{"id":69,"date":"2023-11-19T19:18:01","date_gmt":"2023-11-19T19:18:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/joshtest04.wordpress.com\/2023\/11\/19\/scott-pilgrims-tidy-past\/"},"modified":"2025-05-05T20:21:42","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T19:21:42","slug":"scott-pilgrims-tidy-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/2023\/11\/19\/scott-pilgrims-tidy-past\/","title":{"rendered":"Scott Pilgrim\u2019s Tidy Past"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Spoilers for Scott Pilgrim Takes Off<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Some works remain evocative of a time and place for you, even when the time and place they are set aren\u2019t really all that similar to the circumstances you remember. Such it was for me and Scott Pilgrim<\/em>, which I read on the cusp of the age it concerns, living nowhere with even the slightest similarity to Toronto. I was in fact somewhere between the ages of Scott, a 23-year-old serial moocher, and Knives, his inappropriately young 17-year-old partner with whom he\u2019s kidding himself at the start of the books. It\u2019s a terrible age to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I bought the first three books I was stuck in a rut, studying a terrible Maths degree at a university in a field outside of Coventry. When I bought the final three, I had (possibly for the first time) made a significant life choice that would ultimately change almost everything about me\u200a\u2014\u200anot uncommon, I\u2019m sure, for a 20-year old. I moved, I changed what I was doing, and I started to change how I thought. I bought a guitar, of course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The story of Scott Pilgrim is the story of a young man who crafts grand stories about his achievements and successes, set in a world which makes many of these things cheekily literal. When talking about their school-years romance, band drummer Kim Pine describes how Scott fought his way through a River City Ransom<\/em> scenario, defeating hordes of fellow students in hand-to-hand combat to rescue her. When Scott fells each of Ramona Flowers\u2019 evil ex-boyfriends, they explode into a handful of change commensurate with their social standing. And when Ramona vanishes towards the end of volume 5 and his friends are either too busy or too far away to participate in his heroic pursuit of her, Scott enters something like a period of depression, drifting from place to place and struggling to put his self-image back together. When he does, it\u2019s by recognising that his actions have always depended on and had an impact on others. Rescuing Kim was a great triumph for him, but their relationship always sucked for her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much of the subtlety of Scott Pilgrim<\/em> is lost or muddied in the collective memory because it was omitted from the 2010 Edgar Wright film, Scott Pilgrim vs The World. <\/em>The film was a necessarily condensed retelling that was scripted before the final book was even written, packing six books-worth of plot into a 1h52 runtime. And there is lots of subtlety to be found in the books, despite the bombast and the action and the video game theming\u200a\u2014\u200ait may be hard to imagine now, but at the time the concept of a story being embellished with elements of video gaming was novel and exciting. The film sticks with this world of heightened metaphor, having the climax being Scott approaching the same scene twice, once as the embodiment of heroic love and once as the embodiment of a more mature self-respect. It\u2019s a lot of fun, but it\u2019s less emotionally complex than the long, drawn-out ennui Scott experiences over the final two books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Scott has always assumed that he will be the hero in whatever story he\u2019s living. If he\u2019s dating a high schooler it\u2019s okay because it\u2019s him, even if he\u2019s dating a high schooler. If breaking up with Envy Adams made him feel bad then she must have been at fault, because it\u2019s him and he\u2019s feeling bad. What changes him is the realisation that he was prioritising fighting the evil exes\u200a\u2014\u200aprioritising the story\u200a\u2014\u200aover his actual relationship with Ramona. Ramona\u2019s affection is not determined in a fight between Scott and a bunch of third parties. To reach that place though, he has to go through the breakdown of this assumption of default heroism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I think of the Scott Pilgrim<\/em> books, I think of those passages between volumes 5 and 6 where Scott is at a low ebb, feeling useless, propped up by his parents and failing on his own standards as well as anyone else\u2019s. That\u2019s much how I felt when I was reading them, having notably at one time scored a straight zero on an exam paper. It wasn\u2019t even that I didn\u2019t show up\u200a\u2014\u200aI showed up, sat with the paper in front of me for the mandatory minimum thirty minutes, then left. What was happening, which I didn\u2019t recognise at the time, was that despite whatever aptitude I had for the subject, I didn\u2019t have any affection for it. I didn\u2019t want to learn Maths. I\u2019d just assumed for my whole life that I would. Questions like \u201cWho do I want to like me?