‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 505

Back to colors by Audrey with a bunch of edits by me once again. Everything else is by me as well.

Incoming.

And I have safely arrived in Vermont! Thanks to all who came out to meet me at the meet ups. It was such a blast to meet fans in person! You guys are amazing. Thanks so much!

62 Comments

I wonder what Bellatrice is thinking right now. Probably something along the lines of “Just what is WRONG with you people? This is madness!!!”

I mean, her group is currently watching a bunch of elite players behaving like complete goofballs and they still didn’t stand a chance.

But…. ratings!! What will the semi-suicidal new group do next? Its no question of ‘if’, its a question of ‘how and when’ will the new group implode on itself and die out?

That right there is ratings gold.

Assuming that Bandit’s player survives the next five minutes…

Yeah, the ratings are probably skyrocketing right now and the replays will be watched a lot of times as well. Their world is way too similar to ours regarding interest in violence and personal conflict in media. Oh well, at least it is different to our world in terms of “sex-sells” or this fight would’ve been… let’s say “quite different”. Because ratings!!!

True that…

(KAT PLEASE DON’T HACK)

I hope they get a chance to talk privately. Knowing they live almost entirely online, though… not a great chance.

Of course he’s killing you, silly girl. Don’t forget that this is the guy that goes around sending bots that harass players to commit suicide.

And no, I’m not going to be letting that go, even though he’s been shown in a pretty sympathetic light for quite awhile now. If Aneeka didn’t want that to be a plot point, she shouldn’t have had someone kill themselves because of Bandit. Could have just had the player give up, but she actually got bullied to death. Don’t expect me to start loving someone after they make such a horrible first impression, just because they turn out to be completely terrible.

Can’t trust that man, I say.

Not nearly as bad as Torchwood, which showed one cast character date raping people in the first two episodes…

Yeah, I haven’t forgotten that either. I think the point is more that there is a ‘crap-sack’ setting behind all of the desperation to be in LIFE, in the Game, in from Outside (if you aren’t an Outsider because everyone was trying to kill you, anyway).

That is to say, Jake knows that they can’t save everyone, and while he angsts over some stuff, he doesn’t angst over not saving everyone…or even doing his job when it means cutting the margin of survival for someone on the edge.

But the whole thing was over the top creepy.

Well… Mary Jane isn’t going to like this – all the backstabbing, teamkilling and treachery happening without her presence?

Actually, from a player’s perspective, Mary Jane and their team sponsors may love this… It might be just what they want to push Kat further away from Bandit (and Tenka) so that they can recruit her. Remember they are in direct opposition to Tenka.

Hmm… Wouldn’t her popularity force the admins to bring her back into the game if she dies? Also, even not, I would think she would be smart enough to realize that if she were to die, it would help prove that she isn’t who she was.

Like she was smart enough to realize she should let Danni win the prelims?

She IS popular, but she would have to go through the Game Trials again. She might automatically get past the preliminaries due to her popularity, but Im sure she would have to earn her spot back, like Bloody Mary/Jane earned her spot.

Hi Aneeka! I met you in Minneapolis. I was the one with the beard. Keep up the good work!

I remember you! Thanks so much for coming!

I was less than ten blocks away, in my apartment, coughing up a lung. 🙁

Oh Bandit you giant f*** up.

This is what is called ‘winning the battle but losing the war’. You have her on your team, in constant contact and with the possibility of peaceful discussion in future. But instead you are going to try to ‘save’ her in a way that will make her hate you, in order to resolve a non-issue.

He is going to regret this for a long time.

And why exactly does he have to do all this now? They’ve been in the Game for all of ten minutes, when their campaign ideally would last months. There’s no need to try and resolve everything instantly; if he trusts her at all to have changed, he ought to have a private conversation with her after this battle is over to explain his actions and level out their understandings of each other. Then whatever actions are deemed necessary to protect her can be doled out in a way such that she understands what’s going on and doesn’t risk Bandit getting murdered outright. The guy is seriously jumping the gun right now.

Short Version: he’s an idiot. long version: he has tunnel vision.

