Scott Pilgrim Versus 2023

It's time to face the music, Mr. Pilgrim.

Recently as of this writing, a strange animated hybrid of remake, re-imagining, follow-up, and remastered edition of the cult indie comic, Scott Pilgrim, was released on Netflix under the title Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. Reception to the project has been, as everything seems to be these days, divisive.

While there is universal agreement that the series certainly looks like what one would expect a modern, big-budget, animated adaptation of the comics would and should look like, it's drawn both compliments and condemnation from disparate parties for expanding the roles of several female side-characters, which in turn supposedly reduces Scott's part in his own story. Whether or not this is true, I can't say - I haven't seen the series yet, and, given my busy schedule, I can't say when I'll have the chance, as much as I'd like to, but I can say that, from everything I've seen, there is a significant increase in the screen-time devoted to several secondary characters - both female and male. This wouldn't a bad thing, if handled correctly. I've seen hardcore fans of the comics - purists, if you will - complain that the series left a lot of the original comic material on the cutting room floor to add these new scenes in, and I've heard more than one complaint from both hardcore fans and casual viewers alike that the over-arching meta-narrative that involves time travel is a bit much and probably could have been hemmed, if not outright dropped, to include more from the comics.

This character appears on one of the the cover designs for Volume 4 and never appears in the movie or animated series.

Given the history of Scott Pilgrim, this split in consensus isn't exactly surprising. For as long as it's existed, this simple story of a Canadian 20-something manchild has maintained a deeply divisive place in the zeitgeist of pop culture. One of the most impressive things about the various pieces of Scott Pilgrim media, whether it be the comics, the 2010 film directed by Edgar Wright of the Cornetto Trilogy fame¹, or this new animated series, is the fact that almost no one I've ever met or seen that's engaged with the story has ever just had a lukewarm opinion on it. The story of Scott Pilgrim is one that you love, one that you hate, or, in some cases, one that you hate to love or love to hate. There's a reason that, twenty years after the publication of the first comic in 2004, the series is still being talked about.

Twenty years may not sound like all that much time in the grand scheme of things, but, as I've said many times on this publication before - we often forget just how radically things have shifted in the broader culture just over the past few years, let alone the past two decades.

Scott Pilgrim is a story that is firmly rooted in the underground indie scene of early 2000's Toronto and steeped in the iconography and aesthetic of Western nerd culture of the time. The Canada of 2004 and today are two very different places, politically, economically, and demographically. I mean, I feel like Justin Trudeau has been the prime minister of the country for so long at this point I almost forgot there was a time when he wasn't until I saw this picture.

Can any Canadians in the audience tell me why Paul Martin looks like a child that’s in mortal terror of getting their ass beat by an angry parent in every photo I saw of him?

Nerd culture in the West, in that same span of time, has mutated into an unrecognizable, grotesque parody if itself that looks like a Funko Pop crafted from cancerous tumor flesh. It isn’t even a different country; it’s changed so much that the scene might as well be a different fucking galaxy.

Keep in mind, in 2004, the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films were only two movies in and the peak of superhero cinema. Iron Man, Captain America, and the dominance of Marvel in Hollywood wasn't even a pipe dream at that point. The Star Wars Prequel Trilogy had yet to wrap, any anime and manga that wasn't Pokemon or Sailor Moon were still extremely niche, video games were still for dorks, and table-top roleplaying games were still strictly the domain of neckbeards, basement dwellers, and virginal manchildren.

The story of Scott Pilgrim was a story about an eccentric outsider made by an eccentric outsider for a community of eccentric outsiders - a far cry from the nerd culture of the 2020's, where the Venn Diagram of nerd culture and pop culture is almost a perfect circle, and is mostly constituted of slavish, unthinking devotion and worship of three or four immensely popular intellectual properties and a revolving carousel of lesser ones that come in and out of fashion. Not to belabor the point, but Scott Pilgrim takes place in a time where being a geek was not exactly considered the badge of honor many consider it to be today, and that's reflected in the series’ rather self-effacing and often self-aware sense of humor, which in turn betrays some deep-seated insecurities of the author. But, pin that to a corkboard for now - we'll touch on it soon.

That intrinsic connection to that time in place is, in my opinion, a boon, as the setting and culture around it lends the story some of its charm. But, despite that deep sense of setting, the story of Scott Pilgrim is one that feels equally timeless. It's difficult to say why, exactly. I suspect it's because, in a lot of ways, for as radically different as society is today as it was in 2004, there's just as many similarities. Many of the problems in the Western anglosphere then are the same problems we face now, and most of them are as bad as they’ve ever been in most people’s living memory.

The sense of purposelessness, confusion, neurotic insecurity, and general malaise that defined the members of the late Gen-Xer outsider scene that populate the story of Scott Pilgrim were inherited by an even larger contingent of Millennials as they came of age. Now, those same issues seem to be crippling a vast majority of the Zoomers of Gen Z as they enter their 20's. I also suspect that, even more than that, the thematic contents of the story are universal in a way that I think make it something of a modern monomyth.

The challenges faced by the character of Scott Pilgrim are those faced by almost every young man in the West as he matures through that awkward stage where you're too much of a child to act like a real adult and take on those responsibilities, but too old to be acting with the flippant irreverence of a teenager, and too stubborn to commit to putting in the work to change.

Even more pertinent today, though Scott has relationships behind him and multiple girls chasing him during the course of it, plenty of nominal friends, and a greater community of like-minded geeks, losers, and underachievers around him, there's still a haplessness to his character and a sense of isolation and disconnection that never makes him seem like someone who isn't lonely.

The comic literally opens with a dream in which he languishes in a desert, lamenting just how alone he is.

Scott is awkward and impulsive and has a problem of speaking without considering how others might take what he says - even when he means well or he has good intentions, he can sound insensitive, callous, or outright rude despite not intending to be, all because he can't always articulate his thoughts or simply doesn't take the time to, whether it be out of excitement, impatience, or he just doesn't care enough to. Often times when he's talking to others, he seems to be speaking past people rather than with them. Like, even though they’re speaking the same language, neither party really understands what the other is saying, and there’s some communication barrier that makes meaningful connection difficult if not impossible.

As someone who's brain moves much, much faster than their mouth, this is one of the qualities that makes Scott such a relatable protagonist. And, yes, I know he’s not really supposed to be someone you want to relate to, but… again, we’ll get to it. I can't tell you how many times I said something that I thought was funny or meant as a joke or even just an innocuous comment, only for someone to take it completely the wrong way and accuse me of malice when I intended anything but. I think this is something a lot of young men - especially awkward, insecure, and immature young men who grew up without strong male role models still coming into their own - feel acutely. The cultural zeitgeist was charged and uncomfortably tense when I was Scott Pilgrim’s age, but in 2023, the panopticon of social media and the ubiquitous presence of cameras make someone with lackluster social skills making their way through a social setting of their peers less like an inconvenient struggle and more like navigating a minefield. I’m sure more than a few young men today can relate to Scott opening his mouth to make a joke, just to have everyone around him dogpile on him.

I might be getting a little ahead of myself.