\u201d are unanswerable if you\u2019ve always assumed that anyone who knows you will like you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I don\u2019t know if I always viewed myself as the hero in any story, but like most people I viewed myself to some extent as the protagonist, or someone whose job was to fill the role of the protagonist. What changed for me was the realisation that I could choose to do things in my life that I enjoyed. It\u2019s an obvious realisation\u200a\u2014\u200abut everyone has to make it once. With the help of my friends, much like Scott, I did just that. Brian Lee O\u2019Malley has an earlier book, \u2018Lost at Sea\u2019, about a young twenty-something who goes on a road trip with some friends she belatedly realises have invited her along by accident, but has a great time with anyway. O\u2019Malley has a real talent for capturing the young adult mix of absolute confidence and unbearable self-doubt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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All of this is prologue to discussing how Scott Pilgrim<\/em> is back. O\u2019Malley, along with BenDavid Grabinski, has penned an eight-episode follow up series for Netflix, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off<\/em>, that apes the best elements of other legacy sequels like Matrix: Resurrection<\/em> and Rebuild of Evangelion<\/em>. The show starts as a direct adaptation of the books before veering off into an alternate sequence of events where Scott is out of the picture for much of the period of the original plot and Ramona instead is forced to reckon with her wants and responsibilities. Ramona of course was never so much of a fantasist as Scott, and so her story\u200a\u2014\u200awhile goofy, adorable and action-packed\u200a\u2014\u200ais more easily resolved. She apologises to the exes who were unfairly hurt and the others simply find other relationships to obsess over. It\u2019s a breath of fresh air with much in common with Matrix: Resurrections<\/em>\u2019 handling of Trinity, another female character who while she wasn\u2019t underserved in her original appearances was still forced into a particular kind of role by the story having one set hero who wasn\u2019t her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scott has to return of course, and when he does it\u2019s with the gimmick of time travel. Future Scott, a thirty-something with an impressive beard (and a coat he really should have thrown away by now) has hit a rough patch in his relationship with lifelong-love Ramona and decided that the only way to heal his broken heart is to reach into the past and have the relationship never happen at all. It all gets a bit silly from here, with the desire to give Ramona the agency in resolving this plot at odds with the fact that weird, buff, forty-plus Scott is the climactic villain. But the basic idea is sound: what would a character as flawed as Scott be doing in his thirties, if things had gone badly for him? Searching for the fault in his stars is as sound a choice as any. Catastrophising any blip into a grand narrative of failure. The positive side of always seeing yourself as the hero in any story is never seeing yourself as the victim. Future Scott realises\u200a\u2014\u200aor is forced to realise, really\u200a\u2014\u200athat his mistakes are his own doing and not some cosmic contrivance that could have been avoided with the benefit of hindsight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s an interesting approach to the question of what these characters went on to do which avoids\u200a\u2014\u200ato some extent\u200a\u2014\u200athe trap of writing a new dramatic arc with characters who already completed their story the first time round. It\u2019s necessarily unsatisfying if Scott and Ramona actually lived happily ever after. It\u2019s necessarily bleak if it all went wrong for them. The need for conflict in a new story means sequels and revisitations tend towards the latter\u200a\u2014\u200aI\u2019ve heard many complaints about the unkind future Dial of Destiny<\/em> proposed for the character of Indiana Jones, left sad and alone after his many adventures. But neither route obviously leads to a compelling narrative. What\u2019s needed is a new story, which is something that could always really be better tackled with new characters rather than the baggage of old ones. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off <\/em>splits the difference: the future characters are speculations, what-ifs. The present characters have the interiority. Even if all the people who read it have grown up, Scott will always be 23.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For myself, I don\u2019t regret the path my life took to reach the point it\u2019s at now. I hope that\u2019s true in ten years time and I hope that\u2019s true in twenty years time. And selfishly, I\u2019d like to find myself able to revisit Scott Pilgrim and the gang again, if it\u2019s as thoughtful (and funny) as Scott Pilgrim Takes Off<\/em>. But if I don\u2019t it won\u2019t be a big deal. There was a time and a place where Scott Pilgrim<\/em> meant a great deal to me, and while it\u2019s nice to visit it I don\u2019t want to get stuck there. I don\u2019t want to go to war with my younger self, like Scott does. It\u2019s a good lesson, but as with all the lessons Scott Pilgrim<\/em> has to offer it\u2019s sure to feel straightforward in retrospect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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If you appreciate my writing, watch my new video essay The Fanatic<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, available now with a short companion essay kindly published by Blood Knife. If you\u2019re after more text, please follow me on Medium<\/a> or subscribe to my Letterboxd<\/em><\/a> reviews.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spoilers for Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. Some works remain evocative of a time and place for you, even when the time and place they are set aren\u2019t really all that similar to the circumstances you remember. Such it was for me and Scott Pilgrim, which I read on the cusp of the age it concerns, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":1,"footnotes":""},"categories":[94,96],"tags":[12,45,92,93,52],"class_list":["post-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article","category-media-criticism","tag-comics","tag-media-criticism","tag-scott-pilgrim","tag-scott-pilgrim-takes-off","tag-television"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions\/103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}