‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 603

The Dude is aware of how suspicious Kim can be.

29 Comments

I am struggling a bit, ironically at the very point where Bandit says that he can see Dude’s reasoning.
Why would a whisper regarding the Portal have been suspicious at all? I just assumed that he was out of whispering range, if there is such a thing, but if he wasn’t then a quick whisper “Portal! Deselione! Watch out!” to his buddies would have been a perfectly normal thing to do in a *team*, right?

I know that people aren’t perfect in their decision-making, so Dude defaulting to blind panic mode was a valid choice, but I just don’t see how a whisper could’ve outed Bandit.
Also: Outed as what? And how would it trigger his girlfriend?

Does he mean “outed as someone who works with someone who knew about the portal”, so Bandit and Dude would get killed for treason and Kat would avenge her boyfriend or something?

But it’s interesting to know that their break was forced because of the portal. I was wondering why they didn’t get to play more than 10 minutes tops.

A whisper probably wouldn’t be suspicious if you were innocent, and you didn’t think people would be double checking to see if you were guilty. Acting like it was a total mindflipping panic accident and you didn’t even think to whisper makes it seem a little more like you didn’t know in advance. Kim still decided he probably knew in advance, and she’d have stuck with it if she could have pinned it to even innocent seeming evidence.

Then, instead of defending The Dude to her, Bandit would have been having to defend himself.

Hm, I guess Kim really IS very paranoid. Jake has some serious guts to work behind her back to save his even more dangerious girlfriend. That guy’s an adrenaline-addict. 😀

But if she’s really THIS paranoid, then what about some of the other whispers? Bandit helped Kat finding an excuse for her instant Mean Eater summon.
Or Dude’s “Your girlfriend is freaking whispering at me!”
http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-460/

Kim knows who Jake’s childhood friend was/is. And she still suspects Kat. So if she’s really that paranoid regarding that portal, a message like that should get her right into Bandit’s face once she hears it.
I know that he can make excuses, but I find this one quite a bit harder to excuse than a message that warns team members about a portal where a giant monster came out of.

I don’t think this page or the portal has anything to do with Kat (except the side girlfriend remark). The Dude is not worrying that Kim will find out about Kat. He is worrying that Kim will find out that HE is a double agent. And that whisper could cause Kim to look into it.

The whispers about girlfriend and the help to Kat can pretty easily be explained as helping a new girl in the game to be popular and to get in her good graces. Bandit is already told to make Kat like him so he can pretend that is what he is doing. Kim will probably still be suspicious (she is Kim, after all), but will not be able to take any obvious actions based off this information.

I think the big question is how is Dude being a quadruple agent? One guess is that Dude is in the underground acting as a Tenka double-agent (giving underground information about Tenka) but is actually a triple-agent (giving information about underground information to Bandit). That gets to triple-agent status. Any ideas on where to go for a quadruple agent?

Here’s how I see what the Dude is talking about:

1. Dude knew about the portal because the underground told him (as a double agent).
2. He wanted to tell Bandit (as a triple agent) so that they could decide if they should enter it.
3. This fact (being a double agent for the underground) is not known to Kim (and possible Tenka) so any whispers about the portal could have caused Kim to wonder how he knew about the portal and bring to light the fact that he is actually working for the underground.
4. That would then bring to light that he isn’t actually working for the underground but is instead working for Bandit. And then Bandit would get in trouble and possibly killed.
5. Kat (his girlfriend) would have become enraged because her boyfriend is now dead and go on a massive killing spree, just like she did after her mother died.

After reading that, I think I just confused myself 🙂

Umm, yeah. I would be surprised if that quadruple agent comment is anything but a wild exaggeration.

But then again, one can always be surprised.

Let’s see, he knows Bandit is Tenka. He has enough contacts in the underground to know about the portal. If *they* know Bandit’s Tenka then he’s probably pretending to be sniffing for information for them in his interactions with him, meanwhile he doesn’t want Bandit’s bosses to know he has contacts in the Underground.

It gets more complicated than straight “double triple agent with a side of fries” because there’s more than 2 sides involved. There’s Bandit, Dude, the Underground, and Tenka. He’s working with half the folks involved with varying degrees of them thinking he’s working for the other half while not wanting to give away things to the 3rd half.

It could also be his city wanting him to get in with Tenka, Tenka believing that he is spying for them, the underground thinking that he is spying on both for them, and Bandit ‘knowing’ that The Dude is his boy.

Everything is complicated.

Too complicated at this point, for an every-few-days read (can’t keep the plot line in my head and it seems some important info is missing at this point). The only thing I’ve got at this moment is that Dude isn’t as cowardly as he portrayed in-game, that it was all an act (well, except maybe when he accidentally came across the Dandy Lion thing). But at this time I don’t understand the significance of the portal, why everyone jumped in it without knowing where it went, why everyone is so upset about it, or where the plot is going at this time. What’s keeping my interest is the message from Jane and the question of why she wants to talk to Kat.