More like:
Short version: He’s an idiot.
Medium version: He’s a f*****g idiot.
Long version: He’s being over-reactive, overprotective and paranoid. Which is actually explainable by his relation with TENka (I mean, after a world apocalypse and a posterior weird dictatorship, I think overreactive is the word of the day.)
Extra-long version: He’s a f*****g IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Best. Comment. Ever.

Uh-oh, here it comes…

Dang it!
Now we are probably going to see her snap. I am still rooting for her, but I am becoming worried.
…
And I must give myself a Pun Hammering, for my accidental pun.
Sorry. It won’t happen again.

Pretty good pun for being accidental, come to think of it.

I know that face… Danni it’s about to sacrifice herself.

Last panel. Uh-oh. Danni is about to react to this…

I hope she can either block it or get Kat out of the way.

If Jake kills Danni, we may yet see Kat snap.

Alternatively, if Danni does get them both clear, it’ll probably kill Dude. Kat will be mad, but I’ll personally laugh since then Jake will have eliminated his only (remaining after this behavior) ally on the team.

If Danni does save Kat, it would go a long way to boosting her ratings enough to stay in the game.

Danni’s health is really low…but I think she still has an intact esone?

No, Danni doesn’t. It was shown not long after she took the hit from the Destruction shockwave.

She could also pull Kat out of the way. Which would be huge, because then Bandit’s attack would miss and hit a tree… Bandit would then be turned into a tree.

I call Danni grabs Kat’s arm and JUUUUMPS!
Possibly at a horizontal angle or else they will be in the air for hours. But if she really can do that I wonder why she and Dude didn’t dodge the previous blow. Unless that one was a homing one. So if this one is homing, too, they gain merely a few seconds from jumping away.

@Alex The dude was stopping Danni from moving by grabbing on to her whilst screaming like a girl 😛 You can see that danni pushed dude away after the shot hit kat. She’s ready for action!

Interestingly, page 505 is 1337 for SOS and since Kat is an elite gamer… sorry that I didn’t find a better way to make that joke work.

So, what you are saying is that Kat somehow hacked the strip order and storyline in the comic in order to signal for help at this point in time? D just got 4th wall breaking powers!

Just?

Well done! That joke works! 🙂

I already mentioned in two of the last few strips when navcomic had shown errors and the strips therefore weren’t available early for channel members, that Kat probably doesn’t like that Aneeka has Bandit try to kill her and thus she hacked the site.

I think our world is about to end.

the comments about Bandit being an idiot arent even from the READERS POV.
given the information HE has available he KNOWS theres a good chance its literally suicidally (and im not talking about his character) stupid (given he is experiencing doubt about his actions, when he’s apparently cyberbullied at last one person to suicide without regrets, that heavily suggests he knows its probably a VERY poor idea). and from OUR perspective, one of the BEST outcomes is he MURDERS someone ELSE -_-

Murder is a strong word to use for an in game avatar. Unless you are talking about the direct correlation between Danni needing the sponsors to keep her sister alive. Then, yes it could result in a death.

But not just Dani. From his POV he could be wrong and this isn’t the “hacker” just a new player that needs the game to live just like Dani.

As stated before many players depend on the game to live. It’s literally their job.

From his POV, I doubt Bandit ever thinks he is wrong. Therefore, he is convinced Kat is the “hacker” and not a new player, though I do see your point.

It’s Danni herself who needs to stay alive. The other gal has the sister who needs medical help.

Mina. She has a name.

he is responsible for bot accounts driving at least one player to suicide via relentless bullying

The sob story we’re getting spun for Jake really isn’t doing it for me. Others have mentioned the cyberbullying, as well as how incredibly moronic his alienating Kat just so he can break her perfect score Right This Second is. It’s overwhelmingly clear he has a multitude of other options, both now and previously. But even aside from that, his idea of “protecting” Kat seems like a thinly veiled excuse to try and seize control of the situation.

He doesn’t want to work with her. He doesn’t care about her goals, or even about the degree to which she’s already been redeeming herself. He was using “well, she’ll hack” as his previous excuse for why she couldn’t be trusted in the spotlight, but now that she’s clearly not doing that, he rationalizes it as necessary for “her own good” and to keep a promise to a dead woman. Kat’s been kicking a** both morally and physically, and he’s doing everything in his power to subvert that. If he honestly cared about helping keep her profile low, it would take two seconds to communicate as much. But he’s more interested in taking her down a peg, and just narcissistic enough to spin it around as something SHE needs.

