‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 630

This was not according to Sandra's plan...

33 Comments

I think it’s interesting the Kat doesn’t fit in any of their molds and yet is exactly what they need.

Very interesting.

Well if she fit there moods she wouldn’t be what they need but what they want.

A wise man will know the difference between what he wants and what he needs. And smart enough to not stop at obtaining simply his needs

Food, water, shelter, and someone to banter with just about covers most needs, but darned if I’ll do completely without a good pair of pants and a book.

She never quite fit anybody’s molds, which is where the problem become when she accidentially weaponized that bit of hardware without realizing how much power she had and then people got scared, panicy and all lets destroy her before she gets us or insert threat item here stuff.

Well, this ends the debate about whether Sandra knows about the “Kill the Game” plan or not. She’s clearly in on it.

Indeed.

It reinforces the complementary question though: what is Sandra hoping to gain by this? Just reducing TENka’s influence in general?…

All I catched of their plan was “Kill the game, kill Tenka, everybody wins”. I expect Sandra has more of a plan than that and understands that it is not that simple, but I do wonder if Jane has really understood Sandras plan – or even what Sandra is actually trying to achieve. I don’t think I have.

Same here O8h. I’m a little lost by now… but waiting to see how things play out. I’ve enjoyed seeing more of Jane’s character. I’m not exactly sure of what Sandra is up to either. I figure we’ll either learn in future panels or maybe if I go back and re-read everything. For my personal taste right now the story is moving rather slowly, so I’m just following along clippity clop clippity clop. We’ll see what happens. ;D

I think their plan is to overthrow Tenka, which Sandra correctly guessed requires assets. Kat would be a great one, as she’s an expert in the infrastructure modern life runs on. And, if nothing else, she could use her to improve her own life by getting her to code for AFK stuff and the Specials. The first one implies an improvement to the community, the second one could get them more money, which is always useful if you can order things from a city.

And, even if she doesn’t *want* to overthrow tenka, fixing things would go a long way into making Sandra a relevant political figure because she actually got things fixed.

If I had to guess, Sandra and Co believe that destroying the game will weaken Tenka’s hold in the world, get people actually thinking about things and perhaps improve them via their own means (instead of trying to escape it). Along the way, she’ll be positioned with the necessary assets (people, resources, etc) to take advantage of the situation and steer it towards her idealized future, whatever that may be.

Does Jane have any idea who Kat actually is?

Kat is basically Bigfoot. If someone large and hairy walks up to you then you won’t assume they are Bigfoot just because they match the description. I mean, sure, the idea may cross your mind, but it isn’t exactly credible. Unless they have information that we on’t know about, or finding The Cyborg was specifically part of their plan and they have been putting in a lot of effort to profile and scan for it, then it seems very unlikely that they would believe that they have just stubled upon them, although they might fantasise as much…

Now I really want to see Kat in a classic Bigfoot pose

That’s debated. Some suggested she must have — but the last bunch of pages IMHO make that appear rather unlikely.

Well, there’s the answer on if Sandra’s in on it or not (or theorized in the comments last page). Interesting.

Is Sandra’s face ever going to be perpetually stuck in “I have had too much of these antics”? It seems to spend most of its time there and you hear stories…

Wow this is weird, we’re seeing actual raw real Jane here (assuming that’s not her user’s real name…)

I was kind of starting to forget that there was an actual person there with her own real life threatening issues….

I wanna throw a little ethical wrench into the works here, just for the fun of it. 😀

I appreciate what Jane is saying… and her character has certainly become more interesting (was interesting from the beginning). It’s been revealed that she and her real-life children are in a world of hurt and she’s trying to fix things. She realizes that to rebuild one often must first destroy. Trouble is no one is even trying to rebuild, so destruction of the wall-in-the-way has become a necessity.

Trouble is of course, that is unlikely to do Jane or her children any good. How long does it take to rebuild after a world-wide system collapses. Chances are things will get much worse before they get any better.

But here’s the ethical quandary: how responsible is Jane (and/or people like her) for literally murdering the vast majority of the programmers out there who might have saved them? From what I understand most of society went on a mob-mentality witch-hunt and no-trial, no-jury executed every programmer they could get their hands on.

So the ethical thing is: does the majority of society pretty much deserve the mess they’ve gotten themselves into… and this is the result of their own evils? Karma bites back, big time.

I’m guessing that Jane is probably less a part of the Hacker Hunts than most. After all, whether or not her husband was a particularly good programmer, he was at least computer literate enough to have created a pretty cool Special. My guess is that he did that when doing so was easier, say involving some kind of Special creation tool which TENka subsequently removed.

Still, on balance I’d say he, and thus Jane, were more on the other side of the Hunts, something she has in common with Sandra.

Which is a bit ironic, cause the people Kleya is trying to help hate hackers so much more.

I’m not sure Sandra or Jane hate actual “hackers” any less — they are probably just more careful to apply that label to anyone…

My understanding regarding the Specials is that the rules for what a Special can do were made more complicated, not the way they are created.