If you've never read the comics or seen the movie or you're just generally unfamiliar with the general premise… well, you really should at least watch the movie. But, here's the basic run-down: Scott Pilgrim is a resident of Toronto, aimlessly drifting through his early 20's circa the early 2000’s. He's chronically unemployed save for playing bass in a middling indie rock/punk band with people who he says are his friends, but they don’t really act like it. His only real friend seems to be his gay and possibly alcoholic roommate, Wallace, who's played so well by Kieran McCaulkin in the film that his scenes are easily some of the best it has to offer.

Scott is in a loveless rebound relationship with a 17-year old Asian girl nicknamed Knives. Even though Knives adores Scott, he regards her as little more than a novelty and keeps her at arm's length. And, yes - we will touch on the seventeen part again shortly. Before her, he dated a girl named Natalie - later calling herself Envy - who would go on to become a pop star after she unexpectedly and quite brutally dumped Scott. In the film, she's actually played by none other than…

Brie Larson Jumpscare!

Fitting that she plays a raging bitch. Or… does she? Again - we'll touch on it.

And, look - I know Brie Larson's not the most endearing woman in the world, but, ah… well, a lot of guys who take umbrage with her in the Marvel movies say she's not a good looking woman, but… yeah. Nah. Not true.

Which I think segues nicely into the girl at the center of Scott's tale. Scott's hum-drum, mediocre, listless drift through life comes to a sudden, screeching halt when he attends a house party and meets… her.

Oh, sweet Jesus - her. Ramona Flowers. Look. I won’t lie to you. I’m weird when it comes to women. I’ve always been weird about it. I have a type. 99.8% of Hollywood actresses don’t even come close to meeting it. I’ve always felt like something of an odd man out whenever my friends talk about women, because they’ll be going nuts over some famous chick and I’ll just be like…

“I dunno, man, she seems like she’s got a lot of… plastic.”

I’ve always been like that. But, when it came to Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Ramona Flowers…

Well, you can call me Homer, ‘cuz… I'm ‘boutta simp, son. I was, like, fourteen, maybe fifteen when this movie came out, and, I'll admit, I was what could generously be called a late bloomer, I could not have cared less about girls at the time, and still - still - I would have dragged my bare ass across a football field of broken glass just to hear Mary Elizabeth Winstead cough through a walkie-talkie in a hurricane. And pay for it.

Just looking at that gif makes me feel like…

Yearn.jpg

And, yeah, okay, maybe she's a little plain - I know some people will say she's mid, which, you're wrong, but… I dunno, man. Mid is, as the kids say, gas.

I don't actually know what that means but I think it means that plain but cute girls are my Achilles Heel. Either that or it has something to do with weed. I don’t smoke weed so, I dunno. And I'm not even a guy who really digs dyed hair colors. That's never done anything for me, but -

Ough… g-guys, I… I don't feel so good. I just… I think - I think I need a second. Just… just a moment.

Dame da fucking kill me already.

Hopefully you also totally understand why Scott Pilgrim would willingly do battle with seven of her “evil exes” to get to date her. You probably don't, and that's fine, but I do.

That’s the basic conceit of the entire series - Scott must defeat seven quote-unquote evil exes from Ramona’s past in order to date her, because she’s been such a shitty girlfriend that her exes literally unionized and created a fucking Legion of Doom to make sure that her love-life is permanently terrible.

What a prize?

Yes, one is a girl. She had a phase.

Again - if that smacks of troublesome to you, shelve it for now. We’ll get to it.

Befitting of Scott’s love of video games and the puerile, juvenile trappings of Western nerd culture, the whole affair comes off as very… video game-y. Each of the Evil Exes are fought individually, like boss fights at the end of levels, and conveniently appear without much explanation. Everyone seemingly has mystical powers or is a ninja without much explanation and you’re just kind of expected to nod and say, Alright. And, really, it’s not that difficult to. It’s kind of one of those turn your brain off and don’t think about it too hard type of things. It’s a fun, easy, charming, and relatively simple story about a guy who wants a girl and has to sack up and change his life for the better to do it.

So… what’s the problem, then?

Well, the story of Scott Pilgrim is… flawed. Deeply so. Like the protagonist, it can be charming. It can be annoying. It can be insightful, and it can be shallow. It can be both profound and puerile. It’s both self-aware and stunningly not, all at once. It is a series of contradictions, and I can’t help but love it. As I said, for better or worse, Scott Pilgrim as a character is one that almost any guy who was lost and confused in his early twenties can relate with.

But is that really a reason for it to remain so controversial all these years later? Well, let's look at some of Mr. Pilgrim's most dogged issues that have haunted him well into the murky mire of modernity.

Scott Pilgrim Versus the Longhouse

Edgar Wright’s film adaptation of Scott Pilgrim released in 2010. Only one scant year before, the entirety of Western nerd culture was irrevocably altered when the YouTube channel, Feminist Frequency, debuted, featuring bite-sized feminist think-pieces by Canadian blogger, activist, and professional agitator, Anita Sarkeesian.

I want to keep this as brief as possible, as just the name Sarkeesian is tantamount to lighting up a cigarette while standing in a puddle of gasoline. This isn’t the time or place to get into the dumpster fire that was GamerGate and the Feminist Revolution of the Video Game Space. I really do not have the patience to get into that now, though, one day, I dread that I might have to; I like to think that we all just kind of lived through it and, at the very least, were vaguely aware of the events that unfolded, but as time continues to march on, I realize there were young men now who were raised in the aftermath of Feminist Frequency and GamerGate that were still learning to spell there names when it happened.

Suffice to say, there’s a reason that the very name of Anita Sarkeesian raises hackles. There’s an entire generation that have come of age in a world that this woman helped define and will never know what they missed. And what they missed was a time where you just didn’t have to think about politics all. The fucking. Time.

One of Sarkeesian’s first videos was on the inherent sexism of the Super Mario franchise. If you have two brain-cells, you can fill in the blanks without my help. The damsel in distress trope - it’s sexist. Princess Peach is just a sex object, or something. A prize to be fought over by men who don’t consider her agency. These days, it’s all old hat; a horse that’s been effectively beaten into glue, which in turn has been sniffed by every mouth-breathing idiot on the American west coast who still buy into that kind of nonsense, because, yes, it is extremely foolish to read that deeply into the Bing Bing Wahoo Italian plumber games that basically have no story.

But, again - we’re not here for that. The critical feminist lens of analysis that Sarkeesian was using to examine the quote-unquote sexist undertones of Mario was soon applied to fucking everything. Unfortunately, there’s still no shortage of people still doing this with every piece of media under the sun. But, what’s pertinent to our discussion is that the wrathful eye of the internet pop feminists would inevitably fall upon Scott Pilgrim. If it weren’t for the movie coming out when it did, it would have happened anyways; the story is one steeped in retro video game iconography and inside jokes and the series a lynchpin of the indie comic scene, and since that culture was in the midst of an outright color revolution, it just wasn’t going to slip by unnoticed forever.

Obviously, if an Italian plumber can get be problematic for rescuing a princess from a giant turtle, you can imagine just how problematic the character of Scott Pilgrim was. Ramona is a damsel in distress. Scott must liberate her from her seven evil exes. She’s more or less a pawn to be fought over by eight guys (and one girl). He’s very sexist. Boo. Very bad. Thumbs down.

Whatever.

