‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 625

Jane may have a bias against short ends of sticks.

Per request, vote to see a blown up version of Bloody Mary's group from this page.

58 Comments

Thanks for the vote incentive!
So the green-haired person is a guy after all. 🙂

Jane was kicked out because she is an Outsider? I assumed it was because her popularity was the lowest of them. That would still have been quite a heartless thing to do, but kicking her out because she’s going to die if they do it is just insane. Also letting her stand guard after telling her that is insanely stupid.

Are those four others all in puberty or something?
Or do they have the mindset “let’s kill the Outsiders so the rest has a higher chance of survival”?

I predict that the next page will be along the lines of:
Jane deflates, saying: “Therefore I’m begging you to repair my dolls. I don’t care if you ridicule me with your flowers. Have all the victories you want. I only need the resources to feed my children. That is all I care about.”

Her popularity was the lowest, but only by a margin.

Also, presumably her Avatar was on AI a lot of the time, ergo less interesting, because out of the group, she was the one who most couldn’t make time for the game because of her kids – even more so when her husband disappeared after a hunt.

Though now thinking of it, the fact that she waited initially is probably the root cause of the popularity drop.

Basically, Jane was the only person in that team that was doing badly in-game due to no fault of her own.

The size of the margin won’t matter in a discussion like that, but regardless of that I was merely assuming that that was the cause. Your theory is way better (i.e. she was an A.I. most of the time and dragged everyone down). Since she was in the middle in that group pic she was probably even the leader, i.e. their most competent fighter.

Um, yeah the margin size would matter a lot. Getting rid of the least popular makes sense, also just because she was in the middle doesn’t make her the leader. Usually its the person in front who’s the leader.
Also where is everyone getting the idea that outsiders are looked down on and discriminated against by everyone? I don’t remember seeing anything like that, and Mary Jane’s group of 4 is not enough to judge everyone on.

I don’t know if there is an INTENTIONAL bout of prejudice going on, but consider this:
1) In all of the Annie side stories Annie is treated somewhat like an infantile person – understandable on one hand, as the game is common knowledge and so on, but DEFINITELY a sign of bias.
BUT
2)The outsiders have less (read: little to no) access to some of the luxuries that they ASSUME the city has, meaning they are predisposed to take things personally.

Yeah, but Annie is treated like that by another Outsider. Carol isn’t anti-TENka and doesn’t seem too concerned about nice things must be in “the fancy Cities”, but she pretty clearly includes herself as an Outsider. Just one determined to live down the “weird/unstable” image.

Sorta like the Lilly family (except for Dad, who probably views L.i.F.e. beyond earning food as mere palliative).

Can’t say about “looked down upon” — but we *do* know that citizens tend to resent outsiders for their “privilege” of “working” in L.i.F.e.

I suspect the margin being so low is precisely *why* there was a vote to begin with rather than just nixing Jane without a vote.

Their popularity is down, but because multiple people are low on popularity, nixing one person wouldn’t extensively raise their bar – they also have to add a high popularity person.

At that point, nixing the person who most needs the game, even if they’re lowest popularity by a small margin of benefit,, shouldn’t be worth it.

it’s not ‘let’s kill the Outsider’ it’s ‘we’re all friends and she’s an outsider’. They didn’t think about her kids or that she’d die.

Alex, that’s how Jane sees it.
Maybe there is a completely different story on the other side.

My guess is that Jane already had a reputation for being a little…difficult, personality-wise. Nobody seems to think that this is a new thing, and Jane certainly seems used to it.

The “Outsiders are all insane” bit might play into it, but there could be a surprising twist to that. What if someone pressured the other players to boot Bloody Mary precisely because she hurt the image of Outsiders so much and made it difficult to integrate them into L.i.F.e., or even caused problems getting Citizens to accept Importing them?

I don’t see Jane backing down from her wish to destroy the Game. She would probably drop it if someone (like Sandra) could guarantee the safety of her kids with ending her vendetta against the Game as a condition, but not for less. And Sandra is going to need to show more value to her City to make importing Jane and her kids an option. I don’t know if recruiting a high-power programmer would be enough… overlooking the fact that Kat’s identity would be immediately obvious and difficult to conceal, even if Sandra wanted to go that route.

pretty sure the “because I was an outsider” thing is just jane being irrational bias bitter

the popular thing is what happened, go back and look at the picture of their popularity, jane’s was the lowest.

Seems to me that ends of sticks may have a bias against Jane.

She may have been a little short with them on occasion.

Her actual kids – now it’s making more sense.

Jane participating in Olympics: “muh family and I would die if I don’t win, so give up”.
Jane after Olympics: “They didn’t let me win, I must destroy Olympics, it’s evil”.

This is not the spirit of the Olympics. All corruption and doping aside, Olympics is meant to be a friendly competition. But if you compared Jane’s situation to the Hunger Games instead it’d actually be pretty accurate.

