‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 524

Colors by Audrey with edits and everything else by me.

Yes, Jane has kids.

Thanks everyone for answering all those polls I put up. It's been very insightful and your ideas have been great.

Topwebcomics is my main referral for new readers and those referrals double when I'm at #1. It would be awesome if we could pull off getting NAV at #1 for all of October. I'll post up new incentives each update, but October starts tomorrow, on a Saturday, when most people aren't thinking of NAV. Yet, voting heavily at the beginning of the month creates a better chance to stay at #1.

If you happen to come by tomorrow, I'll have a new incentive up. It's an earlier version of this page and I'll explain why I made the changes I did. And I'll put up another incentive on Monday (all old incentives can be found in the AneekaChannel).

EDIT: Monday's incentive is up! See what the poor tree thinks!

Thanks everyone! Kickstarter for Book 4 launches on Oct 4th; see you then!

29 Comments

That could explain Jane’s violent attitude in-game – her children are in danger, she can’t do anything about it IRL or take action against those she believes are responsible (likely TENka), so she takes out her frustrations in The Game instead.

So that makes two members of the team for which The Game is literally a matter of life and death and three with a serious grudge against TENka (plus of course their sponsor), made more complicated by two “TENka pets” (one of whom potentially holds the key to Kat’s fate IRL).

If only once this Game session ends, it was possible for Kat, Danni and Jane to meet up in LiFe for a discussion…

MORE CHARACTERS TALKING AND DISCUSSING THEIR PROBLEMS

THIS WOULD BE SO GREAT

Your sarcasm is noted, examined, and rejected.

I’d be really interested to see what Jane’s LiFe avatar looks like.

The sweetest, most innocent thing you’ll ever see… }XD

Jane backstory?

Oh please be the lead-up to a Jane backstory!

I am excited to learn more about her, and the worldbuilding would be a big plus!

please continue working on this comic ITS REALLY COOL

I… was right?!

Was I right???

I mean, I had ideas besides this general one, so maybe when details are examined I was /not/ right, but…

I was right?!

Insanity is starting to make sense. It explains, for one, why she got so mad on page 232 (http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-232/) when Dude starts going off about how important the Game is; instead of being a form of jealousy for him being in a city while she has to struggle to survive, like I’d assumed, I wonder if the main reason it is making her mad is a combination of what she considers wasted resources (Like was brought up in the comments on page 232) and (at least perceived) selfishness while her daughters (and herself) are dying. If the trees she kills are really players that have been Treeified (Treed? Treesed? whatever), then it stands to reason that, by “killing” them, she is also limiting the number of players that are wasting said resources by playing the game. It also explains the killer-with-no-remorse angle she pulls off: She’s killing them in-game, but (ostensibly) they will be able to survive out of game. By their presence in-game, though, they make it harder for her daughters to survive.

But if it’s about the resource waste, shouldn’t she strive to kill as many trees as possible, rather than wanting off the island? Unless other islands have even more things that waste resources…

Guys, I think she believes her dolls are her kids!
And that explains why they were dormant!

I’m still really fond of the notion that Jane is Mina’s mom. Have we seen anything to refute that?

Outright? No.
Implied? Sort of. Mina would probably be able to figure it out, and her mom doesn’t speak like Jane does. Also, there’s a bit of evidence they’re young, if you buy it:
Jane uses dolls which are a small child’s toy; she calls them kids, not daughters, which could be a way to hide their gender or an indication of age; and she uses nursery rhymes, again something for young children
Additionally, they need two parents to take care of Mina’s injured sister and there’s no mention of Mr. Jane’s Husband.

The most damning of evidence that Jane is not Mina’s mom is that Jane doesn’t live in a TENka city, while Mina does.

Not quite, the Lillys are outsiders, they are trapped under rocks. Actually Mina’s main reason to became rich is for she to be able to take Mae to a city and cure her.

“Implied? Sort of. Mina would probably be able to figure it out, and her mom doesn’t speak like Jane does.”