There’s more legitimate merit to the complaints that Scott is dating a seventeen year old at the beginning of the story. This is a pretty thorny topic, especially in a day and age where grooming is one of the hot button issues du jour and it seems like every private Discord server is practically writhing with maladjusted sexual deviants ready to lay the moves on minors. As single, unmarried, and viciously bitter Millennial women increasingly progress into their middle age, and men of the same age are increasingly dating younger women in their early twenties, a lot of to-do is being made in the mainstream about age gaps in adult dating. I am not kidding when I say I’ve seen think-pieces that say a thirty year old dating a twenty-four year old is, somehow, illicit and immoral and on the same level of repugnant as an actual, legitimate child predator. How severe the infection of shit-idiot-brain-fungus you have to have to believe that is beyond me.

It seems that, to most of the women who tragically have this condition, any man roughly their age dating any woman that’s younger than whatever age they currently are is grounds for being a cradle-chasing sex fiend that should be jailed. Oh, unless it’s a fifty-something year old woman chasing a twenty two year old guy - then that’s just fine. It’s called being a cougar, not a predator, don’t you know?

Anyways, I’d also reiterate that, in the story, Knives is seventeen.

And I dunno how old Ellen Wong was when the movie came out, but she sure as shit doesn’t look seventeen.

Not twelve, not thirteen, but seventeen. At the beginning of the story, Scott is twenty-two. The age gap is only four years. Though the details differ from state to state, most have Romeo and Juliet laws, which exist specifically to keep an eighteen year old from going to jail for being in a relationship with a seventeen year old, because I think we can all agree that’s ridiculous. Hell, when I was twenty-one, I was dating a seventeen year old. We went to high school together. We had classes together. Call me crazy - I just think that’s a whole lot different than someone who’s thirty plus going after someone who hasn’t even finished puberty.

If it sounds like I’m defending this plot point - I’m really not. At least, not in the way it might sound like I am. I think the discourse surrounding it is overblown, since, if these people had a single ounce of reading comprehension, they’d see that the author is very explicit about Scott and Knives’ relationship being categorically bad for both of them.

Scott’s not dating Knives because he loves her. He only begins dating her after Natalie breaks up with him, and it’s painfully obvious that she’s a rebound that Scott humors simply to avoid being alone. We'll get more into this in the next section, but “alone” is simply something Scott cannot be.

He’s dating her because she’s there, she’s available, she likes him, and she’s easy. Not sexually easy - just unthreatening. Uncomplicated. Not difficult to please.

I will say that, when it came to my relationship, I wasn’t with her because she was just there, or available, or showed me attention when no one else would. Trust me, at that time, if availability and attention was the one criteria I was looking for, I had my pick of the litter, but I legitimately did really like this girl. Much more than all the other options I had to pick from at the time. We’d been friends for years when we started dating.

But… but…

Here’s the thing - having been a listless, confused twenty-something drifting aimlessly through life with no clear goals or ambitions and dating a seventeen year old, I can tell you that it’s easy to get comfortable with them. They aren’t challenging. They won’t push you - not in any meaningful ways. These girls are young, inexperienced, impressionable, idealistic, and still figuring themselves out. They have very little history behind them, so their expectations in a partner are staggeringly low. They don’t like to push you out of your comfort zone. They’re hesitant to test boundaries. I’m telling you, you will never have a more devoted and selfless partner than a seventeen year old girl who’s just coming into her own. She will do a lot of things for your benefit at her own expense, and, being an over-grown manchild, you will not appreciate them as you should. In fact, in a way, you’ll come to just kind of just… expect it. Like you’re entitled to it. Not just from her, but from future partners as well, which causes trouble when you inevitably start dating girls your own age with more experience who’ve got a totally different set of expectations from a boyfriend.

And even if you if you are seriously dating them with the intention to stay for the long-haul, given enough time, they go from seventeen to twenty-two, and they begin to cotton on that you aren’t exactly pulling your weight and they’ve been picking up the slack for your short-comings for a long time. It’s just another symptom of being a manchild stuck in perpetual adolescence - everyone else will continue to grow and change and mature, while you remain in emotional stasis. One side of the relationship should never have to shoulder the majority of the emotional burden, and taking it on is only complicated when the that individual is a girl who’s just as confused and about her own life as you are, and trying to sort out her own shit, just to be taking on the emotional baggage of a (slightly) older guy who should really be mature enough to start doing it himself.

There’s a reason why people think that Scott is a loser for being in a relationship with Knives - because he is. He’s not really even in a relationship with her so much as he’s using her. There’s also a reason why Knives tries to kill Scott multiple times after they break up - because he really does her dirty.

Which brings us to…

Scott Pilgrim Versus Himself

Simply put, Scott Pilgrim is not a good person. People act as if this is some great revelation when it’s brought up in discourse, but it really isn’t. But, again - anyone who’s making a cow about this series being some sort of sexist incel fantasy has the reading comprehension of a lobotomized chimp, and doesn’t seem to understand that there is a difference between being not good and actively bad.

He’s not actively malicious. He’s not an evil person. But he’s not really a scrupled, principled person, either. His biggest sins are intrinsically tied to one another - he’s immature, and he’s inconsiderate. He's inconsiderate because he's immature, and he's immature because he's inconsiderate. It’s not that he’s going out of his way to fuck anyone over… he just doesn’t really care what happens to anyone else, so long as he’s fine in the end.

Well, you weren’t the one I fucked over, so why do you care about it? Says the man wholly unaware that anyone with any sense knows that, if you cheat on someone with them, you’re not above cheating on them with someone else.

And that lack of empathy, emotional awareness, and inability to take responsibilities for his actions stems from a simple refusal to grow up. Scott is the prototypical manchild; chronically unemployed, mooching off his friends, chasing some pipe-dream to work in the music industry despite not being particularly driven, talented, or even all that dedicated to it, but more out of a lack of more concrete ambitions. He has a chronic inability to take things seriously and is always papering over his fuck ups, mistakes, and sleights against others with jokes with the naive hope that a good joke can diffuse a tense situation.

He’s co-dependent to a fault, always leaning on romantic partners in order to export his own emotional load onto them and leave them to process it for him. That's one of the reasons he's so co-dependent - he literally cannot handle his own emotions, and needs someone else to parse them out for him. He’s so emotionally illiterate that you wonder if he even could process his feelings if he actually sat down and tried. And, to be perfectly, brutally candid for a moment, if there’s anything I’ve ever felt more acutely before in a fictional character - it would be that.

Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt and had it signed.

No, I was not a happy person in my early twenties, thank you for asking. I got better, though. Honest.

Even though he spends most of his time around other people, you get the feeling that he isn’t with them because he really wants to be so much as he’s so profoundly, deeply afraid of being by himself with his own thoughts that he hangs around them just to have background noise to keeps himself stimulated and occupied. Whenever he is alone, he’s seen playing video games, or engaging in some other trivial distraction to drown out the sound of his own thoughts.

When Scott’s ex-girlfriend, Natalie, is introduced to the narrative, she’s pitched as this raging, narcissistic, vindictive bitch that has it out for Scott for a laundry list of minor offensives. He casts himself as a faultless victim being antagonized by a treacherous, petty, and vindictive woman. When the two begin to mend bridges, however, it becomes explicitly clear that Scott’s recollection of their relationship - and the reason it ended - is vastly different from reality.

