‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 636

And so ends Book 5.

39 Comments

Oh it came out VERY cool.

soooo does the game have to die to get rid of the dead ones? cause that seems to be the main issue they have.

I guess the other way of putting it is, does getting rid of the Dead Ones actually get rid of the Game, as per Jane’s theory. My read is “no.”

I’d guess that the primary audience for the Game is more like Mae, not really interested in Dead Ones at all except as background. As long as the Dead Ones getting killed were like the one on Guelia Isola, it’d probably be a big event draw.

Then the people who succeeded would be the big thing to watch.

As for the Erbana created by Kleya’s mom, I’m guessing that she doesn’t go along with allowing her to be taken out. That wouldn’t be heroic at all, even though it apparently would be quite difficult.

Is she scritching D’s chin? D looks so happy!

That was all D really wanted . That last panel…

Scratchies!

Oh, and the last panel is still cool, even if you had imagined it cooler 🙂

Ooh! Last panel has desktop background possibilities!

Hmm. Trying to save it directly from this page is a bit small. May I request new voting incentive? Big version of last panel, but put “no one is going to kill my game” where “So” is.

If you’re taking requests, that is!

I’d vote for that!

Can I second this request?

Hopefully Kleya is interested in actually being a hero rather than just appearing to be one. Because otherwise this is an easy path to villainy.

everything in the story indicates Kleya has a good heart.

/Being/ a hero and /wanting/ to be a hero are completely different. After all, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Gosh, I really want Kleya to make the right choices now. Or at least, the better ones, because sometimes, there isn’t a right choice, only bad and /less/ bad…

What I mean to say is that good intentioned people can be villains. It’s happened before.

yea, to that point if you actually take a closer look at what most villains are thinking. (least the ones that have deep enough characters that it’s possible)
Then you’d find most of them do at their base have a good goal. it’s just the means they use to get to said goal are not. because something has skewed their version of reality to make them think what they are doing is a necessary evil to get to the greater good.

In the real world, most “villains” are psychopaths, and don’t really have a proper concept of good or evil.

I don’t think Kleya is one — although her behaviours sometimes look a lot like that…

We do know that Kleya is interested in being able to help people, and that the fact that she’s perceived as a villain makes that very difficult, such as when people freak out and break things they need to survive because she’s hacked them. This is apparently something that’s happened enough for it not to be a hypothetical danger.

We don’t know if this is the only reason she want’s to be perceived as a hero, but we do know it’s among her reasons.

I don’t think Kleya understands that there is a difference between being seen as a hero, and actually being one. That said, I can easily see that leading her to villainy. Mostly because of two acts in her history:

1. She went into a meltdown upon realizing that the party was playing the role of villains. She did something nasty to the network, and almost decided to abandon her current identity and friends.

2. She lied to her friend to borrow money. She said it was for the singing career, when she spent it on being able to participate in the Game.

I suspect that we’ll see a moment of major character development when Kleya is forced to actually choose whether she wants to be a hero, or be a sociopath with good PR.

She had a bit of an unbalanced childhood. She learned to WIN at any cost, regardless of any social or legal cost. This has led to her having a bit unbalanced understanding of the world.

Being a sociopath/psychopath is not something people can *choose*… It’s a sort of physical defect.

As for borrowing money under a false pretence, it should be noted that she did that to help Danni — so in a way she was actually trying to be a hero in this case, not just playing one…

And there we have it, why Tenka are not able to shut the game down. Or they don’t dare try, if they have already found a correlation between either planning to or starting to do so and their “virus readings”.

D is looking a lot like Coyote from “Gunnerkrig Court”

this

And I like Coyote! 🙂 I also really like D!!

I thought it came out pretty cool. That panel was pretty powerful to me.

That last panel is both awesome and terrifying. D’s grin seems to be a portent of doom

You know how Game is a synonym for Prey? There were so many puns forming in my head about who is hunting whom right now, because currently so many people are hunting others for all kinds of reasons and now Kat talks about nobody killing her Game, but I couldn’t get anything to work. 🙁

Anyway, now that I’ve explained the pun, I can at least hope that our grumpy and formerly violent genius shows some Good Will in her Hunting. 🙂

Well, it’s not that nothing would work, it’s just that I don’t see Kleya telling D “Keep your claws off my prey. Only I must kill it.”

I just read the entire comic in one day. I am addicted. Please give me more.

I have no experience with visual art of any kind, but I think what you could have done to enhance the coolness is this:

Split the hacker frame in half so there are three wide panels instead of one wide and one square.
Only show Kleya and D’s faces for the last two panels.
Second panel is what you have, with “No one is going to kill my game”, but cropped to just their faces.
First panel is Kleya face-on, D facing away from her to her left.

This idea gives it more “motion” so you get the movie-like feel you see in your head.

Sorry, meant third and second panels, not second and first.

“It’s a movie in my head.”
…
You can’t leave it hanging like that. Who voices who? 😛 I assume Channing Tatum is The Dude?

I feel like Kleya could learn/gain inspiration for how to act in the Game from Skip Beat.
…not that it’s necessary – Kleya’s “character” is doing fine on her own so far. I just think that Kleya and Skip Beat’s main character are both trying to get people to like them, but through different means and in different universes. Interesting~

Oh, Kleya… You don’t actually NEED the Game to be a hero. Just trying to help people is heroic.

Normally true yes. But practically everyone in the real world is so certain she is evil that attempting to help them openly would result in them trying to kill her. Or at best others seeing them as being in league with her evil intentions. She believes (or hopes) that if she can convince everyone she is a hero that will change.

I’m going to try to be constructive here. I don’t see anything wrong with the last panel, but feedback of simply “It’s awesome” probably doesn’t help you much (aside from giving you the will to continue).

With that in mind, you nailed the expressions on Kleya (vicious resolve) and D (malicious glee). I’m just not sure what else you were trying to convey. I suspect that the way Kleya’s fingers overlap with D’s jaw is the problem keeping me from seeing the motion you wanted.

Found this comic yesterday, read the whole thing and just got to the current one. I really like it. It seems to me that Kleya in her past did something reactionary when the facility she was at got bombed, and just kept making things worse while she was trying to fix them. She also may have potentially gotten confused for a while between reality and virtual reality. I’m also fairly certain that “D” is her dad made into an AI. (D would also be the “virus.”)

I am confused. I thought the dead ones were used to populate LiFE because so few people survived.
I suppose they could be in the game too, but with the competition to play it would be expected to be mostly empty except for NPCs.

AI’s were used to populate L.i.F.e., but not characters established by pre-Ending players, and certainly not AI controlled characters of Dead Ones. L.i.F.e. is apparently a social network largely designed after the Ending, though likely based on a pre-Ending platform. There are two reasons for this. First, a lot of people don’t have Kidos, but headset/glove interfaces are apparently fairly common. Second, the actual Game is probably too addictive to allow Citizens to play it just for fun.

It’s likely that an established game-like social platform that was popular pre-Ending would be poorly suited to the socialization engineering that L.i.F.e. is designed to impose and that it would still be too addictive for Outsiders, and possibly Citizens as well. As it is, there have to be enforced minimum rest guidelines and such.

For a user to interface with the Game, a Kido is required. For an AI to control a character in the Game, all that is required is that the AI have access. Plus the Game is all about competition and fighting, there is no reason not to have a lot of AI controlled enemies, that’s perfectly normal for games.

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 636