Some works remain evocative of a time and place for you, even when the time and place they are set aren’t 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, 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’s kidding himself at the start of the books. It’s a terrible age to be.
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 — not uncommon, I’m 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.
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 scenario, defeating hordes of fellow students in hand-to-hand combat to rescue her. When Scott fells each of Ramona Flowers’ 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’s 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.
Much of the subtlety of Scott Pilgrim is lost or muddied in the collective memory because it was omitted from the 2010 Edgar Wright film, Scott Pilgrim vs The World. 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 — it 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’s a lot of fun, but it’s less emotionally complex than the long, drawn-out ennui Scott experiences over the final two books.
Scott has always assumed that he will be the hero in whatever story he’s living. If he’s dating a high schooler it’s okay because it’s him, even if he’s dating a high schooler. If breaking up with Envy Adams made him feel bad then she must have been at fault, because it’s him and he’s feeling bad. What changes him is the realisation that he was prioritising fighting the evil exes — prioritising the story — over his actual relationship with Ramona. Ramona’s 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.
When I think of the Scott Pilgrim 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’s. That’s much how I felt when I was reading them, having notably at one time scored a straight zero on an exam paper. It wasn’t even that I didn’t show up — I showed up, sat with the paper in front of me for the mandatory minimum thirty minutes, then left. What was happening, which I didn’t recognise at the time, was that despite whatever aptitude I had for the subject, I didn’t have any affection for it. I didn’t want to learn Maths. I’d just assumed for my whole life that I would. Questions like “Who do I want to like me?” are unanswerable if you’ve always assumed that anyone who knows you will like you.
I don’t 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’s an obvious realisation — but everyone has to make it once. With the help of my friends, much like Scott, I did just that. Brian Lee O’Malley has an earlier book, ‘Lost at Sea’, 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’Malley has a real talent for capturing the young adult mix of absolute confidence and unbearable self-doubt.
All of this is prologue to discussing how Scott Pilgrim is back. O’Malley, along with BenDavid Grabinski, has penned an eight-episode follow up series for Netflix, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, that apes the best elements of other legacy sequels like Matrix: Resurrection and Rebuild of Evangelion. 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 — while goofy, adorable and action-packed — is more easily resolved. She apologises to the exes who were unfairly hurt and the others simply find other relationships to obsess over. It’s a breath of fresh air with much in common with Matrix: Resurrections’ handling of Trinity, another female character who while she wasn’t underserved in her original appearances was still forced into a particular kind of role by the story having one set hero who wasn’t her.
Scott has to return of course, and when he does it’s 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 — or is forced to realise, really — that his mistakes are his own doing and not some cosmic contrivance that could have been avoided with the benefit of hindsight.
It’s an interesting approach to the question of what these characters went on to do which avoids — to some extent — the trap of writing a new dramatic arc with characters who already completed their story the first time round. It’s necessarily unsatisfying if Scott and Ramona actually lived happily ever after. It’s 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 — I’ve heard many complaints about the unkind future Dial of Destiny 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’s 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 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.
For myself, I don’t regret the path my life took to reach the point it’s at now. I hope that’s true in ten years time and I hope that’s true in twenty years time. And selfishly, I’d like to find myself able to revisit Scott Pilgrim and the gang again, if it’s as thoughtful (and funny) as Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. But if I don’t it won’t be a big deal. There was a time and a place where Scott Pilgrim meant a great deal to me, and while it’s nice to visit it I don’t want to get stuck there. I don’t want to go to war with my younger self, like Scott does. It’s a good lesson, but as with all the lessons Scott Pilgrim has to offer it’s sure to feel straightforward in retrospect.
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