‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 581

Sorry, but Dr. Grace wants the honor of detailing his grand theory so you'll have to wait a bit longer for all the details.

31 Comments

Oh, right, the plan to check whether a mine is still working by pushing its buttons. Don’t complain if one day the readings remain off the charts. 🙂
edit: Nice, I can now comment before the page is available to the general public. Good job!

What, did you ask D nicely? How did you make everything go boom?

I don’t get it. 🙁

Me neither. Is totally confused at this whole conversation. My noodle brain and hiney brain both is fried. I definitely missed something somewhere.

Well, what I meant by pushing a mine’s buttons was this:
They try to find out whether Kat is the one who caused the apocalypse by trying to make her snap and start hacking. Because when she causes another apocalypse then they know it was her alright. Especially Bandit knows it’s her, he knows she caused a power outage, and he decides that trying to kill her in-Game would be a good plan.
I can only respect what the Dude is doing, because he pushes her buttons in very small ways (#DontKillMe, #YouCanActuallySmile), so she can get some practice on controlling her temper.

@panel 2: You know, Kim, this is actually not a counterpoint at all.

Also: Since when does Tenka view the virus and the pet A.I. as different entities? I searched the ref links of the last couple of pages and went a bit back and forth and it always seemed like it was one and the same.

I entirely forgot about Tenka’s big plan. I always figured that they already control most of the world, so what could they possibly want that would require a grand scheme?

But it’s nice that they’re talking about Kat again. From an outside point of view it has been obvious for quite some time that she’s her, so I wonder how Kim and Dr. Grace are going to be thrown off their tracks again. My speculation is that Bandit will say something like:
“The A.I. reacts to Kat, because she plays like the DM leader’s mom.” and Kim will be like “So this is proof that this alignment is a dangerous one to play as. We don’t want to die, so Bandit, go to Kat and tell her to switch alignments.” and then Kat will be “That’s rich coming from a Demoli. Maybe it’s your fault for exploding me. You switch alignments!” and Bandit says “No, there are plenty of Demolis out there. But granted, maybe it’s just because I’m too awesome at being Demoli, so how about I’ll play less awesomely and you switch alignments? You know, just so people stop suspecting that you’re the DM leader and my childhood love?” and then the readings go off the charts again. 😀

As far as believing that D and the virus are one and the same goes, I don’t recall any time where they expressed that belief (though I admit page 337 certainly gives the idea some credibility in its last panel). I know they’ve pitched to the public the D is their security system (http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-110/), however, and I doubt that they’d do that if they though of D as the virus.

Oh, right, thanks for showing me! Also I just reread the part starting at around page 320, so now I see that the virus is represented by that smiley… Kat, why are you using smileys for your Specials? ¬_¬

Another factor as to why I got confused was that Kim talks about the readings from the Game as if those were done by the virus, but on page 506 it clearly shows D.

Fun fact: Looks like in contrast to page 338, this time Bandit predicted higher readings than Kim, but the actual readings were even higher in both cases. Maybe after the first time he decided to predict a crazy high reading just for the fun of it and Kim must’ve frowned at him or something.
Makes sense, though. Getting annoyed by fans demanding that Kat should be a villain is not quite as enraging as killing her.

The virus smiley is a very slick piece of art. Kat’s art skills are nowhere near that level. While Kat did put backdoors in the program – she didn’t make it or design the logo.

I take your point that she most likely didn’t draw the logo, but she might very well have programmed the virus and maybe she even had a say in the design. Deconstruct Me was a group of hackers and she was their leader.

She was SAID to be their leader. But… Kat bossing around a group and setting policy? And “her side” of the story is quite different. Even if she thinks no one will believe her. (Heck, she hasn’t even told the readers yet)

Groups like that don’t have leaders. They are a bunch of people doing vaguely similar things and who thinks the name is cool. (Ref: Anonymous)

>”so many traps that not even us”

“us” should be “we” btw. Keep up the good work!

Objective case is preferred post-initially in English. Post-initial subjective pronouns, even in clauses, is a hypercorrection in most dialects.

Could you say that again, but this time in English? LOL

Hahaha, yes, I thought something along those lines as well. It took me quite a few minutes to figure out whether or not Anonoma agreed with Masterofbones. 😀 I don’t remember ever having “post-initial” and “hypercorrection” in my English classes (probably because I’m German), but even if I did then those are the kinds of terms my brain refuses to remember, especially nowadays when there’s always Wikipedia. Also while I know what pronouns are, subjective pronouns is a term I had to take an educated guess at. ^^

Anonyma is saying that the correction of the mistake is itself a mistake. Anonyma is wrong about this, however. The objective case is not “preferred post-initially.” English uses the objective case for the direct object, indirect object, object complement, subject of an infinitive, or the object of a preposition. None of these apply here.

The word “that” in the sentence is a conjunction. There are two verbs in the sentence with two subjects. Therefore, the nominative case (we) is used. I interpreted the mistake as being in-character, though.

While it may be true that the accusative case is used for objects, in this instance, the pronoun in question is the subject of a complementizer phrase, and as such should be in the nominative case. Masterofbones has not hypercorrected.

The easy way to figure this out is to focus int he immediate phrase:
“…not even us could find…”
vs.
“…not even we could find…”

Makes it pretty obvious it should be “we”

Gah! A typo in my post calling out a typo in the strip! That should be “…focus on the immediate…”

You are clearly correct. It should be “not even we can find” (not “us can find”).

Using the wrong pronoun is the most common error among English speakers and I hear it all the time. It’s appropriate that a character make this error.

Pedantic circumlocution, my prognathous friend, is the exclusively endemic prerogative of any one assiduously, sedulously, and punctiliously conversant in the fecund domain of lexicography, as well as being a synergistically expedient mode of communication… at least to those with more than an inherently strabismic intellect. Or something like that. 😀

Sound’s like that one studio c video…

Okay, question just how much of the world is controlled by TenKa?
and does it matter that they don’t control the whole thing as far as the comic has suggested Tenka is the closest to a stable authority figure in the world never heard of a government or nation other than whatever Tenka is, so do they really need a scheme unless Dr. Grace want Kat, not for what she did and more of what she is…I am going to stop now head bad places lots of potential dangers

Tenka I believe is an underwater city and not necessarily in the best shape post ending and likely lacking resources (or allies ) witht eh needed resources stablize their problems so that might be why Grace wants Kleya/Kat.

Well. Six of one, half a dozen of the other…

Ok, I don’t see anyone commenting on this…

“until you killed your teammates.”

There is only one person we know who killed their teammates. Bloody Mary.

So here is a twist… The whole thing was a test aimed at D and Bandit/Jake was Bloody Mary???

Oops, misread that. Thought killing teammates referred back to the bloody mary stuff, but they are talking about him targetting everyone during the last battle… Even though they only lost esones and didn’t actually die.

Would have been more fun to learn that Bandit was alt-playing Bloody Mary. 😀

So what i’m reading is. Kim saw activity spike in the Virus/D as Kleya was about to activate D to keep from dieing and losing her orb, but she got stopped by Danny trying to save her as she was about to. She hasn’t called on D since the fight.

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 581