‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 452

Colors by Audrey. Everything else is by me.

Mary was better at making enemies than friends. Jane may have the same problem.

Happy 2016 everyone! I'm starting it off being sick; hopefully your beginning is better than mine!

EDIT: I was too sick last night to put it up, but the new vote incentive is up now!

34 Comments

you might not be able to officially carry over bounty’s but I’d guess with how infamous bloody marry is, it was reissued for her.

Yup. While bounties may not carry over, grudges certainly do.

I know this is pretty off topic, but making an Archive binge (wanted to see if any of janes puppets looked like the old BM avatar) I noticed something:

It might be that D, Tenkas Anti-Hacking System and the Virus are one and the same being.
– It was heavily aluded that the AH System and D are one and the same (back when Danni got hacked, D attacked, but Tenka said it was thier AH system)
– Tenka might only tell everyone outside the Virus is the AH system, because they do not want to cause panic and it kinda does work like one. They suffer from a really extreme case of “never change a running system”.
– As a result, not even Kleya might be aware the Virus exists/D has such a side. She has no indication of knowing of this (otherwise she propably would have volunteered to take it out).
– All three sides of D could use the level of access/persistence that the Virus has. And it being an AI like D would make a lot of sense, as they treat it like a being rather then just a piece of code.

I might be totally wrong here however as there might well be good reasons for any of the things I observed.

I’ve been thinking the same thing for a while now. D, as an AI, seems to respond to what Kat wants more than what she tells it to do which leads to accidental hacks. It’s particularly protective of her emotional state, even shutting down and deleting part of the game because she didn’t want to be a villain. So it would make sense that D is also causing problems for everyone that says something bad about her.

You also forgot the fact that Bandit could get around the virus with a backdoor Kleya installed in the anti-hacking system. Page 324

I thought this was generally assumed to be the case for a while actually, I am sure people were speculating about before. May have just been me.

My theory is that D was created as an experimental, learning AI to assist and defend her code.
However, some code spread outside of her control (stolen from/by her father, a company she was working with, etc).
The person (maybe a government, or somebody working for the government?) who ends up with it, uses it either offensively or defensively (or its just hit as collateral).
As a hypothetical, lets suppose they tried to hack into the police databases. The police IT dudes respond. D is now defending Kleya’s code from the police, and probably overdoes it.
Things escalate. D, the learning AI with no morals and only really a directive to defend Kleya’s programs, ends up fighting everyone, possibly while being on multiple sides. The rest of the world gets involved while having little idea of what’s going on.
Things escalate. D decides that the best way to win is to take the fight to the real world (hello, computer controlled weapons!). (You just know she made a “take over the world” program as a fun thought experiment at some point). Nations join in, sure that they’re being attacked by SOMEBODY.
Cities get destroyed. Things are made worse by the panicking hordes killing everyone with any form of technological knowledge.
Kleya wakes up from her afternoon nap to find the world in ruins.
What’s left of the Internet is now patrolled by a very aggressive D (learnt from fighting, well, everyone), which may not fully respond to her commands (someone is sure to have tried impersonating her at some point.)
A large portion of whats left will either be code written by Kleya, or by people she introduced to D e.g. Bandit.

Uh, at this point I thought that was a given?

Happy new year! Really awesome comic, Aneeka, in all regards. Keep up the great work, and get well. May starting the new year sick, be your biggest problem! 🙂

I find it interesting that people are positive the two characters are the same person

That said, I wonder how this bounty thing works. Is it just an informal part of the game or is it built in? 🙂

Well, all of the characters assumed it early, which led to us (the audience) assuming it. It was later confirmed by Sandra, indirectly, that Jane used to be Bloody Mary to the team itself. Jane herself confirmed it, again, indirectly, at about the same time.

Because of this, the team knows it is true and does not object when others assume Jane to be Bloody Mary. Others assume it automatically because of the dolls special, which was apparently a trademark of Bloody Mary.

I’m thinking that maybe Jane just wants people to think that she’s Bloody Mary to boost popularity.

I wonder if Kat’s going to agree… Danni needs quests, and all Kat would technically need to do is leave the area. On the other hand, Danni is a vulnerable newbie whose life is literally on the line here, so Kat probably won’t want to leave her. Not to mention cheating the game’s alignment rules like that is not very NICE…

Okay, that’s an interesting twist. As for the bounty I agree with kit ramos: I think that the old bounty is gone, but a lot of BM-haters created a new one the very moment she entered the Game.

But that doesn’t explain what the other party actually wants from our “heroes”. What do they gain from telling the main characters about the bounty? Popularity? Some money from those who offer the bounty?

And oh my god I LOVE how that girl emphasized that there is a “nice” bounty on Jane’s head, mocking Kat’s intention. Though I’m still kinda surprised that Kat intends to actually defend Jane’s life, too. I know that it’s not nice to allow someone to get killed (even outside her no-kill range), but it’s not exactly nice to defend a killer, either. I wonder if this Game has a court and a prison, because that’s where I’d want to put Jane if I were Kat, not necessarily for her BM past, because the law would dictate that they’re two different characters, but for trying to kill Danni.