In reality, Scott was a piss poor boyfriend. It’s heavily implied that he was constantly and casually belittling her without really even thinking about how she might take his comments, and the reason she became so vain and bitchy and reinventing herself as a narcissistic pop star was as a coping mechanism was largely to build herself back up after being torn down so many times by Scott’s callous disregard for her emotional well-being.

With Knives, Scott does much the same thing. While Scott is the object of her adoration, to Scott, Knives is pretty much a passing novelty and just there to fill the space left behind by Natalie. It often doesn’t even seem like he really sees her as a person with agency or ambition of her own, she’s just kind of there to be along for the ride with him, and, Knives, being young and idealistic, doesn’t see anything wrong with that. In a lot of ways, Knives is what I like to call an emotional tampon for Scott. She’s there to soak up his excess emotion, but, whenever the tables are reversed, and she needs something from him…

When Ramona enters the picture, he literally forgets about Knives until Wallace reminds him that he’s gonna have to break up with her. But, being unwilling to take on the emotional discomfort of doing that, he continues to string her along, avoid her, and goes so far as to cheat on her with Ramona before Knives finally has enough and snaps.

It isn’t really until the introduction of the character of Lisa in Volume 4, and a presented opportunity to throw away Ramona as he did Knives to pursue an unrealized high school crush, that Scott finally seems to have the epiphany that he actually, y’know, like likes Ramona rather than just like, and that cheating on her would have disasterous consequences. He realizes that, yes, Ramona would leave him, and that would suck, but, also… Ramona would be needlessly hurt, and that in and of itself would be the worst part of it.

Lisa doesn’t even appear in the movie or the new series, which really is a huge loss, since her subplot is one of the big turning moments for Scott as a character, and probably one of the reasons that Scott in the movie feels a lot less developed than Scott in the comic.

Even in his relationship with Ramona, despite it being clear that he truly does love her in a way he never did Knives and wasn't mature enough to with Natalie or Lisa, the subject of miscommunication and talking past each other continues to arise. Much later in the series, their relationship begins deteriorates due to miscommunication and Scott's emotional illiteracy, and he is wholly clueless as to why, and still too emotionally stunted to commit to the introspection and self-reflection necessary to piece together why. There’s a degree of blame to be placed on Ramona’s shoulders - later, she admits that she was too stubborn to just confront him about the issues herself, and that she should have been more open with him. But, still, if Scott had an iota of emotional awareness himself, he would have noticed that Ramona growing distant and cold. But he didn't, because he was content with things as they were, and it never occured to him that she might not be.

I can’t stress enough that Scott isn’t a bad person out of malice. He’s a bad person because he’s short-sighted. He doesn’t mean to hurt people, but he doesn’t even seem to comprehend his actions can hurt people half the time.

In some small sense, he knows this isn't right, to some degree. The reason I think Scott is afraid to be alone with himself is because, despite a confidently unconfident exterior, he harbors a fear that he really is the aimless, selfish, leech that some others think he is.

A lot of criticism leveled at the series is simply that Scott is a shitty person. That’s where it begins and ends - I don’t like the comics because Scott is a turd. At the beginning of the series, he can actually be kind of difficult to like, at times. In fact, I’d say that the reason it’s pretty easy to dislike him when so many people can see some of the worst elements of their personality or worst inclinations reflected in him. Relating with a guy who displays unfavorable qualities about yourself is uncomfortable for some people. Personally, I see enough of the person I used to be when I was 22 in Scott. But, at the same time… well, you live, you learn, you change, and you get better if you’re willing to put the effort in. That’s the entire crux of Scott Pilgrim’s story - self-betterment. And anyone who discards the entire narrative because Scott starts off as a less-than-stellar human being is having the point sail clean over their heads.

Let me give you the TL;DR - Scott is, ultimately, the archetype of the 21st century man-child; unable to understand himself and his place in the world, unwilling to even try to figure it out, too lazy to put in the effort to change, and cripplingly myopic, unable to see beyond his own nose and turning to insular hobbies like video games to self-medicate and fill the ever-growing hole in his soul that grows like a fissure as the rest of the world continues to move and he remains stuck in place.

But he gets better. He learns. He grows. He matures. Not to spoil anything, but as grim as the later volumes of the comic get, it still ends on a high note. There’s hope for Scott - there’s hope for us all. It’s this little thing in fiction that we in the business call character development. Characters change. In fact, it’s kinda what makes stories and fiction so much fun. We get catharsis from watching fictional characters overcome their problems and, in a way, find some strength to believe that we, too, can do the same in our own lives. That maybe you, awkward manchild, can also grow a pair and get your very own Ramona Flowers - hopefully without having to engage in mortal combat with her exes.

Yet, still, I’ve seen a lot of people who say that the series is not good or worth engaging with because Scott starts off as a shitty person. And it doesn’t matter that he develops, changes, rights his wrongs as best he can, and basically grows up and learns what it actually means to take responsibility in his life for once.

Doesn’t matter. He was a shitty person - no need for further conversation. Send Mr. Pilgrim to the wrong-think gulag, please. Forever. People cannot change. They cannot be forgiven. They cannot pass go and they will not collect $200.

His girlfriend, however…

Ramona Flowers Versus Double-Standards

Ramona Flowers is a character worthy of her own write-up and critical analysis.

Like Scott, she’s a likeable, charming, but very flawed character with some rough edges. Outrageous as this may sound, I actually think that she may be one of the most important and influential fictional characters of the 21st century so far.

Yes. Really.

And, no - I’m not just simping for Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Forget her for a moment.

I’m completely serious.

But we’ll have that discussion another time.

For right now, though, let’s just say that Scott may not be an outstanding individual with a sterling past, but Ramona… well, Ramona isn’t a saint herself. I mean, just the concept of having to fight a gaggle of former romantic partners for the dubious honor of getting a hot blue-haired alt/indie girlfriend in and of itself is… well, this term gets thrown around so much by a certain type of person that I half use it in jest, but that’s a toxic relationship if there ever was one. It really brings the word simp to a new level. I mean, people give Scott shit for exporting his emotional agency onto Ramona - and rightfully so - but isn’t it a bit fucked up that he literally has to do fisticuffs with her exes? Is that not Ramona exporting her emotional trauma onto him to have him process it? Just saying, if the problems with Scott can be overthought, so can the problems with Ramona. And, if a lot of people love to hate Scott… I hate to love Ramona.

When she first meets Scott, she’s a recent transplant from New York to Toronto who effectively left the United States to start over and make a clean break from her tumultuous past. Sounds extreme? Well, throughout the course of the series why her exes created a whole fucking league of super-villains. And it ain't because she was winning any trad-wife of the year awards. Yes, most of her exes are generally just… kind of dicks, but, at the same time, I’d say the same thing I say to anyone who complains about their exes too much - you still chose to go out with them. In a world where agency and consent are considered paramount, it always seems strange to me that, somehow, many people expect to be treated as faultless victims when it comes to their choice in partners when no one ever put a gun to their head and made them go out with that person, or stay with them. Physical abuse not withstanding. The old saying goes, When someone tells you who they are, believe them. I know it's easier said than done, but if your significant other reveals themself to be a shitty person, or even just a less than ideal match - the onus is on you to leave them and find someone who isn't. If you willingly hang around, well… that one's on you, pal.

