‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 816

...probably a good time to start running.

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Oof, yeah, can see why The Dude may have an issue with robots; especially since he was probably blamed by the others or the surviving family of the others for bringing them to Ground Zero of an automated mech hack attack.

Having survived that, getting under The Bandit’s skin must seem super easy mode to him.

A whole bunch of mechas (which likely shouldn’t still exist in the first place!), starting to be activated while there’s a convenient interruption to the camera feeds for The Game – something’s definitely afoot, and possibly connected to Snowman’s group.

Maybe Kleya isn’t the only former member of Deconstruct.Me who’s still around – but whereas she’s trying to “be good”, they have other intentions entirely.

In which case, there’s a small possibility there may be a “Help me, you’re my only hope!” moment, since if Snowman’s group have a backdoor to Tenka’s systems, D is ideally placed to find, counter and maybe even reverse any potentially destructive actions they seek if directed to do so…

Definitely a strong direction to take a story: the repentant protagonist has to fight against former allies in order to repair some of the consequences of what they started. The only thing is that Kleya isn’t really “repentant”. She isn’t looking to fix things, but rather to start over and do it better this time. And I think this is a really key part of her character, that she’s determined to do things perfectly or not at all. I don’t think it would even occur to her to try to leverage the flaws in her history to make things better now, because she sees everything about the person she used to be as evil, and does her best to dissociate her current persona as completely as she can.

I believe there’s definitely going to come a point where she’s forced into facing and fighting the things she was involved in, but I really doubt it’s going to be voluntary, because she doesn’t see redemption as a possibility. When that confrontation comes, she’ll be trying just as hard to hide her identity as she is now.

I think this is a flashback to Dude’s experiences in the past, which ties into WHY he’s freaking out about tech/AI stuff not acting like it’s supposed to.

I think this is a flashback. Explaining why Brandon is taking the Game weirdness poorly and answering his backstory with mechs.

This is definitely a flashback. Brandon is freaking out because the game weirdness is reminding him of something terrible that previously happened that was preceded by similar weirdness. The square text bubbles are Brandon’s current thoughts (or possibly words if he’s saying them out loud).

A lot of the stuff, like all of it, that happened was blamed on Kleya.
I think a lot of it, especially most of the really bad stuff, was another group entirely.
Kleya doesn’t even realize this, or at least not all of it, and if she did, she wouldn’t accept it because she blames what happened to her mom on herself, and it’s not like there was any real investigation, much less something she was a part of.
I suspect Deconstruct.Me was the organization that actually did the really bad stuff.
Of course who that is, we don’t know.
How much Tenka was a part of it, we don’t know either, but there’s no way I’d think they didn’t have their sticky little fingers in that mess somewhere, especially how they came out far better than anyone else, even if the public going on a rampage and murdering most of the programmers happened. (I don’t think Tenka wanted that, at least not for their programmers, so it hurt them as well.)
At the very least Tenka knew about things that were going on, and had at least some preparations ready.

Of course this is all speculation and wild guesswork, and I can’t wait to find out if I’m anywhere near correct on these things. 😀

I have a sneaking suspicion (yet to be confirmed in any way by Aneeka) that after the assault on Kleya’s family, Kleya went after the perpetrators to recover her family/get revenge. However, while she was doing that, Deconstruct Me started causing a butt-load of grief elsewhere and, because Kleya was so open about what she was doing, she copped the blame for everything DM was doing too (possibly because DM claimed that they were responsible for what Kleya was doing… even though they had had no part in it).

It’s clear that there’s more than one person talking, but it’s not entirely clear who is saying what? Say, wouldn’t it be simple to give the speech bubbles different hues, akin to whisper bubbles but with arbitrary colors?

I thought the same thing.

It’s clear there’s multiple people talking. I’m assuming two. Hues would make a very good way of showing who’s saying what, maybe connecting them to their game character colors, where applicable.

I don’t think it particularly matters, since the only one getting out of here is Dude, and this scene is probably about to end brutally.

Maybe it doesn’t matter who was talking: it’s all in the past and the speakers are all dead…

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 816