On the other hand: I just went back to page 32 and realized that she probably killed everyone only because her group was about to be replaced with a Ten-Ka group and apparently her killing everyone caused the tournament to happen instead. But according to Sandra she also had personal reasons for quitting the Game… I’m curious how she develops.

I wonder how Jane is going to respondd when she finds out that Kat is her strongest defender in the group?

Oh, and Happy New Year and get well soon! 🙂
I was lucky enough not to be sick.

Btw: I got an idea for when you need time to create a buffer, like when the Dude’s adventure was happening:
Maybe you could create sprites of your characters in a couple of different poses, but with much less detail than now, and write some silly non-canon adventures for those. Kinda like “8 Bit theatre” or “Bob and George” or they could look like Anime chibis (i.e. with oversized heads). With sprites you will be able to reuse more stuff.
Maybe some people will even want use it to create fan comics that can be used as filler. They can be fun to read, too. Osaaru’s was definitely worth reading. 😀

Hehe, that would be fun to see the gang turned into chibi’s but also aware that their avatars are much different now and that they seem suck that way.

lol, I assume you mean “stuck”? 😀
What’s the problem with them being stuck that way? Isn’t that a good thing if you want to create Chibis?

Btw: Lookie here http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-332/ 😀

Aneeka’s already had a similar idea, in the form of a stick figure filler story – Dude The Great:

http://navcomic.com/great-dude/dude-the-great-01/

Yes, I did mention it above.

Or if everyone tried drawing their own avatars, like Kat’s big-headed one in the tournament. http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-44/

Wow… I’m actually not expecting to be this early.

Anyway, when will you even going to go show and tell like the whole story, I like the method of yours (Foreshadowing/?) but sometimes but curiosity sometimes go asking ‘WWW’, When, What and Why? (I’ve actually finished this abbreviation just now.)

And probably her name ‘Mary’ weren’t suppose to be Bloody (Making puns) and if I found that Jane or Mary or maybe even Bloodier Mary is actually related to Kat… Should I be surprise here? Not sure if I am supposed to be surprise.

Anyway, I only answered What (The answer is in the pun) but Why is probably anger. Or maybe desperation because sometimes you can live by fighting, and When is something I don’t know yet because you (I’m pointing to Aneeka) are probably the guy who’s been wearing a cape while drawing this comic out because you are working nice and clean with no obvious hints.

Thing is that even after all this time… I’m not sure exactly what it is that Kat did in the past to make everyone hate her so much, what effect it actually had on society, what drove her to it or why she feels so bad about it. That makes it somewhat difficult to sympathize with the main character, just knowing she’s trying to repent and prove she’s changed for doing SOMETHING but we’re not sure exactly what.

But at the same time, a lot of the readers here seem to clue into the game itself a lot better than I do and maybe I just missed some clues. But it would be nice to have a bit more “what happened to start all this?” fill-in. Or is it there somewhere and I’ve totally missed it all this time?

Things Kat did:
*Fight an entire army.
*Implicated in leadership of hacking group that sent mechas and cars on rampages around the world.
*Implicated in environmental disaster involving destruction of the atmosphere and volcanos.
**Apocalypse involving loss of most of the world’s population and arable land.

In my view, at best she was a child prodigy whose programs and talents were framed for the apocalypse. At worst, she was complicit in the apocalypse. Either way I give her a lot of leeway because she was definitely a kid. As for her guilt – her mother died during the apocalypse, details unknown – it seems like almost everyone in this story is using escapism to avoid survivor guilt of one degree of severity or another.

I’d like someone to sit down and explain – one of my favorite headcanons is Bandit and Dude ‘casually’ throwing around apocalypse theories around the campfire to get Kat to explain what happened – but until that happens I don’t think anyone but Kat knows what happened, exactly, and she doesn’t trust anyone enough to explain and think she’ll be believed.

Honestly, I think at least half of the reason that the audience finds Kat sympathetic is that we aren’t certain that everything that Kat is hated for is her own work. We know that Kat blames herself, and that she has a very different attitude from before. The problem is that there is very little evidence pointing to what Kleya actually did. When someone is straight faced saying that someone hacked the magnetic field of a planet, the information available to the public can be regarded as somewhat fishy.

Kat did something, that we do know. Now whether she was used as someone’s tool, was a large component that caused everything to go to ruin, or touched something that had the bad luck of causing everything, not so much.

The fact that her father being the person that raised her in a fairly unhealthy mindset, of sheer competiveness and then turned around and called her a monster upon television also raises suspicion. Especially as Kleya was her father’s child and if he asked, she most likely would have complied to whatever he asked of her. We know that Kleya is blamed, whether or not she is the scapegoat or deserving of the blame and how much, is iffy.

