La Ron S. Readus
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Scott Pilgrim Is DOOMED! (VIDEO SCRIPT)
🕑 Added 2024-02-07 21:00:05 +0000 UTCSlight confession time, Readers. I was one of those individuals who first got into Scott Pilgrim not through the graphic novel, but through Edgar Wright’s live-action movie Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Now that’s not necessarily a crime or a deal-breaker for some fans of the comics as I once thought.
For the longest, I knew that the final volume was released after they originally wrapped filming. But what I didn’t know was that they did reshoots for the ending after the final book came out so they could make sure the ending of Scott Pilgrim vs The World had an ending that stayed true to it.
And after getting a chance to finally read the series, seeing what all was condensed and what all was cut for the sake of what all made it into the movie was a tough process in my opinion.
/Like, I had NO idea that there was an entire STORY ARC dedicated to the Todd Ingram fight. I just thought he punched the highlights out of Knives hair, burst Scott through a wall, and then got his vegan powers revoked by the Vegan Police -- aka the BEST characters in the movie -- before Scott headbutted him to coins, and that was it./
That’s part of the reason why I was looking forward to watching the anime, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off
Not only would the entire cast of Scott Pilgrim Vs The World be coming back to voice their respective characters, making the Me who got introduced to this world through the movie happy...
/But at the time I thought I’d finally see a more faithful adaptation of the comic in the way that I’d still know what happened in it without having to read it./
Not that I DIDN’T wanna read it, but y’know...I have shit to do...
So you can kinda guess my shock when I decided to sit down and watch Scott Pilgrim Takes Off with a few friends of mine -- one of which who DID read the graphic novels and know the story -- and found out that the story takes a HARD turn from the source material by the end of the first episode
And also learning that this is by design by the creator of the Scott Pilgrim comics, Korean French-Canadian writer and cartoonist Bryan Lee O’Malley, /who wanted to use the opportunity to explore some new avenues of telling the story that the original lacked because it was mainly focused on Scott./
That’s how in the show you get Ramona as the main protagonist, seeing things through her eyes, reconciling with her evil exes while also gaining a new way of learning that she can’t just constantly run away from her problems, which is something that I REALLY appreciated.
However, that didn’t stop me from realizing that Scott still did play a pivotal role in this story. After all, it’s called “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” for obvious reasons other than brand recognition. And the role that Scott Plays in all of this is both just as important and also provides an interesting reflection of what he goes through in the graphic novels.
Then after making my initial thoughts known to my friends after we finished the show, I was basically INSTRUCTED to read the graphic novel series before I even THOUGHT about making a video on this.
So I did. And when I did, I realized that thanks to the existence of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, Scott’s life has gone from a slice-of-life rom com to a “Catcher In the Rye” style tragedy.
/The tragedy in question? Scott Pilgrim is beyond saving. Let’s begin./
___________
Hey, Readers. La’Ron here. Offering you analysis and perspective on your favorite bits of geek and pop culture media
If it wasn’t obvious from the intro, this video will in fact contain spoilers for the first and possibly only season of Netflix’s Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. It’s currently available to stream exclusively on Netflix, so give it a watch if you haven’t seen it yet, and don’t want me to spoil pivotal points of it for you in this video.
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That’s the syllabus. Now onto the lesson.
As its own thing...
Scott Pilgrim Takes Off handles Scott’s development in a way that, while still effective, is nevertheless interesting.
This no doubt has everything to do with the fact that the show’s primary focus and time is dedicated to Ramona, who’s own story arc and character development is worth cracking open in its own right. Give this video enough views and engagement, and I’ll make a video about Ramona’s story.
But for those who are new to Scott Pilgrim and were mainly introduced to it through this show, how they convey his development while only dedicating like...2-3 episodes to it was pretty solid.
/While Ramona was searching for the person who staged Scott’s death during his fight with her first evil ex Matthew Patel, he was actually brought to the future by his 37 year old future self, appropriately named according to the narrative’s sense of humor Old Scott Pilgrim./
It was in that future Scott learned a lot about the type of man he’d eventually grow up to be, kinda clocking aspects about Old Scott’s mannerisms and personality even before finding out the reason he was brought to the future.
/Things like his insecurities/ (Now this one look like it’s in a completely different style. What are you talking about? It’s the exact same, if not BETTER. No, it’s definitely worse. Whoever did this is bad at art)
/And his over exaggerations of the truth/ (So, we’re divorced? Well, technically, we’re separated. Ah, man. When? After the honeymoon. A few, 12...well, 13 years odd years later)
But then he DOES find out why Old Scott brought him to the future; that by removing Normal Scott from his timeline, he hopes that it will cause him to never fall in love with Ramona or fight her evil Exes in order to keep from experiencing the heartache of their separation.
And then those of us who weren’t able to pick up the negative aspects of Old Scott’s methodology and personality from the comedic instances earlier...
/Fully see them in plain sight when Normal Scott’s reasonable suggestion according to how the universe works brings out Old Scott’s full-fledged insecurities like a dog backed into a corner/ (or you can tell me what you did wrong and I can go back and do a better job! You immediately assume I messed up! Because she’s the one who’s bad news, not us!)