And, look - there’s no shame in picking a bad partner. We’ve all done it. The good Lord knows that I have made some spectacularly poor choices in that department. Often times, what I think is simple eccentricity in a girl is actually debilitating mental illness. As I’ve said many times… I have a type. And it’s probably why I would have fallen for an actual Ramona Flowers many times over in my younger years despite her having enough red flags to decorate a Chinese military parade. And if actually she looked like Mary Elizabeth Winstead…

You know she’s gonna be a trainwreck but god damn it you still gotta buy a ticket to ride.

But, choosing a significant other is a big fuckin’ deal, more than anyone in today’s hook-up poisoned culture wants to admit, and the success to failure rate is dismal. And that's being charitable. When a test has a fail-rate of 90%, it’s okay to admit that you reached for an apple and pulled down a hand grenade, because, clearly, almost everyone else is fumbling their own bags, too. But, for a society that puts so much emphasis on agency… we sure do put just as much emphasis on exporting the blame for poor romantic decisions to literally everyone who isn’t ourselves, a lot of the time.

But, even if her exes are dicks, most of Ramona’s previous lovers are still not without valid grievances in most cases. This bitch sucked and fucked a mile-wide path between Ontario and New York and left a trail of destruction and shattered hearts in her wake. She admits to only ever having dated the first “evil ex” because he kept away other potential suitors she wasn’t interested in, even though she wasn’t terribly interested in him, either. The second, she admits to having only gone out with because he asked her out ninety-six times (yes, she kept count) and she wanted him to stop, so, instead of doing the logical thing and just, y’know… doing that, she strung him along until someone else caught her fancy and she cheated on him. She cheated with one guy by fucking his twin brother. Without telling either of them. There's even a girl in the mix that she just got “curious” about and promptly abandoned when the novelty wore off.

It’s pretty much a constant through-line of what I would call egregious offenses with one exception at the end. The final of the seven exes - Gideon Graves - is pretty much just a stock-standard egotistical, manipulative, and emotionally abusive dick.

But, the issue still stands. Even if Gideon was just a fucker for the sake of being one, Ramona still really did the others dirty. It’s kind of like that one saying - if you have one bad ex, he’s probably an asshole. If you have seven bad exes, they might not be the problem.

And this really isn’t something that’s ever addressed in the narrative. Now, Ramona does fess up near the end and genuinely, sincerely apologizes to Scott for her own short-comings in their relationship, but when she does, Scott just kisses her and says, It’s fine! Don’t worry about it! Which, I mean, sure, in a story about forgiveness, acceptance, and personal growth, I don’t expect Scott to relentlessly shame her, but I’m talking more about how she’s perceived by the audience and the discourse surrounding the series. Because there’s a lot of it. And it sucks.

The audience, the community, the culture at large is very interested in painting Scott as a perpetual villain, but even when Ramona admits that she had an equal part in her failings as a partner in their relationship, no one really seems to care.

Scott is expected to own up to his mistakes and course correct. But Ramona? She’s kind of just a victim, through and through. It seems to me that there’s a degree of chauvinism to the whole thing - that, somehow, Scott is expected to take responsibility for what he did in the past, but most of Ramona’s mistakes are hand-waved away. The onus is totally on his shoulders to grow a person, and Ramona is basically given a hall pass. Is she not also capable of the emotional growth necessary to right the wrongs of her past? Is she somehow exempt from having to take responsibility for her actions? Does she have the agency to do so? She certainly had the agency to willingly engage in these decisions when she made them.

Ultimately, I think we know the answer, if we’re honest with ourselves. A non-insubstantial amount of tension placed on inter-gender relations at the moment is that men are expected to be perpetually repentant for everything shitty they've ever done, every shitty thing they could do, and every shitty thing that actual shitty men have done, while many women - especially Millennials - expect to have their cake and eat it to; in today’ day and age, there are substantial resources and political clout dedicated to ensure that they have agency to engage freely in whatever relationships they like, fuck up, break hearts, sleep around, and generally raise Hell, but they’re also allowed to off-put that agency onto every other party and shirk the consequences that follow.

And, to an extent, I get it - this may be chauvinistic of me, but most guys… yeah, we got a soft spot for girls. Especially pretty ones. We wanna make ‘em feel good, y’know? It’s in our nature to simp. Sad but true. So, when a Ramona Flowers comes along and spins a sob story about her seven evil exes, of course our first instinct is to give her all the ass-pats and honeyed words we can ans immediately assume the worst about the men who made her feel bad. A pretty face makes your brain not work, sometimes.

But when Scott fucks up? When the consequences of his actions come back to bite him in the ass? Well, he’s just a hapless dork, so, he's on his own. Tough luck, bucko. Maybe you should have been born with two X chromosomes and been a little easier on the eyes. Maybe then we might give a damn. The sad reality is that most people… just don’t really care about men’s issues. Men are expected to shut up and put up and, if you fuck up, well, that's tough titties, dude.

And, I’d also say that learning to put up and shut up isn’t always a bad thing, in and of itself. You kinda have to do that. Most humans do. A man who can’t function when he's unhappy and do what needs to be done is, simply put, not gonna make it, as we in the know like to say. It will be so over for them. He will never know what it's like to be back, because he will never put in the work and effort to make it not so over. You follow?

Not to spin off on a tangent, but, fellas - this is why we gotta look out for each other. No one else is going to. You're never gonna get the same treatment as a Ramona Flowers ‘cuz you ain't a cute a girl, so don't count on being treat like one. It sucks, but I only speak the bitter truth I assume you already knew. The collapse of philios - brotherly love - is in large part responsible for the total breakdown of our society. That’s a topic for another day, but just… keep that in mind, yeah? Maybe call up a friend you haven’t seen in a while. Go get a drink and catch up. Be a friend. Do it for the Ape.

Anyways, I just want to be clear - it isn’t the fact that Ramona fucked up in her past that’s the issue. We all fuck up. We all make mistakes. We all hurt people, make poor relationship choices, and, when our time comes and we all stand before our creator and are made to explain why we did what we did with the time that he granted us… well, we’ll have some very difficult conversations. But, in the meantime, we’re allowed to grow and learn and forgiveness, both internal and external, are just part and parcel of it all. If the person in question changes their questionable behavior. And, since Scott Pilgrim never got a follow-up or sequel, I like to assume that Ramona puts her history of homewrecking behind her and starts over in earnest with Scott.

But, in the here and now, it feels like men are, by and large, being forced to have these grimly serious conversations with a secular society and pay a price for some primordial sin of being male and bear the brunt of the consequences for the bad behavior of unscrupulous and evil people of both genders. Like we’re all on trial for both sins we’ve committed, and the greater sins of our collective gender, real and imagined. Ans I know that, in their own way, women are having their own reckoning.

And, trust me - I know you ladies have your own host of issues, and it’s not any easier for y’all than it is for us. But society trying to remove all the consequences of every action that young women make is not going to do anything to fix those problems. In fact, absolving someone of the consequences of their poor decisions is just going to exacerbate the matter. Pain is a consequence of making stupid decisions. It’s our body’s way of saying, hey, dipshit - stop it. If you’re never held accountable for your actions - if you’re never made to feel pain - what will you ever learn? And who does that benefit?

There’s even a scene in the final volume of the comics where, after taking a journey into the wilderness with his ex-girlfriend, Kim, and taking time to actually self-reflect on what went wrong in his relationship with Ramona, Scott asks her what she was doing in the months they spent broken up. Ramona tries to play it off as if she’s also spent time doing working on herself and getting her life in order, as well, but then just ends up admitting…

Charming.