Kat created some kind of security program for TenKa. She then showed Bandit the backdoor she left in it because her dad encouraged a show boating “im better than you” attitude. Well, that program she wrote was using the DeConstructMe logo. Said logo was refered to as “the Virus” by normal people in the reality arc, and was in some way related to Kat letting D off the leash for a second. In the same arc Bandit pointed out that “the Virus” responds to “Original” TenKa employees. Said logo is also on one of Kats screens in here reality home, and we know she’s trying to change. Why would she hang on to something with clear ties to a group blamed for the Ending? It seems more likely that a make-believe hacker group was used as a scapegoat, and that the logo is actually the interface for TenKa’s Antihacking Security System: code named DeConstructMe.

D for Short.

When she got the neural interface working I’ll bet that not only was it considered “impossible” but also “top secret”. TenKa yoinked her dad for questioning and\or punishment, (or maybe as leverage against the new flying super hacker) and Kat freaked out. Once the line was drawn her instinctive competetiveness took over, and she started wrecking their systems. When they turned their security program on her, it turned on them instead. Perhaps it chose kat, or maybe she just took sole control of it. By this point, this program was so widely used that when it stopped doing its job everything was exposed. There’s no doubt in my mind a highly automated society would have a large number of code saavy individuals looking for payback/easycash/etc. The world starts falling apart real quick, meanwhile TenKa and Kat+D are duking it out in the background. TenKa doesn’t stand a chance so they change tactics, blaming her for everything. Somehow her mother gets hurt, and then gets killed in a hospital bombing. Kat breaksdown and D, which has a direct connection to her head,(is infact, most likely protecting her mind from external hack attempts now that i think of it) lashed out in response to her pain, to devastating effect. TenKa uses this as indisputable evidence that she’s gone insane, and convinces her father to publicly denounce her. Kat then goes into hiding.

The idea that D was widely used for security and left systems vulnerable to other hackers after going rogue is interesting. So is the idea that D got more destructive as Kleya felt more threatened. Jake seemed pretty sure that Kleya was behind the destruction of her mom’s hospital, but maybe that actually happened after her mom died, if she went on a rampage out of grief.

I still don’t understand quite why Kleya’s dad got grabbed if they wanted to know about Kleya and the cyborg interface… unless perhaps they assumed her dad was the one who got the interface working, though I would think they would still want Kleya. Or I suppose he could have sacrificed himself, holding off the agents and pretending no one else was home so Kleya and her mom could get away.

I’m undecided about whether Kleya (or D) had anything to do with the collapse of earth’s magnetic field. In our world, the magnetic poles do occasionally flip, with no great effects. The damage described seems more consistent with a solar coronal mass ejection. A solar ejection at the same time as a polar flip seems unlikely, unless the solar activity actually caused the polar shift…. That would still be very bad luck, if it happened just at the same time Kleya and/or D were on a rampage. I think it extremely unlikely that Kleya or D could cause a solar coronal mass ejection or solar flare.

i like your theories on D, they fit nicely with mine.

re: her dad though: i’ve been wondering if her dad wasn’t the true villain behind the events that lead to the apocalypse. i think the fact that he was the greatest mani player ever to be very telling and ominous. and in the first(?) reality scene when she expresses fear of “him” finding her, it’s showing a picture of her and her parents except dad’s torn out, but the general population seems to think him dead? idk, maybe he just didn’t want to be known as her father anymore so changed his id and wants her dead because he thinks she killed his wife.

i keep coming back to the mani thing though. i feel like enjoying blowing things up in games doesn’t translate into enjoying blowing things up in real life as easily as enjoying manipulating people (npc and pc alike) in games could escalate to manipulating in real life

Well, Bloody MARY JANE the killer is in trouble, it seems…

I spy a loophole.
Bounties can’t follow you once you’ve died. But Mary got banned and never died. Therefore, the bounty’s still on.

I hope you are feeling much better now, Aneeka!

hm, I’m curious about the colours:
originally everyone looked white, and according to Sandra, that’s because Tenka’s servers (I assume then also the game servers) only have “white” and “asian” as skin options. Sandra’s own server allows her to show her own colours… but here in the game we see the other team have a range of colours.

Was it that the L.I.F.E service is really the only one that can’t show a proper range of colours?

L. i. F. e. avatars are just a typical “take a base and choose for each feature one of the pre-made variants”, which is why the options are so limited. However, GAME avatars are custom drawn, so they can look like anything.
This is my understanding, anyway.

By the way, I don’t remember “asian” option ever being mentioned… Sandra even said “ONE skin color” o.O

“Bounties can’t follow you when you die?”
Uh, HELLO! This is the INTERNET. Hate, bile, and revenge will follow you from ANYWHERE.

The new incentive is really beautiful. I hope for Kat that she can look like that more often in the future.

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 452