Thanks for writing such a poignant and thoughtful piece. Having gone through a difficult divorce many years ago - and spending several years afterwards rambunctiously trying to process difficult feelings - I know how it feels to deal with emotional turmoil. I threw myself into all kinds of activities and socializing to avoid “going internal” with my bleak thoughts - I wanted to export everything outward because I didn’t want to sit alone inside my troubled mind. Reading your piece snapped that into crystal-clear perspective - perhaps for the first time.
Now, having since remarried and having had our first child recently, I know that the time is long past for exporting previous turmoil. It’s time to “level up” and move forward. Thanks again for bringing that clarity!
I'm glad that my writing could have helped with that epiphany. Sometimes you just have to have something phrased a certain way for it to stick, you know? Thank you for your comment, I appreciate knowing that I could help someone.
Solid stuff, as usual. Getting at both the usual political issues, but also the pathologies that inflict us in the modern age. Not much to add, except that I think we've all been Scott Pilgrim at some point in our lives, or maybe still are.
You should write that essay about Gamergate, by the way. I can't think of a better pair of simian hands to handle the foundational event of the modern Kulturkampf
As I said, Scott Pilgrim really is a sort of monomyth for the average young man in the West, so, I'm inclined to agree. In the end, we all were... Scott Pilgrim. For better or worse.
But, that being said, I've waffled on covering GamerGate for a while now. While I appreciate your vote of confidence, it would be a massive undertaking of research that I don't know if I have the time or effort to expend any time soon. Politically, I think the dust has settled a decade on to say that GamerGate, regardless of what camp one might be in, was a net negative for the video game industry that it has still yet to recover from. I'd argue it hasn't recovered at all and is only just barely limping along with one foot in the grave. Even though video games like the new Modern Warfare, Destiny, so on and so forth boast massive player bases, culturally, they're far less relevant than when their predecessors dropped. I'd argue that Fortnite has and continues to be the only video game influencing the wider culture at large, and the only real caveat is probably Nintendo and their stable of IPs, though they were always insulated from the American cultural rot by virtue of being Japanese. There's just so much nuance and the topic so dense that, to do it justice would require a lot of work, especially when it comes to sifting through my own memories of the time to parse out what I saw versus what really happened. And I think the topic absolutely needs to be done justice because it is, as you say, the foundational event that set into motion what we're in now. I don't think most people really understand just how violently the culture shifted in a very short amount of time.
One day, when I have the time, I would very much like to take a stab at it. But, for right now... I still have that pony series I need to wrap up.
I remember liking the Scott Pilgrim comics, until the emotional stuff started hitting too close to home. I just wanted quirky nerdy bullshit, not a harrowing story that reminded 25 year old me of my own backlog of emotional difficulties. I should probably read them again and see how they register.
The movie didn't do it for me. I liked Michael Sera in Arrested Development, but he just didn't match my sense of Pilgrim as a character.
Anyway, this is a timely essay, since I'm going through some romantic turmoil that's testing my powers of maturity.
Revisiting them myself, they really are a relic of another time. A lot of what didn't age well (which wasn't that much) can be ignored if you take them as something from a different time that might as well be as removed from now as Dickensian London.
Hopefully whatever turmoil you were facing is behind you now, though, I hate to hear that.
Thanks for writing such a poignant and thoughtful piece. Having gone through a difficult divorce many years ago - and spending several years afterwards rambunctiously trying to process difficult feelings - I know how it feels to deal with emotional turmoil. I threw myself into all kinds of activities and socializing to avoid “going internal” with my bleak thoughts - I wanted to export everything outward because I didn’t want to sit alone inside my troubled mind. Reading your piece snapped that into crystal-clear perspective - perhaps for the first time.
Now, having since remarried and having had our first child recently, I know that the time is long past for exporting previous turmoil. It’s time to “level up” and move forward. Thanks again for bringing that clarity!
I'm glad that my writing could have helped with that epiphany. Sometimes you just have to have something phrased a certain way for it to stick, you know? Thank you for your comment, I appreciate knowing that I could help someone.
Solid stuff, as usual. Getting at both the usual political issues, but also the pathologies that inflict us in the modern age. Not much to add, except that I think we've all been Scott Pilgrim at some point in our lives, or maybe still are.
You should write that essay about Gamergate, by the way. I can't think of a better pair of simian hands to handle the foundational event of the modern Kulturkampf
As I said, Scott Pilgrim really is a sort of monomyth for the average young man in the West, so, I'm inclined to agree. In the end, we all were... Scott Pilgrim. For better or worse.
But, that being said, I've waffled on covering GamerGate for a while now. While I appreciate your vote of confidence, it would be a massive undertaking of research that I don't know if I have the time or effort to expend any time soon. Politically, I think the dust has settled a decade on to say that GamerGate, regardless of what camp one might be in, was a net negative for the video game industry that it has still yet to recover from. I'd argue it hasn't recovered at all and is only just barely limping along with one foot in the grave. Even though video games like the new Modern Warfare, Destiny, so on and so forth boast massive player bases, culturally, they're far less relevant than when their predecessors dropped. I'd argue that Fortnite has and continues to be the only video game influencing the wider culture at large, and the only real caveat is probably Nintendo and their stable of IPs, though they were always insulated from the American cultural rot by virtue of being Japanese. There's just so much nuance and the topic so dense that, to do it justice would require a lot of work, especially when it comes to sifting through my own memories of the time to parse out what I saw versus what really happened. And I think the topic absolutely needs to be done justice because it is, as you say, the foundational event that set into motion what we're in now. I don't think most people really understand just how violently the culture shifted in a very short amount of time.
One day, when I have the time, I would very much like to take a stab at it. But, for right now... I still have that pony series I need to wrap up.
I remember liking the Scott Pilgrim comics, until the emotional stuff started hitting too close to home. I just wanted quirky nerdy bullshit, not a harrowing story that reminded 25 year old me of my own backlog of emotional difficulties. I should probably read them again and see how they register.
The movie didn't do it for me. I liked Michael Sera in Arrested Development, but he just didn't match my sense of Pilgrim as a character.
Anyway, this is a timely essay, since I'm going through some romantic turmoil that's testing my powers of maturity.
Revisiting them myself, they really are a relic of another time. A lot of what didn't age well (which wasn't that much) can be ignored if you take them as something from a different time that might as well be as removed from now as Dickensian London.
Hopefully whatever turmoil you were facing is behind you now, though, I hate to hear that.