Everyone plays it off like a joke, like, hahaha, oh Ramona, you scoundrel, that’s perfectly fine because you’re cute and that’s quirky, but, uh…

Did she even learn anything? Is anyone even concerned that she might not have taken a damn thing from what happened? Like I said, I like to think she did, but no one in the narrative seems to care whether she did or not.

From what I understand, a lot of the newer material introduced in Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is Ramona-centric. I’ve heard claims that, in a way, it feels more like a Ramona Flowers series than Scott Pilgrim, and much of this new content is meant to lift up Ramona while relentlessly beating the audience over the head with how bad Scott is rather than just assuming they have a reading comprehension level above a third grader and can inference that without being explicitly told.

Is this true? Is this just baseless chatter made by culture war agitators? Again - I can’t say. I’d like to know, though, because, hey - maybe there is more to Ramona’s story with her exes than was previously elaborated on. I’m open to hearing more. She may have made some poor choices, but, in relationships, it always takes two to tango. Or crash a plane. Maybe it's a nuanced, even-keeled exploration into Ramona's checkered past that honestly examines and analyzes her character, not as the idealized blue-haired indie girlfriend we all wish we had, but as the person she is.

But, I also kind of doubt it. Mostly because of the man writing it.

See, the story of Scott Pilgrim is one that begins as a goofy, zany, off-the-wall comedy and affectionate parody of manga that gradually becomes more introspective and intelligent as the narrative progresses. In some ways, the maturing themes mirror the increasing awareness and development of the main character. I also think that it reflects the maturation and shifting perspectives of the author. If Scott Pilgrim Takes Off continues this trend, and reflects how he’s changed over the years since the last Scott Pilgrim comic was published in 2010…

Bryan Lee O’Malley Versus The World

Bryan Lee O’Malley was born in London, Ontario in 1979. As of this writing, he’s 44 years old, which puts him at the very tail-end of Generation X². Half Korean, half French-Canadian, and he is… an interesting guy. After spending time working as an artist and letterer for Portland-based comic publisher Oni Press, O’Malley published his first graphic novel, Lost at Sea, in 2003. I know nothing about this book, but it looks like it isn’t really my thing. A long, meandering story about some girl who has anxiety and depression and goes on a road-trip with her quirky friends that spend their time trading passive-aggressive, snarky barbs. It seems very performative in a way that Scott Pilgrim very much isn’t. Like an idea he had to get his foot in the door with. Something he concocted as a way to impress someone else. Pass.

One short year later, in 2004, Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life would be released.

The name Scott Pilgrim comes from a song of the same name by Canadian indie rock outfit, Plumtree. O’Malley says that he was particularly inspired by the line, I’ve liked you for a thousand years, which is one of those things that sounds a lot deeper than it really is. Also, it must have been easy to pick a line to be inspired by, because it’s pretty much the only fucking lyric in the song.

O’Malley also said that he was not a large manga fan prior to penning Scott Pilgrim. He claims that the only shonen manga he’d ever read was the venerable Rumiko Takahashi’s Ranma 1/2, which… you know what? Not now. We don’t have the time. Let’s just say Ranma 1/2 is more of a romantic comedy than a shonen style action series in the vein of what is considered shonen today - namely series like Naruto or One Piece or Dragon Ball. I’m aware if you know nothing about manga, I might as well be speaking in Wingdings, but, just bear with me for a minute.

Like, maybe a quarter of the entire cast of Ranma 1/2. Like I said - we couldn’t get into it now, even if I wanted to.

Later, as O’Malley consumed other manga and anime, influences from other sources began to creep into the work. One in particular is not an manga, but the classic Gainax anime series, FLCL, which is… uh…

I promise, it’s an obvious inspiration, and it makes sense if you’ve ever watched FLCL and Scott Pilgrim. O’Malley says the influence is minimal at best, and mostly due to people reading too much into things, but I kind of doubt it. I have a feeling that O’Malley probably only even found FLCL because of the super soundtrack by the Japanese rock band, The Pillows, which stands as a great album independent of the show entirely. It also feels as if it could have easily been the soundtrack to an animated adaptation of the Scott Pilgrim comics.

Given the glut of recent online articles surrounded the release of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, and the sheer volume of bullshit listicles that just regurgitate the same basic information ad nauseum, finding interviews and first-hand accounts from O’Malley proved tricky. However, based on what I do remember from when the comics were a brief hyper-fixation of mine, I recall that O’Malley waffled on whether or not Scott Pilgrim is supposed to be based on himself. Of course, it would be foolish to assume that there was no trace of O’Malley in Scott Pilgrim. Of course there is - that’s how writing works. But, how much of O’Malley and his own life went into Scott? Well, O’Malley says not a lot, but, again - I tend to doubt it.

The Scott Pilgrim comics are many things, but, more than anything, one of their strongest qualities is the raw passion that went into writing and drawing them. O'Malley has stated many times that he never had an overarching plot for the series in mind - it just kind of came to him as he went, which is the mark of some serious inspiration. You can practically feel how enthused and inspired O’Malley was when you read them - like a kid that just made some sick macaroni art and just has to show you so you put it up on the fridge for them, so everyone can see how awesome their collection of shitty school glue and macaroni noodles is. It’s charming, really.

It’s also why the comics ended when they did - by the end of the final volume, you can feel the gas running out of the narrative as O’Malley speeds desperately towards a sensible and satisfying but ultimately rushed ending. Again, he’s admitted that, up until he began work on the fifth volume of the comics, he wasn’t even sure how he was going to end them. Of course, the pending film adaptation may have lit a fire under his ass to wrap things up, but I still think a little of the magic is lost by the end as O’Malley just simply grew tired of the project. It's also why there’s been no new Scott Pilgrim content from O’Malley in, as he said on his twitter the day of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, over 4,484 days.

Back in 2010, when the comics came to a conclusion, when asked why he chose to end the series when it was peaking in popularity, O’Malley replied with a quote from Belgian comic legend Hergé of The Adventures of Tintin fame. In a letter written in 1947 to his wife, Hergé wrote, There is a complete divorce between what I think and what I invent and draw, and right now, my work makes me sick. Tintin is no longer me.

This is an understandable sentiment to have. Everything has a time and a place. Artists fall in love with stories. They fall out of love with them as well. Very few muses sing for prolonged pieces, and some change their songs mid-tune. Others will outright abandon you when you need their assistance the most. They are a fickle breed, the muses. In Hergé’s case, accusations of collaboration with the Nazis during the occupation of Belgium stained and tarnished his reputation and career, and nearly resulted in a lengthy, if not life-time prison sentence. It stands to reason that globe-trotting adventure stories about a young boy and his dog were probably not coming all that easily when facing total destitution.

I have a feeling that Bryan O’Malley had the same experience. When Scott Pilgrim was first published, O’Malley was 25 years old - only two years older than Scott at the beginning of the books. Scott Pilgrim was, I think, based on a time in his life that had passed. The story he’d wanted to tell had been told, and, by the time the story of Scott Pilgrim broke big in the mainstream, he was already a different person.

