Kaylin knows a bit about mental health, from her own experience and her memories of Kevin. To snap out of something just by being ordered to is similar to brainwashing and or hypnotic suggestion, which in reality, not that much of sure thing, but in a video game, can be a lot more potent. Now, while it should be pretty bad, we also don’t know yet what would require such a crazy method of “treatment”.
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Panic attack. Had them before and they are not nice.
Sena reminds me of some individuals I’ve met, whose self esteem is so broken by abusers/bullies they automatically assign fault to themselves for every little perceived potential inconvenience to others. Sometimes these people are very resistant to anyone telling them they were in the right even, refusing to accept any encouragement, no matter how justified from an outside perspective. It’s, troublesome and sad… I’m often at a loss when interacting with such people, trying my best to convince them think better of themselves, but there’s only so much I can do as an outside acquaintance. There’s only so much I can say before it becomes counterproductive, but it’s never enough.
A key difference with Sena however seems to be an extra layer of uncanny obedience, as the description discusses.
The last couple of pages with *did* show that there’s some Past History™ between Aiya, Sena, and Kaala, and that Sena more or less willingly underwent whatever mental conditioning put her in this servile role. We may or may not ever find out exactly what it is.
Though, one thing to keep in mind: this is a reality based on a video game. For all we know, there ARE no negative side effects to Sena’s conditioning.
And maybe, if she can ever (presumably) forgive herself for the Noodle Incident™ (check it on TV Tropes if you’re not familiar) then the conditioning can be lifted or removed or whatever.
Considering that this IS a video game, and that Sena is an NPC, She would theoretically be AI driven. So even if the outer program glitches into the panic attack, the underlying code was still active. Nyna’s order would have activated the basic programing “resetting” the outer glitch.
Sorry for the text wall, been following your comic for over a year now, but first comment.
…Did you miss the actual wall of text that got posted 45 minutes before your post?
You’re fine, they’re fine, and honestly, so long as it’s a friendly discussion on the topic of the comic, I doubt anyone’s going to mind a few walls.
That said, it looks more like a quirk of Sena’s personality than a oddity of her NPC status, as if it was just a general NPC thing, I suspect we’d see it a fair bit more – especially given that, among all the people we’ve seen in this comic, there are about 3 people that aren’t NPCs (if you don’t count spaceman’s friends that barely got any screentime).
starting to wonder if Sena is an homonculus or other sort of artificial being
Aren’t almost all of them technically artificial beings?
…true
What do you mean almost?? The way I see it Kaylin was created by the world change as much as any of the NPC’s were, and Callum isn’t the original Callum but only a simulacrum of some sort.
Ok mr person correcting the person who writes the story! You must be right about the Callum thing even though there is no evidence and I say it’s not true!