Wha….that’s….that’s not even slightly comparable. The Game is pretty much the ONLY source of money and life for outsiders after the end of the world and she didn’t just LOSE, either. She was knocked off her team by a bunch of people who didn’t need the spot and had no sympathy, hating her only cuz she was different. They discriminate because she’s an outsider and they’re citizens. Their discrimination kills people. That is so far different from your view on this…I have no idea how you got that

You’re shifting the blame. That was her work, show-business in fact. There, you get unpopular, you get kicked out. Government (TENka? or whatever) is lacking any Social security like allowance for desperate families, or why don’t you blame them instead?

I think that you are both right, to an extent- the citizens don’t think of it as being a big deal – its show business as Mouse said. On the flip side, though, Jane views it from the lenses of survival ( excellent example with the Hunger Games Alex – I actually tend to view the citizens like Capital, and the outsiders like the districts when looking at the relationships in NAV)

The Game isn’t the only source of income for Outsiders. It’s Citizens who can’t make money in L.i.F.e., and they can work in the fields or as technical staff in Reality (unless, you know, they can’t).

And food is so cheap that it’s next thing to free. Since there is barely anything else that the Cities can provide short of Importation, Jane must either not really need a lot of money or she must need to get Imported. Which makes her grudge against Citizens a bit…complicated.

And as we’ve seen, Cities aren’t exactly safe either. They can and do go defunct, which is not highly survivable for anyone in one that goes down, except undetected hackers.

What other source of income do outsiders have?

Eh, strike that… I mixed it up with L.i.F.e. 🙁

man your viewpoint is easy to capture and shift. half a speech and you’re full on buying into janes version without a thought and demonizing the rest of the group lol

Appart from the last panel, the page is good. But the last panel IS a bit… Less impactful than it clearly means to be. Not a big deal though, the dialogue is the most important part, and it was done well.

I imagine that Jane’s action in the last panel probably looks pretty silly to Kat. It wouldn’t damage anything, and it might have not even made a sound.

It probably *does* make a sound, like it did here: http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-386/

Jane isn’t going for “dangerous”, she’s trying to generate pathos here. To that end it works better for her to signify the emotional impact on herself rather than her ability to affect the environment.

Not that I would put it past Sandra to have Paddy do background changes and such for all this (as long as they were simple), but that would just make it look staged, which is not the idea.

I don’t think the reasons were all that deep. It was likely just more of Citizens sticking for one of their own. She wasn’t picked because she was an Outsider, or because she was going to die. She was picked because she wasn’t one of them. If there were four Outsiders and one Citizen in that group, most likely the Citizen would have been kicked instead.

We have seen a lot of discrimination against outsiders previously though. I’m sure it it was a group with 4 citizens then the outsider would go, but it really seems that a lot of citizens think they own everything. I kinda side with Jane here based on what we’ve seen.

We are only hearing Jane’s side of the story. And people who try to justify violence by claiming to be victims have a tendency to leave out the negative things that justify their being a “victim”.

Also, Jane could have simply pretended to log out, lulling the others into a false sense of security which caused them to log out before her. The Dude was afraid she would do the same when they logged out.

Thank you for your stunning insight on the character traits of these faceless silhouettes and the likelihood that a female character, who has provided the only version of events and no reason to suspect that they are false, is overreacting and ignoring legitimate reasons why a panel of teammates chose her to die.

In the future, please feel free to not share any further insights with the class.

The wit is great! But the tone is too harsh. Please be nice; I like reading the insights from all my readers.

Fair enough.

That’s true, it’s just one side, but I DO see where she’s coming from is all.

Then again…. we know that City leaders have a LOT of power. The others may not have had a “free” vote. More like “vote the outsider out or we kick your family members out of the city”.

Depends on whether or not their city was controlled by Tenka. If so, then Tenka planned to replace all of them anyway, so there was no reason to pressure them, but an opposing city might indeed have pressured them into getting rid of the one who is most likely to die anyway.

Actually… we know the city they were in was NOT controlled by TENKA. Why else even offer that deal? Plus, TENKA seems to do a lot more interaction and trading with the “Outsiders” then the cities do. I mean.. are the cities the ones giving jobs to people in LIFE?

This is a fairly compelling argument. We do know that the other Cities see the Game as a way to challenge TENka’s dominance. Sandra seems to be taking this a bit farther than usual, but perhaps not.

I doubt the pressure was as blatant as threatening anyone with deportation, though. Certainly cutting access to L.i.F.e. and demanding they work unfavorable jobs at double shifts would make more sense.

It was most likely pressure from the group sponsor, though. Especially as there is no reason that they would all come from the same City.

Still, Jane is slightly overselling this. After all, she almost certainly had built up ample funds to continue paying for food shipments, which are around 30 a day per person. Unless she’s the sole support of a pretty large group…that seems unlikely. The other reason we know that Outsiders want to get in the game rather than scraping by on tips (like Mina) is because it’s a more secure road to getting Imported. Which I can see as an attractive option for Outsiders, but it does make her objective and her objections somewhat contradictory.

