‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 652

Bandit's turn

NEWS (repeated)

At long last, the third book in my Chaos Gods series is ready for its grand debut:

Releases March 27th!

It is currently on pre-order for $2.99 (40% off) until the end of today.

To celebrate the release, the first book in the series, The Wanted Child, is on sale for $0.99 for a limited time!

Yep, new cover

Fifteen-year-old Ki doesn't care what half of the nine gods say. She will not let her parents die to save the Four Lands. Tavk, the trickster god, agrees to protect her parents as long as she completes his missions. For the promise of a happy ever after, Ki evolves into an infamous demonic fighter and tries to ignore her fading humanity and growing loneliness.

Then she meets De: the gods' new Hero. The gods need him trained fast and Tavk is only too happy to sign her up for the job. Two years older -- and distractingly handsome -- De practically worships Ki and wants to be both her best trainee and her best friend. But he doesn't know who she really is: The Wanted Child. The one the new Hero, De, is destined to kill so the gods can finally destroy her parents.

Great time to try the series if you haven't yet!

29 Comments

This is legit sh** that I 100% believe Bandit’s words here… I can seen such a VR system causing such things in a post-apocalyptic setting.

Yeah, especially since here and there it’s already caused in our pre-apocalyptic world. 🙂

Reminds me of the backstory for the Unincorporated Man. Everyone becomes so obsessed with a VR system that allowed them to live out perfect lives that the world literally just stops and slowly dies.

Until a power failure forced the few survivors out of the system and they proceeded to rebuild the world, with one very serious law: NO VIRTUAL REALITY.

I googled it and that is one heck of a dystopian future those people live in. I would never sell shares of myself and thus allow others to decide via shareholder-majorities what I should do.

But as for the VR backstory: Forbidding VR is like forbidding drugs. It suppresses the symptoms to a degree, but ultimately people need to find a solution for the underlying problem or thes symptoms will come back in a different way.

In such a scenario, drugs and VR would/should be classed as similar issues.
Both are a way to take you out of yourself, yo take you away from the worries and fears of real life

People said the same thing about Books, Television, Videogames, Internet, Smartphones and just about anything else Media related of the last few Centuries.

So, I hope you did not expect your argument for “VR is bad” to sound anything but boring and overused. Because that will not happen.

This reminds me of MacHale’s Pendragon series. Don’t recall which one exactly. But the first time they lose is due to a world ruined by the fact that everyone lives in virtual reality and lets the real world rot. So to speak.

The original is “The Reality Bug” (book 4), and it comes back later (book 8, I think?).

I was thinking the same thing. And it’s great to see other people who’ve read the books… although I can’t remember if I finished the series. Story and world quality kind of dropped in the later books.

wow, I’m first.Sweet. Anyway this brought up a question I should have asked you in person, how come most of the cities were put into ruin destroying all other forms of entertainment yet the game somehow survived. How did it survive?

PS: I am loving the mug I got from you! Its great and I always love seeing the dragon with my coffee =)

Probably because the AI and the person who instigated the ruin, really like that game.

The dire truth of this bleak world seems to be that there isn’t really enough of *anything* to go around. Not food, not working tech and not tech repair people – cause they’ve been killed off… I just can’t get over how a society can be so profoundly stupid as to do something that self-destructive. Kill everyone who knows how everything works. Is it not obvious that that is a recipe for disaster? I’m afraid of the kind of people who would go along with something like that, and I sure hope there isn’t enough of them in this world that we could face such a catastrophic outcome.

Well – put it this way. Who has the practical skills to survive sudden loss of tech + natural disaster? (Usually the rednecks and outdoor nuts) Who has the skills to rebuild tech from the ground up? (Usually the geeks and book nerds)

Now – how often do those two groups overlap? I’m thinking most of the programmers died in the catastrophe – not in the riots. But yeah, the riots wouldn’t have had to kill a high ABSOLUTE number of people to kill off/scare off most the remaining skilled techs.

People look for easy answers. Something wrong with you? Find a golden bullet diet pill to fix it. Go all the way left or all the way right will fix the political problems. Attack scapegoats. Someone shoots up a school? It is obviously video games. Not a history psychological disorder, and multiple threats authorities ignore.
Oh and to show extremes. The black plague was spread by fleas on the backs of rodents. European solution? Kill cats because supposedly they are evil.

Several Jewish communities were also persecuted for having ‘created’ the plague.

And for a very modern example the situation in Malawi has been flirting with this as mobs kill those suspected of being vampires and local gangs set up road blocks to stop and check people ‘for vampires’, and doctors and teachers have had their houses searched and ransacked for supposedly harbouring and hiding the vampires.

> just can’t get over how a society can be so profoundly stupid as to do something that self-destructive. Kill everyone who knows how everything works.

it’s happened in real life. look up the communists in cambodia(the one the american media delibrately ignored and downplayed to avoid a second nam) where they killed off all the “smart people” and when they ran out of those executed the ones with glasses for looking smart. and then theres the mass starvation in china under mao, etc.

sadly this is less unbelievable than you’d want to think

“look up the communists in cambodia(the one the american media delibrately ignored and downplayed to avoid a second nam)”

That’s a very generous description of the media’s reasons.