Because who doesn’t want a controlling, egocentric ex abusing you while waxing poetic about what a hard choice it is to make? Isn’t it so sad that he’ll be left alone to wrestle with his manpain? Or maybe she will hack and he’ll have to stand against her as the Hero Everyone Clearly Needs~

“…it would take two seconds to communicate as much.”

Not really. Remember that both The Game and LiFe are computer simulations. Simulations that are run in part, or in whole, by Tenka. The company/city that Jake-Bandit works for/lives at. Because they are simulations, communication like that is recorded in a file on a server some place.

And because Jake-Bandit is a KNOWN former colleague/friend of Kleya-Kat, and since we know Jake-Bandit’s superiors want her found and/or killed, the obvious double-cross on their part is to allow him the veneer of autonomy in the hopes that he stumbles acrossed her. As he has. They’ll be watching him to confirm whether ANYONE he’s in close contact with is her.

So he has no safe way to communicate with her easily. The BEST hope would be to discreetly slip her a message through one or more parties. And then only after reason to suspect her has lessened. Such as, say, getting Danni to pass along a message of “Jake says be careful, stay safe, stop being perfect” after she LOSES. Because Dr Grace believes that Kleya-Kat’s defining trait is her unwillingness to lose. Dr Grace wants Kat to fix the virus (which I think we all suspect is D… or was that confirmed?), then he’ll use her as a scapegoat and kill her. To be World Emperor Grace or something. Kim on the surface just wants her dead for revenge against her best friend but there might be greater motivations.

No arguing that he, Jake-Bandit, is an a** though.

There are some problems with that. If he is really worried about how much they analyze him, to see suspicious behavior, then him arguing that it is good for ratings to see her play Erbana properly, then doing everything he can to destroy her, would raise red flags for sure.

He has also tried communicating with her in the past, and if he was worried about them monitoring whispers, he shouldn’t have even done that. He knows she is receiving his messages, even if she isn’t replying, so he could tell her what she needs to know.

Also, the idea that if she dies, it proves it isn’t her is stupid. She has already lost, when trying to win. If that didn’t convince them, then trying to kill her here makes no guarantees, especially if she then rejoins the game, in a situation where he can’t interact, and can’t oversee her. The more she succeeds, the more Dr Grace and Kim watch her, and become suspicious.

If she rejoins their group with a new character, then she had to show her skills in a game trials that he can’t interfere with, and who knows how she displays it. He also risks her coming back as a different class, with the soul purpose of nuking him into oblivion. Even if she comes back as Erbana again, she likely hits 100%, and her doing the solo trials by herself mean people aren’t watching an entire group. It also means that she immediately rejoined the group, without losing in the mean time, and that she didn’t really lose anything by dying, which would mean the death was negated in the same way her loss to Jane was negated in their eyes.

Killing her would not actually accomplish anything, if her loss to Jane didn’t, other than making him less likely to be able to help her in the long run, and making her more likely to bring about Jake’s death, not just Bandit’s.

Not to mention the fact that he straight up told The Dude that he had indeed found her.

Yea, I’m getting a very strong Twilight vibe here from the “I am protecting you by hurting you”…

He’s a moron.

He also isn’t paying attention to his surroundings. Kat is right in front of a tree. All she has to do is dodge his attack and he gets to be a tree as well. And THAT will be even worse from his supposed point of view because she will be winning against him without killing him either. 100% against everybody. Alone.

I don’t know why everyone is calling Nanea’s death a suicide. She pushed herself to succeed in a task at which an outsider doesn’t need to succeed. Those two bots, while made to be uncaringly mean, are naught but an obstacle to *The Game*, not to making any other kind of living (for the outsider she was). That’s all they were, roadblocks designed to keep most people out of the running, and any reaction anyone has to them is no different than someone breaking their controller because The Witch of the Lake killed them for the 100th time in a row:

Their own fault.

If Nanea had lost the Deathmatch instead of against the bots, she would’ve been right back to neglecting her own safety in the pursuit of victory. And that’s assuming she didn’t die from an external event to which we’re not privy.