The nursery rhyme thing could be part of her “gimmick”, her act. Give the injured daughter something for the pain to help her sleep, plug in to the game, keep up the act to help throw everyone else off the trail of who she really is…

Mind you, Kat WOULD probably know RIGHT AWAY, she can see the code & would more than likely work out where it’s coming from, recognizing the source. Jake can see the code too, but doesn’t know Mina’s family…

The biggest thing is that Kat would figure it out, she knows enough about Mina’s family (and has even dug around in their files, with their permission) to figure it out easily if Bloody Mary/Jane were connecting from anywhere in their vicinity.

But there could be any number of reasons Kat didn’t actually do that. Still, “Jane Lilly” would have no way of knowing Kat didn’t, and would know that she had no way of knowing.

The reason I personally don’t buy it is that Jane must have a Kido to play the game, and Mae could REALLY use one…both for pain alleviation and to play the game in her mom’s place. So Mrs. Lilly would have to be hiding it all along. Still, it’s possible that before the End she was a top-ranked player who secretly had a Kido and never admitted that to her daughters and now plays to secure their survival because she’s the only one who can…oh, also she pretends to have NO programming skills instead of limited but workable programming abilities (that’s okay, I can see a mom doing that). All that, combined with her ability to pretend to be Mrs. Lilly and Bloody MaryJane, would mean that she essentially has multiple personalities that she can control at will (not really how MPD works).

Still, that’s merely a character who doesn’t add up. It’s not impossible, just unlikely.

Virtual sentient trees are… killing… her kids?

So… either real life trees are the cause of suffering and she’s taking it out on virtual trees with faces. Or she’s blaming some abstract concept of the game on some kind of suffering. Or maybe she *is* referring to those dolls as her kids.

All three of those point to insanity.

I’m pretty sure that Jane’s whole thing with nursery rhymes, dolls and mass murder is, in fact, acting. Roleplaying. Kayfabe, if you will.

And I’m pretty sure she wasn’t directly answering Kat’s question there. She’s just building Morto.

The Game; A LARPer’s ultimate dream…?

Or, as someone suggested earlier, game resources used by the trees are part of the reason Jane’s family is in a desperate situation, and Jane is smart enough to realize that. It’s a little indirect, but there must be tens of thousands of player account’s tied up in those trees, according to what we know. We know that the trees process audio and visual feeds from their locations, we also know (from Mina’s problems with too many angles) that this isn’t yet computationally free in L.i.f.e. and thus it’s plausible that it would be even less free in the max resolution Game engine.

That could be connected to why Jane’s special isn’t working (too many resources already in use, so her semi-autonomous dolls can’t function) without it not being also relevant (in Jane’s mind) to why computation resources are so scarce.

Reminds me of the trees in the SNES MK3. Lol that Mortal Kombat! It’s killing my kids!

FATALITY!!!

Hmm, Panel 4 to me conveys more sadness than anything else, and in the vote incentive conveys more anger than anything else

What were you going for?

Both, actually. I felt the earlier version conveyed too much anger, so I changed it, hoping to bring in more of the sadness as well as the anger.

four words to redefine a character…
but then, theres so little we know about Jane. We’ve seen her interact so little with others, and most of what we know is from how others react to her.

Theres two other characters we know less well… Dr Grace, and the President.
Don’t get me wrong, we’ve seen Dr Grace and some of what motivates him… i’ve not the foggiest on what his position or role is.

Just realized that to the viewers, this must look epic as h***. Kat and Jane staring each other down, waiting to see who moves first. Jane shows off her strength, trying to look intimidating by cutting open the tree in one fell swing, but Kat refuses to even budge. Sometimes I wish I was reading this comic without seeing their whispers so i’d know what the viewers are seeing.

What I got out of panel 4 was a mixture of sadness, and a decision to drop her persona for a moment and become serious / honest with Kat. I think she realized that in this moment her “act” would not be beneficial… and gaining Kat’s sympathy via earnest truth, would.

Great kickstarter, I really, really like the cover for your latest book. Danni dancing out of the image… Just wow!

As for Jane, I’m convinced her character is just as believeable as Danni’s or Kat’s once we learn more about her backstory.

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 524