In fact, in 2004 - when the first Scott Pilgrim was published - O’Malley married an American cartoonist, Hope Larson. In 2008, O’Malley left his native Canada to North Carolina with his wife, who, being from the state, I assume wanted to be there for personal reasons. This time period in North Carolina coincides with the development of the fifth Scott Pilgrim book, Scott Pilgrim Versus the Universe, which O’Malley personally describes as Scott’s darkest hour. Sure enough, this is the book where - spoiler warning - he and Ramona, after a year and change of dating and live together, temporarily split. In 2010, following the release of the Scott Pilgrim film and the publication of the final volume of the comics, O’Malley would move to Los Angeles. Four years later, he would be divorced.

If you read between the lines, you might be able to glean why it was the story had run its course. This is just speculation, mind you, but, as something of an artist myself, I have a distinct feeling that the sharp, psychological downturn in the later half of the Scott Pilgrim comics is a reflection of turmoil in O’Malley’s personal life. It’s not uncommon for writer’s to work out their emotions and catharsis through their works.

But Yakubian Ape, you might say - Scott Pilgrim has a happy ending! If the story was based on O'Malley's life, why would he write an ending with Scott getting the girl when he was getting a divorce?

Well… the series always was self-insert wish fulfillment, wasn’t it?

See, along with the passion and humor, the other quality that makes the story of Scott Pilgrim as endearing and resilient as it is, in spite of its flaws, it’s the genuine since of sincerity it possesses. Yes, there’s plenty of sarcasm, snark, and ironic humor stuffed into the pages, but the story never feels as if it it’s embarrassed of itself. It’s bold and unapologetic. When’s stupid, it’s borderline retarded. When it’s emotional, it plays them up to the hilt. It’s all over the place. It’s geeky, it’s cringy, it’s fun, but it is what it is and it never shies away from it. It reminds me of scribbles in a middle school notebook, or a fanfiction published on some remote corner of FanFic.net; it’s almost cringe-inducingly raw and honest. Uncomfortably so, at times. But, in that sincerity is, I’d say, true artistry. No reservations. No bullshit. Just pure, unleaded, and undiluted Bryan Lee O’Malley.

In fact, O’Malley stated that he never expected the comic to be a success. In fact, he said would have been surprised if the first comic ever sold more than one thousand copies and never warranted a follow-up. It was purely a creation of passion. A labor of love if there ever was one. A gift that O’Malley made for himself. And, you know what? There’s something beautiful in that.

When you’re open and honest about who you are, you make yourself vulnerable. And when you make yourself vulnerable, there will always be people who won’t like what they see.

In 2014, shortly after his divorce, O’Malley published his second graphic novel, Seconds. I haven’t read it. It doesn’t seem like something that would do much for me, but, more so than Lost at Sea, it seems like something that came from O’Malley’s heart at a dark time.

I can respect that.

In 2016, O’Malley announced that he had begun work on a new series of his own dubbed Worst World. Seven years later, aside from a smattering of concept art, nothing on the project has materialized. Not even a release date.

In the meantime, he began to collaborate with artist Leslie Hung on a series called Snotgirl in 2017. Again - doesn’t seem like something for me. The viscerally unappealing name alone is enough to turn me off. But, O’Malley is also only writing the dialogue - the art and the architecture of the story is all done by Hung, who, to be perfectly honest, I know nothing about and have no interest in.

O’Malley also produces music under the alias Kupec, but, with his last release being in 2009, I assume that his passion for that fizzled away with whatever else was going on behind the scenes during the conclusion of Scott Pilgrim. In a way, I can’t help but feel as if O’Malley hit his peak, told his story, and has struggled to find solid creative footing ever since. It happens. Sometimes the muse takes an extended hiatus. Sometimes she jumps in the car, leaves to get cigarettes at the gas station, and she never comes back.

Whether O’Malley’s muse is simply on vacation, abandoned him entirely, or he’s simply been too busy with collaborating on other artist’s projects to pursue Worst World, I can’t say. I don’t know the guy. But, in everything I’ve heard about O’Malley over the past decade or so, the guy seems very… discontent. He seems like a guy who’s had his lust for life beaten out of him.

He opened his heart to tell a story and, for his trouble, he was shot. He’s even stated that he had friends sever ties with him over the comics. If Scott Pilgrim was based on himself, as I think it was… well, just imagine if you wrote about yourself, and your troubles, and your hopes and desires, and all you heard for the next ten years from miserable fucks on the internet and media saying that the character that you based off yourself, whether they knew it was or not, was a shitty, sexist, woman-hating immature man-child.

Even if you wanted to explore how that shitty, sexist, woman-hating, immature man-child became not a shitty, immature man-child… I can’t imagine that wouldn’t sting. This was supposed to be a dumb, fun self-insert comic about how cool it would be to have some hot alt chick gf and saving her from her evil exes that I made for myself and my friends to enjoy - why did a story about me piss everyone off so much?

Worse still, if O’Malley based Scott on himself, and Scott, as I’ve explained, is unable to be alone with his own thoughts because he thinks that he’s fundamentally not a good person… what does that say about O’Malley’s view of himself?

O’Malley has repeatedly stated that the criticism of Scott Pilgrim as both a character and story doesn’t bother him, and that Scott was always intended to be a purposefully flawed character that the reader is meant to like in spite of his flaws. This makes sense. That’s literally how stories work. But, much in the way that Scott is quick to deny that he ever takes any offense to anything anyone says about him, I think O’Malley, too, takes all these criticisms to heart, and is wracked by an internal fear that maybe - just maybe - all those people saying that he is the shitty person he’s afraid that he is are right.

So, to try and ameliorate these past transgressions, O’Malley has done what any self-respecting formerly problematic Gen X neo-liberal has done and spent the better part of a decade on the apology circuit. Whether it be apologizing for the cast of Scott Pilgrim being too white, vowing to make future protagonists in stories mixed-race³, to now outright stating that Scott Pilgrim is a villain, O’Malley has wanted to make it explicitly clear that he’s a changed man. No, really, guys - you gotta believe him. He doesn’t like Scott, either! Honest!

If all the rumors of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off scenes re-imagining and reworking the story to more heavily favor Ramona and exaggerate Scott’s worst tendencies are true, there’s reason to believe that this series may be O’Malley’s ultimate offering of penance - the final death of Scott Pilgrim.

He said he wanted to revisit the character because the time felt right to do so; has his muse truly returned, or his he falling for some sort of warped and wicked inverted muse of self-destruction, tempting him forward with a suicidal siren song of absolution through self-destruction? The ruination, desecration, and rewriting of his magnum opus, a series he dedicated six years of blood, sweat, tears, and effort to - is this the sacrifice he wants to make in order to show just how sorry he is for the crime of having been Scott Pilgrim?

Scott Pilgrim Forgives Himself

Remember how I mentioned that Scott spends time on a sabbatical in the woods with one of his ex-girlfriends? That he puts down the fucking video games and actually does some serious, honest-to-god soul searching? Well, during that time, Scott encounters Nega-Scott - a manifestation of all his wrong-doings, all his self-loathing, all his doubts, insecurities, and personal issues. The two do battle with one another in the woods, because that’s something that can happen in the world of Scott Pilgrim. Just go with it.