Stow your assumption-justified hate for a bit, okay? Kleya will be just fine if Kat dies from this… in an even better position, really. What would she get? Split from the villainous group and untied from Jake, more fans than ever, and the appearance of sacrificing everything just to be good. Losing *is* winning in this case but she’s too proud.

That said, Jake could have at least said something. The idiot already knows she can see everything coming. An apology or a promise to make it up to her… anything to let her know that he’s trying to help in the meta sense before letting her find out the hard way.

This reminds me of the waterman petition. Kleya might be a brilliant programmer and gamer… but she’s not a brilliant thinker.

She knew the votes, she knew Danni would’ve gained a spot if someone on the team was removed, she had the power to do all of that and more. With a simple yes, she would’ve gotten Danni on the team (instead of forfeiting herself, which was a plan), would’ve been leader of the group, and wouldn’t have to *deal with Jane*.

Instead of a crazy, team-killing, Morto… they’d have a (I’m guessing) somewhat likable Demoli.

But no, she won’t take any time to think things through.

She knew that she could say yes to the vote, but she didn’t necessarily know that it would bring Danni into the team, nor that Danni *really* needed the Game until after that vote.

And she was tempted to say yes – but she was of the opinion that it wouldn’t be nice to vote in such a way; especially since she lost the last match, and it would come off as bitterness.

Except Kleya DID know that someone leaving the team would get Danni into the game, because as a final resort she was planning to help Danni by forfeiting her own spot. And she was heading to help Danni when the opportunity to help Danni was handed to her on a silver platter by a floating head.

And it’s fine if she just didn’t think of it at the time.. but that still leads to the fact that she doesn’t think things through.

You are forgetting one thing. They were not game avatars. They were bots in LiFe, pretending to be people, doing the bullying. So as far as their victims knew it was two real people hounding them.
And your suggestion for when a bully blocks you from doing something is to just quit and do something else? Bullies follow you. They thrive on inflicting pain. You have two releases from them in the world. End the bully or yourself. Both are painted as the wrong answer.

Except you’re assuming that these *bots* would’ve gone on harassing her for no reason in any programming they would’ve had. Everything they did was designed to stop some newbs from getting in the game trials. Nanea and Danni wouldn’t have known they were bots… but YOU DO. So what’s your excuse for thinking that the bots would be designed to coerce people into dying of neglect due to some game compulsion (which still isn’t suicide)?

Unless it’s your contention that Jake wrote a pair of bots to harass, specifically, Nanea to death because he totally would’ve known and cared about a miracle-situation outsider enough to see her dead but not enough to do it in person.

I was going to go to the Minneapolis meet up, but decided at the last moment not to go. Good thing, because Saint Paul (where I live) got hit by flash flooding. Did Minneapolis get hit as well?

Yep! It hit just before I got into my car and then it kept with me as I drove east for the next couple of hours. It was an insane storm! The radio said there were tornado warnings, too. Thankfully none found me!

I’m not giving up hope. Haven’t forgotten her super tank dandy-lion chimera thing!

I can see it now, she calls…

Heeere, puppy-puppy! Block the attack and then give the nice man a hug that will squeeze the resistance out of him!

can’t wait to see how this turns out O_O

Beyond all the misjudgment that people have pointed out, I have a big question. How exactly will they explain 2/5 of the party trying to kill the others? What is Bandit’s external reasoning? Realistically, (assuming Kat and Danni live) Dude will run off with Bandit, Kat and Danni will go play the game Kat’s way, and Jane will go do Jane things. This group has some of the worst chemistry I have seen. As people, they should get along fine, but their characters are so opposed that this group can’t survive. Maybe this is Aneeka’s clever way to avoid large group shots in the future.

Well, his alignment is Demoli, which as far as I can tell means ‘you get points for blowing things up.’ His teammates are things, he is trying to blow them up. Seems like he’s going to get some points for that from his alignment. The way Jane could get points for killing Danni.

Well, the group members can’t just run off in different directions, as they have to be exactly 5, unless they have special permission. I can imagine headhunters, though, i.e. groups who lost a few members and need to fill their open spots within a certain time frame before getting kicked out. Especially the rare and thus super-precious Erbana players should be in high demand among these kinds of people, and a self-destructive group like the one Kat is in is practically a beacon for headhunters.

Danni to the rescue! She’s moving, you can see it.

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 505