‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 704

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In 2G, falling can be as deadly as the projectile.

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Bandit, you *really* need to work on being able to keep up your poker face around Kat.

Just pretend that was an amazing dodge from Danni.

~~~

More seriously, I suppose he’s more worried that D can probably read his bio-signs and report that.

That smile- perfection.

Don’t tell me she ended up hacking and they’re [i]still[/i] going to avoid talking to each other!

Yeah, if that tension doesn’t get resolved in this scene I’m gonna be disappointed…

Smile and wave Jake, smile and wave! Your life literally depends on it!

Oh no Kleya darling…silly kitty… she looks genuinely horrified

kaaaaaaat
what u done
…well, luckily for you, he’s just as scared of you as you are of him.

What would be more likely is that she will log off and perhaps never be seen from again.

What I don’t understand in all of this is that if she wants to be a good guy call the virus off that’s attacking the rest of civilizations computer systems and at the very least get the robots to start helping people again so people outside the city are not in such dire straights.

I don’t think the virus is attacking all the cities, so much as it interferes with the running of Jake’s city (currently mentally blanking on the name). And since, as far as she knows, the world wants her dead, she is not currently willing to do anything obvious to help people. I suspect she may have been responsible for the robot with the medical supplies that Mina’s family found.

What she doesn’t quite seem to realize is, she now has two close friends whose life situations might eventually push her into violating her self imposed rules. Danni’s city wants her pushed out because she takes more resources than a healthy citizen. Mina’s family’s situation is only growing increasingly precarious over time, and they are in a collapsed building that would make importing them to a city impossible under normal circumstances. Eventually one of those two situations is going to reach a tipping point, and when that happens, she will have to choose what is really important to her, her friends or her reputation as Not A Hacker.

i agree with what you’ve said here, but i’d add that she’s also hiding from someone or someones with presumedly malicious intent, and hacking will give away her presence/lack of death and cause her to be hunted down. so it’s not just her reputation as Not A Hacker, but also her safety on the line

For most people, D isn’t just a virus, its also a major anti-hacking program in the system. The problem is, D has a habit of overreacting. My theory when the robots went crazy, was D overreacting to protect her and things got out-of-hand fast, and she got the whole bucket load of blame, along with every ‘hacker’ around.

You know, you might be right.

I don’t think it’s ever been stated whether she’s aware of how rigidly D controls all that stuff – or even if it’s actually as bad as everyone says it is. Literally all Jake had to do to fix the authenticity problem after the crash was log himself in. After all, we ARE talking about a society that lynched almost all competent programmers out of fear that they MIGHT be malevolent, murderous hackers.

There’s substantial reason to think that the virus is semi-dormant, and people just lack the ability to restore functionality, due to KILLING PEOPLE

Man, you are really good at drawing faces full of fear. And movement effected hair. I really like this page! Though I’m also internally screaming at the characters right now 🙂

Bandit’s expression is SPOT. ON.
And poor Danni, she thought she did well. maybe she can use this false confidence and turn it into real ability (if it doesn’t make her cocky and if Kat can leave things alone).

Talk about a balancing act between those two.

That… That is the face of a deer caught in the headlights.

Aww that’s what I was going to say.

SUSPENSE!!! This is one of my favorite webcomics and I legit love it.

JUST SPEAK, PLEASE, PEOPLE! lol!

Now I want Danni to be the savvy one and see both their facial expressions and be like, okay, what the hey is wrong with both of you?

Smashing that LIKE button!

Love Kat’s expression and body language/pose in panel four, Aneeka! Great job!

Huh… There is something hanging from that cliff. Oh! It is another cliff! And then another from that one. It is cliffs all the way down!

Just think of them as reeeally tall terraces. 😉

LMFAO those two are great. And Danni being pleased with herself is cute.

Hmm, I’m trying to remember. Does Kat know that Bandit is her old friend Jake, or does she just think he’s some random hacker with some decent skills?

She knows who he is. She knew the first time they fought in the Deathmatch.

What she doesn’t know is that he’s in love with her. She probably won’t be able to figure that out until after she realizes that she was somewhat in love with him, and decides whether she still is or not (he’s not going to bother telling her, that’s for sure).

I vote that she decides she can’t be in love with a freaking idiot who continually does things that he rationally should know are terrible ideas, like constantly provoking her when he already knows she might kill him (oh and maybe everyone else too) as a result. Nothing wrong with being terminally interested in winning a Darwin award, but not a great thing to be in love with someone like that.

On the other hand, if being in love was reasonable, it wouldn’t be magical.

She Strongly suspects, but I don’t think that she has had any proof, but it may as well be confirmed as she will keep the idea of Bandit=Jake in mind as a precaution if nothing else.