It would be hilarious if Jane’s message is, “Kat, do you have any idea what’s going on right now?” ;D
mwahahahahaaa

For starters – “Bandit” and “Jake” have conflicting goals about the portal. “Bandit” is a player – the portal was the BEST move to make. (If you are not cheating, you are not trying)

However “Jake” is a game mod! His JOB is to stop cheating. Especially when that cheating interferes with a DIFFERENT “cheating” attempt that is trying to get real world equipment up and running. He chose the best move for Bandit in this instence. (Mostly because Jake would have to do the same cleanup regardless)

Basicly the main drama of the story is game goals conflicting with reality goals. (beyond the simple “play games or do irl chores” conflict)

That’s a really good point about the Bandit persona and Jake having conflicting interests. We’re also getting a chance to see behind The Dude’s (I’m a reality tv star) mask (maybe looking at another mask).

Because of the main plot we know a lot about Kleiya and Kat and their competing needs, and that Danny’s problem is that she doesn’t have a stage persona yet.

And now we might get to see the other side of Bloody Mary and find out what separates the player behind Jane from Jane, goal wise.

I’m really loving this identity split thing, along with the intrigue and the politics and the whole world falling apart. Some people are saying the story is getting too complicated but I’m digging it big time right now just for that.

Dude’s Fourth side is for Team Get-Bandit-And-Kat-To-Hookup.
His fourth loyalty is to the shippers!

Dude’s loyalty is making sure Kat doesn’t blow up the world (again). As far as he is concerned, anyone that can hack the geomagnetic poles can’t be killed, so playing nice is the only option.

Quadruple agent: President/Kim, Tenka/Grace, Underground, and Bandit’s private plans to save Kat from all of the above.

“Your girlfriend” is EXCELLENT code word for “childhood friend”. Jake knows exactly what he means, but no one in Tenka will think twice.

Not even a Kim who is so paranoid that a warning about the portal would raise suspicions for whatever reason?

Ah, zo. this is the real dude.With actual kidneys!
I like.

I haz to agree Alex. I seem to have lost understanding of the story thread several dozen pages back. I’m now kind of coasting along wondering what’s going on and hoping it will get back to understandable soon. I feel like this is one of those cases of the writer knowing what’s happening but the audience not exactly being in on it (except for the really smart ones). ;D

This is what happens when a novelist writes a comic. 😉
NAV is really deep and I estimate we don’t even know 1% of all the things Aneeka has thought up so far, as long as you include fluff, e.g. game rules, islands, locations in LiFe, etc. I proposed that future books should contain text-heavy bonus pages with some background lore, but by now I believe that there’s enough for an extra book. A NAV Novel. A “navel”. 🙂

Keeping the thread is difficult for me for any comic that has a plot that’s not super shallow, because there are always “just” a few pages per week. Maybe you can try rereading the last 200 or so pages (takes way less time than it sounds like ^^). I think I’ll do that too after the exposition arc finishes.

If you’re confused by this, you should never read “Far Side of Utopia.” I might make your brain overheat…

After a re-read, everything makes sense, but I can only reread a comic so many times in a week 🙁

I talked with Aneeka about that, but she says that a novel has way to much detail descriptions for her to write. Thus the comic format. But if someone *else* who was a good writer wanted to take the comic and add enough detail to turn it into a novel, I think she might be interested.

This brings up a really good point – how much of what goes on in the game can Kim, et al see? We know that the audience can only see the spoken dialogue, and now we know that the tapes can be replayed to find out what was really going on, but I’m still not clear on whether the replay would show the in-game messaging to Tenka, etc.
That makes a big difference in this strip as well as maybe other previous ones.

As an employee she may have access to background logs, including whiper history, which would otherwise not be accessible to non tenka people.

You know what would be funny? If the Dude would make a reference to his comic “Dude the Great” now, because it shows a simple life without all those annoying politics (see also the ending of Dude vs. Jane).

I just had an unrelated thought:
Maybe in NAV “shipping” is a thing, too. So maybe someone can make a “please be nice” picture of Kat like from that old vote incentive where she looked sooooo adorable and then a pic of Bandit softly kissing her and then Kleya sees it and then the scene switches to Tenka with a voice saying
“Mir händ d’Kontrolle über nommol zwe Net Bots verl—”
“Sir, I told you already this isn’t translating. We can handle Chinese and we figured out Sanskrit and Egyptian, but Swiss German is impossible!”
“Sorry, uh, we lost control of another two net bots”

ref: http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-328/

As an interesting note, on a popular virtual world several years ago, customers were upset to learn that their private messages (“instant messages” there, P2P chat) were not only readable by company employees but were archived in history files– meaning that their private messages (often very personal in nature), weren’t so private after all.

It has been of concern to techs for years and to the general public relatively recently that the webcams on their laptops can be accessed without their permission (causing many people to put masking tape over their laptop and tablet cams), their microphones turned on without notice, and that USB keyboards can have every single key press tracked– and there’s no way to stop it (no anti-spy software that can eliminate USB keyboard hacking by you-know-who).

So yes, it’s entire possible and even probably that Tenka tracks *everything* in the game, including whispers.

Ouch that last line. Rewrite:

So yes, it’s entirely possible and even probable that Tenka tracks *everything* in the game, including whispers.

Note to self: always re-read before hitting post. Alwasy re-reed befoer hittign postt. Always…

Only the Dude would have a “nonchalant screaming mode” XD

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 603