Now for those of us who’ve read the Scott Pilgrim comic, we’ve seen this red flag from Scott before, with no time travel required.
/However, Normal Scott realizes the error of his ways in Takes Off in a way that, thanks to the combination of seeing the type of man he’ll eventually become, seeing what the Ramona from his timeline went through to uncover what happened to him, and learning what Old Ramona did to make sure he’d still remember her if Old Scott’s plan was successful, the development he gains in the comic is delivered in the show in a way that while a bit fast-tracked, is just as prominent./
Especially because the overall irresponsible and toxic aspects of himself that he closed off and refused to acknowledge until that fragile masculinity eventually manifested as Nega-Scott in the comic is now instead present in these variants of his future self, that...
/A) Refuse to take responsibility for his actions.../(You and all your stupid friends must team up at some point in my new past and figure out how to dissolve the anti-kiss field)
/B) Is so caught up in how he personally sees himself that he never thinks he’s in the wrong.../(So YOU’RE the Big Bad! ME? I’m a GOOD GUY!)
/And C) The only way for him to see reason is to have the true cause of his “pain” let him know that he’s only acting under his own insecurities and fragility/ (Okay, are you saying that we WEREN’T over? Are you saying that you still loved me? At the time? Yes. Does that mean we can get back together? Just like that? After 10 years? No, dude. Oh. Well, that makes sense, I guess...)
Not only does this provide a way for Ramona’s development that she’s been working through over the course of the show to have a proper stage for culmination, since it no longer involves Gideon...
/Y’know, since she’s the main focus of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off/
But replacing Nega-Scott with future variants of Scott from a different timeline that basically embodies the same toxicity and fragility that he has to both acknowledge exists within himself and show that he can learn to grow and be better than them...
/Is a great way of transferring that message from the comic page to the television screen for someone who either has never experienced the story of Scott Pilgrim, or whose only knowledge of the story before this show was the Edgar Wright movie./
And because there’s no such thing as an original idea, it would be irresponsible of me NOT to pull another instance in which another property used this same trope to also illustrate the dangers of toxic and fragile masculinity.
That’s right, Readers. While watching the finale of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, It reminded me of something else.
If -- in the form of a movie that was released in 2019 -- you received deja vu when you watched Scott Pilgrim Takes Off in regards to the concept of an older version of a character going back in time to keep said character from making the quote-unquote MISTAKES they did...
When in actuality all they’re doing is just trying to reinforce the toxicity they represent in their younger selves because this future version of said character is 100% convinced that they’re not the problem to the point that even the main character is able to see that they need to course-correct their life to avoid becoming that guy...
/That’s possibly because you watched The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part./
The character in this case is Emmet -- the main character voiced by Chris Pratt -- also known as The Special and The Master Builder.
/His future self Rex goes back in time to save him from crashing through the Stairgate to enter the Systar System to save Wyldstyle and the rest of the cast from the first movie after they were “captured” by one of the aliens. AKA, the kid playing with the Lego’s downstairs leaving the basement to go to his sister's room to get his Lego figures back after she took a handful of them to goat him into playing with her./ (I just wanted you to play with me)
The thing about Rex however, is that when the crash happened in his timeline, he became jaded because nobody came for him. Not Wyldstyle, not Batman, not Charlie Day, nobody.
(SPACESHIP!)
/This allowed him to turn into the movie’s depiction of toxic masculinity that characters like Wyldstyle wanted Emmet to transform into since the beginning because of how dire the situation the world was in since the Systars became a thing./ (Hufflepuff reference)
After all, this is a movie for children with humor that adults can appreciate. Instead of telling Emmet to “be a man” they say “grow up...”
/Even though it’s clear through both jokes and declarations that the wrong way of growing up is indeed affiliated with aspects usually associated with both fragile and toxic masculinity./ (we don’t ask for directions)
There’s also Rex’s attempts to transition Emmet from being a Master Builder to a Master Destroyer...
/By forcing him to channel his rage, anger and frustration -- emotions regularly associated with both toxic and fragile masculinity and constantly encouraged to be conditioned and nurtured in men via patriarchy -- in order to be a force of destruction against the unity that we find out the Systars always wanted with the people of Bricksburg/Apocalypseburg./
And whenever Emmet either questions Rex’s mindset -- especially after finding out Rex is him from the future with a “hardened heart...”
/He’s met with the same sense of emasculation by his future self that others placed on him that caused this version of Emmet to exist in the first place./
Because Scott Pilgrim Takes Off’s animation is aimed at young adults and older, the show can be a bit more straightforward with its allegory of toxic and fragile masculinity in how it uses Old Scott and Even Older Scott versus how they want to frame Normal Scott’s decision-making process.
Don’t get me wrong; it still requires a rudimentary knowledge of media literacy to understand the connections regarding why Normal Scott understands that the last thing he wants to be are both of these futuristic versions of himself, as well as why they both think they’re the hero in this narrative when they’re both clearly in the wrong.