Ok – can I comment on the amazing art again? Like… *dang! grrl!* look at those human shadows! And you didn’t even cheat and reuse figures from the similar scene you linked to. (You totally could have too)

Yeeeeaaaahhhh, I don’t think Jane would be so eager to cooperate with Kat if she knew the latter’s real identity…

I mean, sure, but would *anyone*? She is, from a number of perspectives, the single greatest monster in the entire setting. Certainly she’s caused more deaths than any genocidal regime in history. That’s why her own efforts to redeem herself are such a big deal.

I would.

I frankly am firmly in the anti-TENka faction, I don’t believe any of the major charges against Kat. She didn’t hack the geomagnetic field, she didn’t kill her mother, and she didn’t lead the Deconstruct Me hackers. The first is extremely implausible on the face of it and in the opinion of the most technically expert hacker in TENka, the second is contradicted by the fact that Kat successfully extracted her mother from the destroyed hospital and escaped, and the third simply has no evidence other than TENka’s claims (claims which include the first two).

We can confirm exactly two crimes on Kat’s part. She really did upgrade the Hakido into a security nightmare. And she apparently really did kill some people while extracting her mom from the hospital where she was being held. I can confirm way more and way worse crimes by TENka, with the complicity of Jake and his superiors.

I’m gonna be honest, it seems highly unlikely to me that Kleya has the temperament to interact with a bunch of self-important hackers, even in a leadership position. Maybe that’s just because of how closed off she is now, because of trauma from how everything went down The Last Time, but still, Deconstruct Me seems like a lot of interaction with a lot of people who are jerks, and we’ve already seen that Kleya does not suffer that gladly.

Of course, that’s even presuming that Deconstruct Me existed, which, given everything that D is and does, isn’t an absolute. Who needs a hacker group when you have an AI that is so integrated into all the major systems of the world that the rest of the world’s best programmers can’t begin to extricate it? Especially when you Are Interfaced, permanently.

I tend to believe that Deconstruct Me probably existed, but it is doubtful that Kat led them or even tolerated their existence. I think that there is a reason that TENka started calling D an anti-hacking program.

I knew there was more to Jane than bloodlust! 🙂

When Aneeka was making her tour, I think she was slightly shocked to find out that Jane is one of my favorites. 🙂 🙂 🙂

Waiting for the other shoe to drop on this, though I doubt it will come out immediately.

Here’s the thing, there were some other people who sent Jane’s husband off to die, and she hasn’t said anything that would indicate she’s still with that group. So…what happened to them?

It’s possible that Jane took off with her kids and found a cache of supplies and a Kido, allowing her to hook up with L.i.F.e. and eventually get into the Game. I think that the Kido had to have been found after Jane’s husband was sent off in search of help. But I’m not certain that it was Jane who first found it.

Speaking of the other shoe dropping, Jake is apparently triple-crossing everyone (I’ve lost count) for reasons he won’t tell Brandon because he thinks Brandon would panic…. and Brandon has decided he doesn’t want to know, after all. I think there’s more on the line to TENka replacing Jane’s group (or Jane/Mary) than just “low popularity, let’s make the Game more interesting!” They inserted Jake/Bandit into the Game for a very specific purpose. I wonder if Kat knows that D has killed people since the Ending? That the best programmers on the planet are terrified of her pet AI?

Of course she knows. She knows that they’ll even break equipment they need to survive on the mere hint of it being hacked. She knows that they’ve done so in the past, resulting in the deaths of probably millions.

She also knows that Jake, working for TENka, has killed innocent people, and that most people involved in the Hacker Hunts have too, with the add-on effect of making it impossible for many other people to survive because of a lack of technical competence in the surviving population.

I doubt Kat understands what Jake is trying to do, because given what she knows the plan is ludicrous on the face of it. She’s still alive and controls D through her upgraded neural interface…D as an integrated entity rather than a collection of old back-doors might even be something that runs on the hardware in her neck.

Of course, Jake may not know everything, but he knows enough to realize that the Bandit Gambit is a wash given that Kat’s still alive. He’s just pretending to keep playing along to avoid admitting why he knows it can’t work.

What makes you say that TENka has killed innocent people?

Nanea. And Danni.

That’s on Jake personally, even if he was following orders, which I think is clearly the case. In other words, it’s company policy for that kind of situation, it happens all the time, Jake doesn’t even bother apologizing for it.

Saying they killed them seems a bit of a stretch. All we can really tell is that they were trying to keep newcomers out on purpose. The effect this might have on individual fates is incidental, and I don’t think they are even fully aware of it.

(Also, in case of Nanea, I’d say it’s more on herself. She didn’t *need* to get into the game at all costs — it was her own choice…)

“And no one about to die.” – Insane Jane

Pretty Sane Jane

Sanity is relative, and Jane’s team *did* decide to vote off the person who needed it the most…

With this level of anger, I’m wondering if Jane actually did lose one or more kids. 🙁 Poor thing; and on top of, apparently, losing her husband too!

Aneeka; the last panel works good for me!

I fear that using the same style for the Game group death panel, as the one used for the Reality Outsider group death panel earlier, might be rather confusing? Especially since that earlier scene already seems to have caused some confusion between the Game group and the Reality group…

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 625