Do we have any confirmation on “they love each other”? They were pretty much one another’s only friends growing up, it seems reasonable that they would go to these lengths on that basis, with romance being completely irrelevant. Tsun is a bit… and they didn’t have social contact besides each other back then which is also a bit… . I feel as though Jake is not against the idea of romance, but it just isn’t a priority, he has a friend and world(Kleya could fix a lot) to save. Kleya I feel just hasn’t thought about it at all, she has far more pressing things to worry about.

Keep in mind that loving someone and being in love are completely different and only occasionally related. Even people without the basic capacity to love anyone other than themselves fall in love. Fictionally the reverse is also true, but I don’t know that there are a lot of real life examples of people who can’t fall in love, it’s a basic function of higher chordate neurology (humans can’t lack it and have a functional central nervous system). On the other hand about 1% of the human population completely lacks the capacity to love others, with another 10% who are in the severely impaired category, and those people still fall in love (though it often is expressed weirdly and almost always turns out badly).

K loves Jake more than Jake loves her (otherwise he and everyone at Tenka would be dead or worse already), but he is more in love with her than she is with him.

Jake falls into the mildly impaired category, probably mostly as a result of having a screwy life (though K’s life has been way screwier and she’s basically unimpaired when it comes to loving as opposed to being in love).

As to certitude of knowledge, I think that K is confident enough to not require further proof as absolute confirmation could involve hacking to a degree that would possibly endanger Jake and others. She knows it’s him, she doesn’t need to risk killing him to make absolutely sure.

I didn’t want to argue off-topic, but some of those claims are dubious.
>”love” and “in love” are poorly defined. If someone says that they are in love with… say… a webcomic, I’ll believe the statement.
>I believe that someone can lack mental faculties of all sorts and still function. Brains are not about meat, but activity. It is pretty easy to be wired to not use a specific part in a specific way without having a lump of dead or absent flesh. On top of that, mutations can be freaky. Central nervous systems are ridiculous if all you can see is bacteria and I feel that something otherwise identical to a human would be considered human.
>Psychology is a bit of a joke amongst the scientific community. They tend to have tiny sample sizes, weak sample isolation, unreliable testing methodologies, and a questionable flow from hypothesis to theory. I feel that it has reach “better than nothing”, but is still not exactly convincing. Especially when you end up with round figures for your examples…
>K has never demonstrated a desire to kill people, probably. It gets a bit close around certain specific figures, but “Kill the whole of TenKa” seems to be out of character regardless of personal affection towards them. The only threat that they pose is competence, which they don’t seem to have enough of to get her out of their internal systems, far less track down her hiding spot or fry her brain over LifE. Pretty much the whole world would be willing to go back in time to kill Turbo-Hitler if they had the option so TenKa’s attitude really isn’t an issue.

I just don’t feel that Romantic feelings are important to this. The two of them would want to save one another regardless, and would have a boatload of awkwardness regardless. It is certainly possible, it just doesn’t seem to address anything that needs to be addressed. On top of that I dislike forced relationships, and while the term feels far too strong for this situation, the fact that they didn’t really have any alternatives, what with their isolated upbringing and current rivalry, just doesn’t sit entirely comfortably with me. I would prefer it if they were nonromantic towards each other, but it’s not as though it would turn me off of the comic if they were, nor that I can’t see that it is likely. It just remains that I don’t recall any proof that there is anything romantic between them. All I can think of is Dude doing the standard “Ur in lurv” routine.

Somebody had better congratulate Danni in the next 10 seconds.

Lol. Yeah, if Jake doesn’t, that’s basically declaring that he definitely did notice Kat hacking.

So he at least should unfreeze.

I love panel 4 too!!! <3 Also bandit you might wanna blink and say something like congratulate Danni and just quickly move it along XD

That facial expressions in the last panel is PERFECT. Well done

…that last panel… XD

I’m just going to add my voice to the chorus saying that you nailed K’s expression in panel 4. I swear I can see her guilty conscience that panel.

Overall, I think the last panel is also fitting. Jake’s face looks really off and awkward, which makes sense given that he’s terrified, and trying to show anything else.

I suspect that a lot of the plot would short-circuit if he just says, “I’ve been trying to talk to you for ages, Kleya,” next page.

A miss is as good as a smile….

Can I say that it’s both telling and adorable how Kat’s ears are in pretty much all these panels and the previous comics….just like a kitty that knows it’s in trouble.

Even without that, the last few comics and the ones to a bit ahead of this, you’ve gotten really good at making the characters expressive through all sorts of little things and body language.

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 704