‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 378

We will eventually get her real name.

Some relevant links:

And the Kickstarter for Vol 3 launches next week!! You can see Volume 3's finalized cover in the vote incentive. Also, AneekChannel subscribers, you'll want to check out this post (Patreons, check here). Thanks!

Speaking of Kickstarters, a webcomic I read, Mystery Bablyon, is just about to finish her Kickstarter (like, literally within hours of this post). She's already funded, but I thought I'd give a shout out in case none of you have discovered her work yet. And Snow-By-Night, another webcomic that I follow, is just about to launch his Kickstarter (tomorrow/Wednesday). Apparently, it's Kickstarter Madness this month! 😀

26 Comments

“Purposefully blew up the hospital everyone knew her mother was in?” Oh my gosh, I’m dieing to get the full story on that– I really can’t see Kleya intentionally hurting her mother.

Theory time: people tend to assume that “everyone knows” things if it’s generally talked about, but if Kleya had been distracted with other details– such as getting Dad back or fighting an army– she may not have realized that the building she was blowing up was a hospital, let alone *the* hospital.

Although, once again, I’m not saying that she was completely blameless– to sum up my theory, the army made her panic (or made her mad) and she decided to let them know just what she thought of it, not quite registering what she was doing until too late. Blowing up an annoying army that was trying to hurt her would have been easily justifiable in her mind once the adrenalin was going, but blowing up the building your mother was in wouldn’t have been as easy to excuse. Who knows, maybe it wasn’t until that point she realized that what she was doing is wrong.

When will we get her real name?!

We have seen that her mother is important to her, and closely connected to her current resolve to not hurt people. There also seems to be a connection to great feelings of regret. All that does make it very likely killing her mother was indeed the point of realisation.

So, what more than the word ‘purposefully’ is wrong in the Dude’s summary? Unless Jake tells us on the next page, which I doubt, my bet is that it will still take us a long long time to find out.

I’m afraid Jake knows just as much as Brandon does. Come on, they’re best friends, they wouldn’t withhold info from each other. If Jake didn’t even try to hide from Brandon who Kat is, I would think he wouldn’t hide she’s not as guilty as they’re told either.

At the risk of sounding horribly prejudiced, they may be best friends, but they’re also guys. You can see on this page how painful this topic is for Jake. We saw previously that Brandon has issues as well. Getting most guys to talk about deeply emotional stuff is like pulling teeth. I’ll bet they’ve talked very little about the details of what happened.

However, even if Jake has told Brandon things that he knows that Kleya didn’t do, that doesn’t mean Brandon believed it. Such as when Jake tried to explain that the geomagnetic field isn’t hackable…

I agree that Kleya probably wasn’t trying to kill her Mom, but beyond that I’m just going to wait until we know more about the circumstances. I also agree that was almost certainly the trigger for Kleya’s epiphany.

I’m betting the Mother wasn’t even in the hospital when it was blown up. Page 363 shows her mom hurt and a mecha nearby. I think Kleya moved her mom out of the hospital, then destroyed the army (maybe the army was actually by Dad to hurt/capture Mom), and then rode a mecha to where her mom is. Kleya probably thinks she killed her mom because she removed her from the hospital, not that she killed her accidentally in the hospital.

That’s a pretty good point. It’s also possible that Kleya tried to treat the wound herself but brought her mom to the hospital later, although I don’t think it’s likely.

okay this is a really good point!

Even aside from it, there are two glaring weak places in Dude’s argument: “purposefully” and “knowingly”. It’s obvious Kleya was alone and nobody knew what she was actually thinking, inference like that isn’t reliable.

but yeah the whole narrative might actually not be true

g-d I love the works that deal with spread of faulty information, rumors and reputation SO MUCH

That is my assumption as well, Kleya would still blame herself for depriving her mother of needed medical care just because she did not want to lose to the people she was fighting, where allowing her mother to be captured would have probably ensured that she would get medical help. That would explain her belief that her inability to allow herself to lose, even when she knew she should, was what killed her mother.

Actually, based on Brandon’s claim that Kleya hacked the geomagnetic field, with Jake stating that that isn’t possible leads me to believe that the Earth underwent a geomagnetic field reversal, which, apparently, can lead to increased volcanic activity. Remeber how IRL Kleya was asking D if volcanic activity had gone down?

I’d agree with that. Though it seems that the media reported that she killed her own mother, but the evidence suggests that Kleya didn’t do that. Do we even know for sure that her mother is dead?

