‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 493

Colors by Audrey. Everything else is by me.

First part of Bandit's thought.

Danni and hugs.

Dude and the cards.

Bandit to the rescue! Err...

I'll be at Phoenix Comic Con this weekend; in the Artist Alley, table AA525! Come see me if you're attending!

31 Comments

Let’s see if his Kame-Hame-Ha works this time. 🙂
Though I wonder what exactly he is planning. Apart from blowing something up I mean.

If I had to guess, he is going to target one of the immobile opponents, as they wouldn’t have any chance of dodging, and he could say they were starting to break free and he was “protecting her” from them.

Five bucks on “Chimera-thingy eats the attack”.

Hey she could’ve got it legit, Bandit, you don’t know. :p

…I mean, she didn’t, but still, she /could/ have. xD

Wasn’t there some rare plant in a tree she was climbing for earlier? Couldn’t this be that plant?

He was imply how she found out it was there, but yeah, it was semi-legit, as in she actually made an attempt to make it looking like she found it by chance.

And the tree it was in was knocked over, so it’s plausible that she just grabbed the plant and tried it as a desperation move.

But, realistically, she’s going to have to do some verbal tap dancing, and probably admit that it’s a lost loved one who taught her a lot about Erbana, though she never played it much herself.

OH SNAP.

Bandit isn’t considering which island he’s on, so he might get tree’d in another sense soon. O_o

I think that Bandit is intelligent enough not to get turned into a tree. 🙂

Yes, she will have to do a lot of verbal tap-dancing, but regarding teachings I don’t see a problem if she admits that she admires her mother (without actually saying that she’s her mother) for being such an awesome Erbana player and that she wants to show the world the worth of her idol’s favorite alignment.

I don’t think she will need too much verbal tap-dancing. there’s a lot of setup already in place to imply she used to play erbana before the ending, and has a good grasp of it beyond what most viewers have encountered in recent years.
http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-297/ Showed Kat had a pretty impressive grasp of erbana to begin with. A perfect 100% of anything is tricky to achieve, getting it with a rarely played alignment is impressive and shows either a-that the alignment syncs perfectly with a persons playstyle or B that the person is pretty familiar with how to play the alignment before they created their most recent character.

http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-298/ and
http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-299/ explain a bit of the lack of attention Erbana has had since the ending

http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-306/ and
http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-307/ explain a bit of why people are unfamiliar with erbana – with popularity being important few choose to go against the flow

http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-338/ ,
http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-339/ and
http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-340/ Show that not only is Erbana unpopular it’s deliberately discouraged as a focus while being fairly unchanged since before the ending. They also reaffirm that scoring high in it requires a fair amount of foreknowledge,

http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-389/ and
http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-390/ give a quick overview of the popular perception of erbana – the first panel on 390 gives a particular hint to keyla’s abilities – often in crafting type games you can accomplish learning new recipes in one of three ways – finding them by luck/level unlocks, trial and error discovery, and player/character memorization. It stands to reason that if a player has already previously done the memorization they can use the trial and error method to build their recipe list fairly rapidly since there won’t be much time lost to errors and once you’ve unlocked the recipe you have it. Component gathering is similar – once you know what the nodes look like you just have to level up your harvesting skill enough to meet the node’s minimum to collect value.

http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-394/ establishes that bandit like a few others can recall details of erbana so it stands to reason there could be an outsider who used to play it whose made it back into the game.
Think about videogames you used to play but don’t any more. Chances are if you were to pick up the correct console and game, hook them up and play a game you haven’t even seen in 10-20 years but loved when it was new, you’d be able to quickly recall not only how to play your favorite character but some of the tricks for unlocking special things. take Super mario brothers as an example – chances are if you saw an image of a level you once played that was tough you’d remember where to find the one special item that could get you past a trap/enemy blocking the way. At a minimum you’d recognize the graphics for coins, mushrooms, and enemies.

I’d wager she could pass this off as “I was looking for some plants A, B, and C which grow in trees and i recognized the graphic for Z so I snagged it figuring it might come in handy” nice simple and sweet and doesn’t connect her to her past.

What have Bandit and King Julien from Madagascar in common?
When they develop a “cunning” plan to see whether someone is a savage killer, they throw something.

Bandit’s looking very scary there in the third panel.

Well, the Danni-Dude ship is still at port…

OH MY G-D HE’S SO ADORABLE

“Won’t you please cooperate with me trying to protect you?!”

I hope this one lands. And that Kat doesn’t do anything else stupid.

For a genius, Kat really doesn’t have much common sense.