When they fight, Scott labors under the delusion that killing Nega-Scott (don’t say that outloud, by the way) will make him forget about Ramona and allow him to move on. But, with a little encouragement from his ex, he realizes the sad truth - he’s been running away from his problems this whole time, trying to forget them, using video games and the company of other people and cheap, passing relationships in order to keep himself distracted. But has all that running ever fixed any of those problems? What has any of it done for him or anyone else before?

Scott, in a moment of lucidity, doesn’t recognize what he’s done so much as accept it. Yes, he’s been a dick. Yes, he’s been selfish. Yes, he’s been a terrible partner and hurt everyone he’s cared about. But nothing can be done about it now. All he can do is accept what he’s done, learn from it, and do better. He acknowledges that Ramona doesn’t have to accept him back. He acknowledges that, with the way he acted, he doesn’t even deserve to have her back. But, he resolves to apologize, if nothing else, and returns to Toronto to make amends.

It’s not exactly high art, or even all that well-written of a scene, as, by this point, it feels as if O’Malley is kind of rushing to the finish line. Again, I have my suspicions as to why. But, it is, if nothing else, universal. It’s a deeply uncomfortable situation I think we’ve all been in, at one point or another - that moment when we realize just how monumentally we fucked up and how badly we hurt someone we care about, and that dreadful, sickening epiphany that there’s nothing that can even be done about it except for hope they can forgive you. It’s those kind of moments that, even if they aren’t masterfully done, are still so applicable and relatable that it’s hard not to like.

It’s one of the reason Scott himself, for all his faults, is such a likeable character. Same for Ramona.

There’s a lot of talk near the end of the story about forgiveness, doing better, and accepting one’s mistakes and learning from them. O’Malley has said similar things himself when speaking on the topic of diversity in his works, or the supposedly sexist elements of the damsel in distress in the story of Scott Pilgrim.

But, I think what’s he’s forgetting is that, when Scott does accept his negative side and acknowledge that he’s done wrong, at no point is he told to hate himself for it, or feel bad for it, or labor under some permanent weight of guilt for his transgressions. He doesn’t need to hate himself to earn Ramona’s forgiveness, and at no point does she or anyone else ever insinuate that he does. Obviously, Scott never expects Ramona to carry around the self-loathing for her faults and flaws in order for him to forgive her.

We, as a culture, have a serious problem with apologies and forgiveness. Those words almost mean nothing. I remember when I had my come to Jesus moment about it, when I apologized to a certain someone and they called me dead to rights on what I’d actually done.

You aren’t apologizing. You don’t even really know what you did wrong. You just want me to say it’s okay so you can stop feeling bad about yourself.

It took me a couple days, a lot of reflection, and more than a little bashing my head against a wall to figure out what she was saying.

But, sure enough - she was right. When I say exporting agency or exporting emotional processing, that’s really what I’m talking about. Exporting is when you shove the burden onto someone else. When you apologize for something without even knowing what you did or why it hurt the other party, you aren’t learning anything, and you aren’t really even accepting responsibility for your actions. You’re basically saying, Sorry you chose to get upset by what I did, I guess, not I’m sorry what I did was something that hurt you.

There’s a difference between apologizing to someone for having wronged them, and apologizing because you want to stop feeling guilty. No one can stop you from feeling guilty - that level of absolution is internal, not external. The only way you can release yourself from guilt is when you choose to forgive yourself. And, I think that’s probably what O’Malley needs to do more than seek the approval and faux-forgiveness of people who hate him and what he created.

Now, there is something to be said about choosing to let someone or something hurt you. This is true. But, let’s say I shoot you on accident and then apologize by saying, Well, sorry you got shot, but, like, you really shouldn’t have been standing in my general vicinity. And, yes, this may be true, but I shouldn’t have been playing with a fucking gun, you know? There are certain actions such as cheating that are the same - sure, one person can decide how badly they’re going to let the event hurt them, but the other person shouldn’t be cheating in the first place because it was a dumb thing to be doing in the first place. Stupid games, stupid prizes, et cetera et cetera.

I really don’t mean to sound too much like some bleeding heart simp, here, really, I don’t, but, at the same time, I think this kind of therapy talk, as it’s called these, really has merit that has been all but lost by overuse and abuse by progressive types who just repeat these words without ever really thinking about what they mean, or, worse, using them to manipulate others by talking circles around them with fancy psychological jargon. And, to be fair, these cancel culture cry-bully types aren't actually looking for a real apology. There's no apology that will actually suffice for them because an apology isn't what they're looking for. What they want is submission - not an apology. And I think that’s bled into our everyday lives as a culture. A lot of people don’t want to hear an apology. They want grovelling. A lot of people don’t want to apologize. They just want to stop feeling guilty for making someone else upset.

Point is, apologies are not an easily mastered art. They aren’t supposed to be. A sincere apology should always leave you a bit uncomfortable, because, if you aren’t, it just means you don’t actually internalize, understand, or, in some cases, know what you did. Otherwise, you're basically just saying, please don't be mad at me, and not much else.

And that’s kind of how everything O’Malley’s said and done since the ending of the Scott Pilgrim comics feels. None of it feels as if he’s being sincerely apologetic. It doesn’t even read like he really understands why diversity is supposedly important - he just rattles off the generic diversity is our strength! talking points like a trained parrot that’s been conditioned to recite them when prompted, rather than someone who really knows or cares about the topic.

It all sounds like a poor, confused man begging a crowd of angry on-lookers to stop kicking him.

And I think that’s tragic.

A more recent photo of Bryan Lee O’Malley.

I don’t know Bryan Lee O’Malley. Obviously. Everything in this article is speculation and, I also suspect, more than a little projection, using my own experiences as a former awkward manchild as a template. Maybe I’m mistaken in my reading of these situations. Maybe O’Malley really is passionate about the cause of diversity in comic books, maybe he hasn’t lost his touch and is just taking his time with his next project, and maybe he’s never struggled a day in his life with self-doubt or self-loathing and he’s very secure in sense of self and value. Perhaps he wakes up and does back-flips across his living room because he’s just so god damn happy to be alive as Bryan Lee O’Malley.

Maybe.

I’m certainly sure that fat Netflix check he’ll be getting soon will lift his spirits.

But, whatever the case may be, he doesn’t strike me as a bad person. Like Scott, he’s flawed, but I don’t think he’s a bad person, and he doesn’t deserve to have a decade long struggle session over malicious misreadings of his work, interpreted in bad faith by bad actors who wanted to pick a fight with him to hawk a fucking agenda.

And I hate to see him spend so much time and effort to appease those people for sins that he may or may not have committed, and carry that weight around with him like a mill-stone around the neck to the point that he revisited the series as a sort of mea culpa to finally, once and for all, settle the discourse around the story of Scott Pilgrim.

Again - it’s all speculation.

I’ll be disappointed to see Scott Pilgrim Takes Off alter or demean what made the original comics so special. Imperfect as they were, there was a time where they meant a lot to me. But, whatever the case may be, I just have one thing to say to Mr. O’Malley, should he ever read this:

Because, for a long time, it hasn’t seemed like you are. And that seems like a heavy price to pay for writing a fun manga riff about how cool you thought it would be to date a chick with dyed hair. Because, if I'm being honest… it kind of would be.

Cheers, buddy.

1. If you've never heard of that name before, you've probably heard of the first two films in it, Sean of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.

2. The official cut-off is 1980, but, like any type of generational talk, it’s difficult to quantify, and it’s all very murky.

3. If they ever happen.