I don’t think she did it on purpose but when your labled a super criminal you’ll be hard pressed to find people willing to give the benefit of the doubt.

I agree. They’ll naturally associate anything she did at that time as some SRT of planned, deliberate evil – after all, she was (allegedly) some sort of Chessmaster Hacker-Wizard that brought the world to it’s knees singlehandedly.

I’m very eager to see just how wrong that misconception is, Aneeka. 😀
(I have a feeling that we’ve partially seen this already with Past!Kleya’s very victory I oriented and conscience-less personality, but that’s painfully ambiguous…)

Dude makes more than a few assumptions. I am betting he is only half right at best. Because when you conjecture about another person’s knowledge and motivations you are actually putting yourself in their place. Think rather than assuming you know what really happened and what another person is thinking you should just ask. But that is the problem, isn’t it? XD

This page hurts.

Wow, that seemed like a lot of longstanding questions answered in one comic! Is this the beginning of a larger reveal, or are we in for another couple years of speculation?

The more we hear about her past misdeeds, the more I think she herself was hacked, and she isolated herself from the networks to make sure that wouldn’t happen again, after she realized what she had done.

I don’t think she can be hacked, people call her a cyborg, but it seems more of an augment… her brain is still human and each human brain processes information internally in its own unique manner. It is theoretically possible to build a device to interfaces with our “thoughts” but the hard part has always been teaching the computer to understand us.
Sending and receiving info to and from person; Straightforward enough. Reprogramming a person? Only really possible through already long established brainwashing techniques… and all of those require a captive audience, someone who can merely terminate the connection will just do so. Or sic D on you.

As for whether Kleya’s mind can be hacked, well, remember Clarke’s Third Law. The technology in Kleya’s world doesn’t strike me as being sufficiently advanced, but it’s hard to say. I suppose it depends on how much Aneeka likes Philip K Dick. 😉

My take on it from what we’ve seen so far is that the Hakido seems to function mostly as a direct neural interface. My instinct is that something like that might well effect her and her personality, but not in a “cyborg implants made her evil” sort of way. All our experiences effect us and change us. The Hakido would just be a very different sort of experience. I’m inclined to think that Kleya is fundamentally the same person she was before she got the Hakido.

An aside @ Aneeka: You do realize that even once we find out her real name, it’s going to be really hard to think of Kleya by any other name, don’t you? 😉

Captive audience, you mean sort of like a kid for their parents? *glares at Kleya’s dad and continues to blame him for everything*

I wonder if her mother was already dead when that hospital blew up. I just don’t see her killing her own mother, not with how she thinks of her.

LOL, I just imagined Brandon’s face if, with his beliefs as they are, Danni tells him why Kleya was so upset.

Wow, we get background and it’s horribly tragic and a little disturbing. And it makes me ask three times as many questions as it answers. I’m still wondering why she’s a cyborg to begin with. She can’t have made herself one, could she? Did her dad do it? If he did, how did he dodge blame for the things she did? And what actually happened during the end? Argh.

And now Bandit knows without a doubt that Kleya is her. Whoever her is. Argh again. I wonder what her name even is. And she has D set up to wreck everyone’s day if they say it. The h***? To many questions.

cyborg
?s??b???/
noun
noun: cyborg; plural noun: cyborgs

a fictional or hypothetical person whose physical abilities are extended beyond normal human limitations by mechanical elements built into the body.

Hakido fits that definition, so she can be considered a cyborg, as to how, id say her design and make, but implanting it would be difficult unless she made a computer able to perform the operation she would need some help, maybe thats D’s origin, a program to implant the hakido

Ok, kept getting distracted by all the wonderful story and plot twists you got going on here but, just wanted to say, your art has gotten a lot better! Just look at The Bandit’s pose in panel 1 – or the expressions! Yep, practice is working.

It seems we are still in the misinformation portion of the backstory. But then again judging by Kleya’s mental state now and how little we know of it then she may well have “purposefully blew up the hospital everyone knew her mother was in” Psychotic breaks can cause irrational behavior with little thought to the consequences to the action taken by the crazy person, it’s why we call them crazy.

Another thought is if, as other comments have postulated, she was fighting the robots and not controlling them D didn’t really take collateral damage as important(he seems not to)

But the “virus” that apparently made the robots want to kill everything has been hinted at being her creation, and a child with unlimited power that likes to watch things go boom is not very likely to be the hero fighting the robot army.

She should be reported to the authorities, but the authorities are evil, so there is nothing we can do…

Kind of like real life.

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 378