Every genius I have ever met has been somewhat lacking in common sense. Some much more than others.

lol, well yeah, most people think that what they can do, others can too, so they end up projecting that something easy to them, is easy to others.

I can’t see the mouseover text on a phone the way I can with Dr Mcninja. Is there a way around that?

Drawing characters hugging (or attempting to hug) is hard 🙁

Hugs may be hard to draw, but you did great on that one.

Bandit seems really sure that Kat is cheating when it comes to plants, but is she actually? I don’t remember her having done so, and she seems to be trying hard to avoid cheating, on everything except the extra information which she apparently is just too used to having to realize it’s not legitimate. But I may have missed a reference.

Bandit is assuming that his superiors will conclude that Kat HAD to be cheating, or have foreknowledge, or something, and decide to just kill her ASAP.

He’s forgetting that they’re playing a televised game, that she’s probably going to triumph against severe odds against her while demonstrating that a previously boring path is actually OP as all GTFO, AND that her luck/skill can all be explained as having some foreknowledge, as well as luck.

Personally, I think Bandit’s attack isn’t going to work, for one reason or another.

Panel two presents:
EVIL DUDE.

I think Bandit’s interference is going to make things worse. It’ll draw attention to her and Bandit’s sponsors will confront him about his actions.
Aren’t there walkthroughs about the game? Lists of secrets, items and how-to guides? Like we have today for almost every game ever? Or do people in your world just not share information any more?

Sure, they share information, but Erbana’s walkthrough is a stub from before The Ending, since apparently it’s a boring path that nobody in their right mind would run.

Given that this place apparently was designed to annoy Kat’s mother, presumably it doesn’t even have anything on the Erbana component here, other than “Don’t”.

So not really a big deal or anything, but I read the Not a villain banner at the top again today, and it occurred to me that it’s… not a very good description of the story. It being about a reformed hacker, an addictive virtual game, and wether she can stay honest… the “addictive virtual game” part doesn’t seem to imply the amount of gravitas the whole thing has in the story, to me. It sounds more like a slice-of-life comic where the protagonist is a reformed hacker playing runescape or something.

I’m trying to figure out Bandit’s logic here and I just don’t see it.

He’s trying to make Kat fail because he wants to keep people from realizing that she’s HER since SHE would never lose, but he has no reason to believe that she’s not going to react exactly the way he remembers if she fails. So his plan to keep her from being noticed is to make her fail, which he has every reason to believe will make her flip out, since he has no reason to believe that she still doesn’t despise losing. Therefore publicly expose her in such a way that there’s no way he can make excuses.

Is he that stupid? There is no possible way his plan is a good idea. Because him making her fail and provoking her to hack to stop him will expose her MUCH faster than her being far better at the game than she should be.

They’ve been drawing a lot of attention to themselves. The fighting, Dude screaming – I think everyone has forgotten Jane. And what bigger target is there right now if not Kat?

My guess: he will kame-hame-ha someone, that will drop Kat’s herbana points, taking away that power she is using from her, meaning she will just punch her target, instead of using a power, but punching is violence, so, she will lose even more points, then she will be in shock of how she dropped 20~30 points from herbana in mere seconds because bandit calculated his attack so shw would lose her power in time to punch the target, but not soon enough she could notice the power been dispelled and retreat from attacking her target.

Kat attacks Bandit to avoid bad alignment.
Bandit attacks Kat to protect her.
Bandit clearly is on the higher moral ground.

Kat attacks bandit because killing The Dude is NOT NICE
…also bad for her alignment
Bandit attacks ? (probably Kat) To show that she can be beaten
If the attack succeeds, risk being tree’d, pisses off Kat, might draw attention to Kat as well as seeming to backstab like Bloody Mary, which will hurt him in the future
If it fails shows that Kat is awesome and further evidence Kat is the DM leader, also risks being tree’d

Kat has a long history of not failing with 1 notable exception, and it wasn’t to Bandit

Bandit clearly is shooting himself in the foot.

If Bandit attacks the opposing team’s Cardista rather than Kat, he avoids the “backstabbing team member” issue while having a more legitimate claim to protecting Kat and lowering her Erbana rating at the same time. Bandit attacking &/or killing the Cardista could also serve as a cover for HOW the cards were obtained if he/they don’t want people to know about the plant she used (Kat could quietly hand the card(s) to Danni who can pretend to have gotten them while raiding the enemy’s body and give them to The Dude to complete her quest and get some Kesti points, as long as everyone plays along . . . Bandit wouldn’t need to kill him for this cover story to work as long as everyone plays along, but unless 100% Erbana objects to injuries/maiming Kat won’t lose any points without a kill in the vicinity . . . ).

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 493