That’s the general perception. But Kleya seemed genuinely unaware that anything had been done to Specials (and puzzled that nobody used them). That means that the only thing that could have been changed was a user-level interface she didn’t ever use (probably because it produced Frankencode like Jane’s Special).

Good reasoning in my opinion. While the Hacker Hunts seem to imply that the majority of the society think that the faintest amount of computer programming skill means you are a hacker. Conversely, Sandra and Jane both give the impression of being more particular in their application of the terms “programmer” and “hacker”.

So, another plot to overthrow TENKA +/- Dr. Grace – probably the latter. I think that’s who Sandra is gunning for. So is this one of the conspiracies that Brandon is talking about when he mentions being a quadruple agent?

I’m starting to wonder if Jane is all she says she is. She’s too connected to Sandra to be the “lost in the wilderness” type.

Also, I think that Kleya is going to go back and check into what Jane said to see if that’s the truth before thinking about what to do.

I doubt Sandra even knows about Dr. Grace. To the outside world, TENka is just one big entity I’d say.

Yeah, especially because anyone that survived the “hacker hunts” probably WAS a real hacker. And therefore had the expertise to electronically hide.

I feel that any sane ethical system ignores the concept of “deserve”. The world doesn’t care about debts or revenge. Someone who builds something can be framed and have it confiscated. Someone who steals can deceive others and be showered with gifts. Karma doesn’t exist within the span of a single life, not if you have the resources to distort opinion. A good ethical system will focus on the outcomes it propagates, rather than on maintaining some sort of balance.

Would it be better if such a ruinous society were to end? Given the absence of any better alternative, I would have to say no. And if such a thing did exist, it would most likely seek to preserve this society, for observation if nothing else, although perhaps with reduced freedom…

It is easy to see humans laying waste to the world and think that it would be better without them. But humans are just one more product of evolution, with no particular abundance or lack of self-control when compared to other animals. Removing them would only help if there is reason to believe that their replacement would be more considerate…

So no, they do not deserve it. It doesn’t serve as an example to others and it doesn’t influence them to behave better.

“Given the absence of any better alternative” I might agree.

But we can’t take that for granted, can we? After all, we know that Kleya isn’t the only hacker still out there, still able to make do with infrastructure and equipment that has been abandoned by the general populace as “defunct”. In fact, the early comic suggests that they are regarded as a persistent threat, though it is unclear what exactly TENka or anyone else is doing about them.

My take is that it would be immoral to do anything about them even if they were trying to take revenge on the people who participated in the Hacker Hunts. Not because, for the most part, the Hacker Hunts targeted entirely innocent people, but because the people they targeted are the very ones who have the best chance of rebuilding. Kleya above all ‘deserves’ to be exonerated if we’re going to look forward rather than back. Of course I say that firmly believing that her history is not so dark as those currently in power like to pretend…likely as a means of covering their own guilt.

Kleya can fix this broken world for all the survivors if they’ll stop breaking everything the moment she fixes it…something they’ve actually done when she’s tried to help in the past, and often enough that she sees it as the rule rather than the exception. She could save the Lillys outright, except they won’t accept help that looks like it came from a hacker. All she can do is provide happy (and deniable) ‘accidents’ in their favor.

How do you know people have broken things she fixed? While it seems clear that this possibility is holding her back, I don’t remember any concrete references for this actually having happened in the past?…

Kleya directly mentions it here. More generally, it is pretty obvious. The Hacker Hunts weren’t carried out by people with the acumen to restore their systems to normal, they stopped the hackers by breaking anything that got hacked (and killing anyone who seemed capable of hacking).

That’s still not an actual confirmation of past incidents; just what she *suspects* would happen AIUI?…

Gradients & grass works just fine, it gives a more realistic depth-of-focus or whatever, here. It’s clear we’re paying far more attention to Mary and Sandra than to the details of a setting that “looks real” but which we know is just a cube with illusionary 3D depth.

Heh. Never in their wildest imaginings could they think that she actually needs the lie of the game same as Tenka (much less that she’s responsible for that lie in more ways than one). She needs people to believe that the game is actually filled with heroes and villains as well as an essential part of life… instead of just some entertainment filled with actors. She said so herself: so she can easily convince people that’s she’s a hero when she… does whatever it is she thinks is going to fix the world. I’m still fuzzy on what she’s hoping to accomplish. Obviously she needs people to accept her and what she’s saying as “good” but I can’t comment beyond that.

It’s not just what she can say, but what she can do. Kleya can fix things, but it does no good if the people she’s trying to help panic and break them again because she’s a hacker taking over their stuff. Which is a thing that has clearly happened to her a lot, given how subtle she’s always being about helping people she really cares about.

Is that all she wants? To be trusted enough that she can fix things without people panicking and breaking them again? That’s possible, but I detect that there is something more fundamental wrong with this world, something that caused the Hacker Hunts and brought TENka to undisputed power. It would make sense for Kleya to know the hidden truth behind everything. Even if she doesn’t want to reveal it, she certainly has to deal with it if she’s going to save everyone, or most of them.

Sandra reminds me of Cinna far too much from Catching Fire, (second book of Hunger Games) still dig her though.

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 630