people do exist in spite of people fervently wishing otherwise she shows no signs of being such a monster.

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 375