‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 621

Be honest: who was hoping this question would come up?

29 Comments

I forgot to hope for that question. 🙂 Why she killed her teammates is something I have been interested in for quite some time, but I just didn’t think of it right now. My train of thought was more along the lines of Kat lashing out at Jane for trying to blackmail Kat into helping her getting off the island, but still having the guts to ask for her to repair the dolls. Also previously I commented on how Jane should be way more polite to Kat if she seeks help and especially not calling her “kitty”, because that might cause the “cute thing” to “find some more plants”. 🙂 My mind was too occupied with those thoughts to think about the question I was supposed to hope for.

Now to find out if Jane likes to dodge questions as much as the Dude (e.g. regarding how he found the Deselione).

Nah, she doesn’t like it as much, she’s just naturally better at it.

I always assumed that Jane was just maximizing available game slots while incidentally increasing her own popularity by being “controversial”. It never seemed all that inexplicable, less so now that she mentions that none of them were Outsiders and thus dependent on the Game for income to pay for food.

Jane’s views are pretty simplistic, often to the point of being wrong, but they’re not hard to understand once she lets them slip…she’s just good at being too difficult to talk to about anything.

Yeah, her group had low popularity, so Tenka planned to replace them with one of their own groups, so I figured Jane killed her team-mates in order to have the new slots be filled through an open tournament instead. When it came out that her comrades weren’t in on it and one of them tried to log in again to stop her, I was like “Oh, so it wasn’t an arranged thing they did?” and from that point on I was curious about her motive again.

Whether or not she’s actually going to dodge the question is something we’ll find out in the next few pages. But even if she does, she’s still got a long way to go before she’s better than the Dude. 🙂

To me it doesn’t sound like an actual question, but rather a conclusion she already made, and merely expressed as a rhetorical question. Dodging is meaningless, since anything but outright denial is effectively confirmation that the conclusion is correct.

But… will Kat actually say Dani’s secret deadline? She seems pretty determined not to let any of her new teammates (or fans) know she is in danger of having her life support turned off.

Kat doesn’t need to explain why killing Danni is off-limits. She just needs to say, “if you want my cooperation you’ll make sure Danni stays in the Game.”

Jane (and Sandra) are already planning to use that as a bargaining chip. There’s no need to tell Jane how valuable a chip it is.

I did! 🙂

oooooooh that makes a lot of sense

My guess: Jane is a lot smarter than they take her for, there’s real purpose behind the “madness”, and figured out long ago who Kat really is.

Sandra made it pretty clear from the beginning that Jane’s “madness” is just a gimmick.

Yeah … that’s not going to go over well with Jane.

Yeah that background for panel 4 is interesting. Is it supposed to be anything in particular?

Nope, just give an eerie feel.

I’m getting kind of an Earthbound-style battle background vibe from it. Anyone else?

Could this be final proof that Bloody Mary and Jane are the same person? It was hinted that perhaps they were different people due to fighting style changes.

In the Game, fighting styles are much easier to adapt/change than Specials.

We don’t even know that Jane’s fighting style is actually different, she’s using a different weapon model, but in Game mechanics it probably functions identically.

Umm, yeah. It’s been stated quite plainly here and here that Bloody Mary and Jane are the same person. Just a different avatar. Fairly certain it’s been said in other places to, but I don’t remember them at the moment.

Oh! I totally missed that Jane stated she reset. Thanks!

Your welcome, it’s no problem.

Umm, yeah. It’s been directly stated here and here that “Bloody Mary” and “Jane” are the same person. She’s just using a new avatar. There are a few other places it’s mentioned as well, but I don’t recall exactly where at this moment.

Come to think of it: Wouldn’t now be a good timing for the vote incentive I told you about during the hangout?
Since Kat begins her sentence in the last panel with “Some do -“, she could continue it in the incentive, saying “and if you try to kill her in the Game one more time, this is going to happen:”

And did you like my other two ideas regarding Kleya’s colorless room?
I posted one of them in the comments, saying that if you order Kleya to pick a color she’ll choose mono-gray and then all the shading and varying tones of gray will be gone.
I sent the other one per E-Mail.

Yeah, it would fit, but sadly, I don’t have a lot of time right now to throw it together. 🙁 My free time is all going into getting pages done cause I desperately need a buffer.

I really love this twist on Jane! I’m so glad to finally know her motivations, and am hugely relieved that there are real, intelligent goals instead of simple madness.

Not that I doubted you, Aneeka. I simply have grown tired of the “They’re just crazy” explanation.

gotta make room for more outsiders, huh! 🙂

more like kill the citizens first then the outsiders so that everybody focuses on the real world

…something tells me Jane has never once considered some people ACTUALLY depend on The Game for their livelyhood.

I have read a few other books with a post apocalyptic theme and resource allocation governed by a computer game. It is an interesting idea to us because most of us are probably gamers, but in reality it seems like a stupid drain on resources to even operate the game servers, much less to devote that much muscle and brain power to not rebuilding society.

Energy required to run the servers could be running Danni’s life support instead.
Tenka should be programming tractors and repair bots, not games.

All that being said, I like the comic!

Except that the computers probably only require infinitesimal amounts of power relative to the energy required to grow food. It actually makes a lot of sense in terms of energy efficiency to have people depend entirely on L.i.F.e. and the Game for entertainment and social activity, because when you are growing all your food with aqua/hydroponics under artificial light, then every calorie of effort expended in real life has to come through three layers of lossy energy conversion (turn light to plant sugars, grow plant, eat plant) plus ancillary costs. And the direct energy cost of enjoying yourself outside of virtual reality is higher both because of metabolic rates and the limits on how amusing reality can be.

“Programming” in this setting basically means hacking, rather than coding from scratch. D indicates that computers have gotten very close to the threshold of matching human level intelligence…what the programmers are really doing is more like persuading smart animals to behave than constructing machine processes. The way that TENka is attempting to gain control of D is more “psychological” than what they need to do with the rest of their assets, but indicative of the general direction they’ve moved. Also, D is a big enough threat (and potential asset) that the project to ‘tame’ it through the Game justifies the resource cost absent any other utility.

Not that the ability to code is unimportant, or they wouldn’t have put a coding test into the Game in the form of the revised Specials customization system. Coding ability is a key requirement for understanding where to look for hidden security flaws and exploit them.

Are you suggesting “taming D” might be a major reason why TENka keeps The Game running in the first place? That’s an interesting thought…

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 621