Mostly, the media covers for communists and other socialists because they are sympathetic to them. The most famous example is The New York Times getting a Pulitzer for the way they “covered” (meaning “covered FOR”) the mass starvation in the Ukraine (estimated at 30 million dead of intentional starvation) – no “avoiding another Vietnam” fig leaf for that one (or so many others).

Ever hear of witch trials? Or pogroms? Or just an American of German ancestry getting lynched (and killed) during WW1 by fellow Americans. People are stupid, mobs are worse.

“One person is smart. A group of persons is dumb.” – K, Man in Black.

FINALLY, we get something I’ve been hoping for for a while: Some honest, straightforward expository explanation from Bandit to his teammate about how this computer game ended up in such a weirdly central place in this post-apocalyptic world. It’s nice to see Bandit finally have a chance to be sincere, friendly, and helpful to someone he’s trying to help, and I’ve been hoping for some more answers about this world for a long while now. It makes sense that TENKA has a different perspective on their actions in relation to the state of the world than outsiders do, and I’m very glad that they’re being portrayed as ultimately human and trying to do their best for humanity rather than the soulless evil corporation they’re too often villified as. Hopefully we’ll also get answers about the part that confuses me the most, why playing this game is so financially lucrative to both citizens and outsiders, which seems stranger than ever now that it’s revealed that Tenka seems to basically want people to STOP PLAYING the Game.

That’s pretty simple. Everybody wants to get away from thoughts of mortality and the game is full sensory VR, that’s about as escapist as you can get. Since Tenka is limiting entry, but still allowing people to watch, players become sports stars. Sports stars get tribute from fans regularly, well above the millions from their tickets and advertisements, and it’s likely similar here. Outsider is a player? Send a drone line with food their way, so they don’t need as much downtime scrounging. City dude is a player? They’re now the towns mascot. Exclusivity of a position everybody wants turns it into celebrity privilege.

The story does sound like a less extreme version of what Bloody Mary told Kleya.

Still doesn’t justify creating AIs (that cause enough frustration and obsession) that kill humans

He’ll probably go over that next, but it’s probably to show people what the upper-echelon of players is like; to make them think they don’t have a chance. They’re probably programmed to go after citizens, so they were always harassing Danni… and whomever her partner was. Most people would have been discouraged and given up, but for Danni the game is her only chance at survival, and her partner was an outsider.

I doubt he knew that they caused people to die. Also there’s no way to know whether someone is a citizen or an outsider just by looking at their avatar unless they have pricey stuff.

“kill”

the ai didn’t kill her any more than everquest and maplestory killed all those koreans

Free will only vaguely exists. All actions are a product of circumstance, you just have to factor in that mind and body and potentially soul are circumstances. It is as false to say that someone could have chosen differently as it is to say that a ball could have rolled differently. If someone is subject to enough knowledge and power then they can be controlled completely and intentionally, without ever even knowing it. A massively vast amount of money goes into finding ways to make games compelling. I guarantee that there are people who made enormous efforts to turn off people’s ability to stop playing such games, and never bothered to think about the rather obvious implications of someone doing nothing other than playing the game. If you think that people who die in such circumstances could have done differently than you hopelessly underestimate peer pressure…

The Twins deliberately hunted and tormented people, apparently to get them to do more productive things. Either it was never thought of or it was knowingly accepted that some people would be desperate enough to press on regardless, and that the extra pressure preventing them from succeeding would force them to push themselves to dangerous behaviours in order to remain competitive.

The A.I. was deliberately hostile and biased, and was almost certainly enough of a factor to differentiate between life and death. That is enough for me. Maybe others only want to blame the “primary” cause and ignore all other contributions. Maybe there was some greater factor, an existing condition, some hazard or environment… but for me the twins did enough, and it is probably just another in the long list of deaths caused by negligent mentalities.

One thing that’s still mystifying to me is how someone who *didn’t have a special, or any comprehension of how to get one* thought that training was going to do anything to get her past the Game Trials. Clearly, she’s watched enough of Sasuke’s channel to understand what people in the Game do, even if she has zero comprehension of how to do it herself.

That’s actually easy to answer. It might be partially because specials had become rare, so there weren’t that many people that could use them, which means some people might get into the game without being able to use specials. It might be a little from her training as a dancer, where lots of practice and repetition helped her become famous. However, the primary reason is simply because it was necessary.

If Danni didn’t get into the Game, it seems that it was basically going to be a death sentence for her. As such, no matter how low the odds, no matter how hopeless it is, all she can do is train to the best of her ability, and do everything in her power to increase those odds and hope she gets lucky enough to make the Game and survive.

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 652

NEWS (repeated)