/But because those of us who watched The Lego Movie 2 have seen this scenario before, watching it play out in Scott Pilgrim Takes Off in regards to Scott versus these two older versions of himself painted an image in my head, telling me that him realizing his own toxicity is gonna be one of the main obstacles that he has to deal with, if not the main one./
And that worried me.
Like I said before, Readers. If you look at Scott Pilgrim Takes Off as its own thing, this direction is a brilliant way of doing an alternative take on the Nega-Scott portion of the comic.
But eventually you have to entertain the fact that this is supposed to be a companion piece; a work that’s often made by the same author that has a close relationship to the original story in question.
In regards to Scott Pilgrim the character, because this companion piece deals with time travel in order to avoid the actions that were made in the work that this show is a companion piece for, we have to consider the likely possibility that Old Scott and Even Older Scott are the same Scott from the graphic novels.
For everyone who hasn’t read the story, Nega Scott is a manifestation of everything that’s toxic about Scott.
While the comic likes to say that he’s a representative of all Scott’s forgotten mistakes, the narrative doesn’t necessarily give off that vibe. Scott doesn’t forget them, he SUPPRESSES them by building new narratives around the situations that he was originally shitty in until all he remembers are the lies he tells himself, thus feeding into his blatant insecurities that are displayed across the graphic novel.
A great example of said suppression is the story he weaves regarding how he and Kim Pine got together back in the Canadian equivalent of High School.
/Because it’s through Scott’s POV and the rest of the flashback was pretty consistent in its storytelling for us to think otherwise -- not to mention how the actual plot has been told to us so far -- he tells the story as if he were saving her from an attack from a rival school led by a badass named Simon Lee. In actuality, Simon Lee and Kim were actually dating, and the image Scott painted about him in his head was made to look way more imposing than the small non-confrontational Chinese kid he actually beat up that day./
We find out that Scott does this a lot. He doesn’t want to live with his shitty decisions made from insecurity and convenience -- like telling Lisa he was moving to Toronto instead of Kim -- so he purposely mis-remembers things -- like telling Kim he was moving to Toronto when he clearly didn’t -- until he’s convinced himself that the new versions are real and keeps repeating the cycle.
/Thus Knives Chau./
So when Ramona utilized his subspace and exposed him to the Glow -- Gideon’s way of weaponizing one’s personal issues and emotions -- Nega Scott formed from all of those past events that were made by the combination of his insecurities, and not wanting to take responsibility for his actions; aspects that make up the majority of his fragility.
/When he DOES interact with Nega Scott for the first time after seeing Ramona’s evil Ex Roxie staying at her apartment and having his insecurities about their relationship triggered, he -- as you would imagine -- runs from Nega Scott instead of interacting with him head-on. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t do so until Kim tells him -- and I quote -- “If you keep forgetting your mistakes, you’ll just keep making them again. Everything you’ve done wrong is just gonna keep following you around." And only when he stops sheltering his insecurities and accepts responsibility for his past actions does Nega Scott goes away./
If any of this sounded familiar in regards to Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, it’s because like I said in the first segment of this video, Old Scott and Even Older Scott take the place of Nega Scott in this instance.
/Just like Nega Scott represents in the graphic novel, these two future variants of Scott Pilgrim display the aspects about him that craft his multiverse-wide brand of fragile masculinity./
And while watching this reminded me of Emmet and Rex from The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, I noticed that there was a portion of it that differed in a way.
/You see, when WyldStyle came for Emmet and stopped Rex from planting the seed of doubt in his head, Rex and the timeline he came from ceased to exist. Both the combination of seeing what Emmet would eventually become and his friends coming to save him from the DryAR system undid any possibility of him turning into Rex at all./
Normal Scott had a similar epiphany in seeing the insecurities and fragility in Old Scott in the future, while also seeing the lengths the Ramona of his timeline was going through to find out what happened to him and seeing how much Old Ramona still loves and cares for Old Scott.
/It was enough for him to do some reconciliation of his own when Old Ramona took him back to his time, and we have the stairway conversation he had with Knives to prove it./
Yet despite that, the timeline and -- more importantly -- the Old Scott from it didn’t fade away from the development Normal Scott gained or the execution of it.
/This insecure and fragile version of Scott still existed, and gained enough power to go back in time and challenge his entire entourage in a display of denial and insecurity/
When you add how barely anything changed when Normal Scott went back to his respective timeline even after developing and applying said development to address some of the mistakes he made, it makes you think about what Old Scott must’ve gone through.
/Especially when you realize that thanks to their past and Old Young Neil’s book basically being a novel form of the graphic novels.../
Old Scott and even Older Scott came from a timeline where they had already beat the League of Evil Exes -- including Gideon -- and had already BEAT Nega Scott in order to get to where they are by the time Normal Scott arrives in the future.
/They had already realized that the combination of their insecurities and their refusal to believe anything was their fault was holding them back from growing as a person./
Between the end of the graphic novel and the beginning of the anime, the fight that resulted in Ramona needing a trial separation from Scott caused him to completely undo the development he learned over the course of the graphic novels.
He allowed his insecurities and his ego to once again fill up his box of fragility to the point where he became his OWN Nega Scott for his younger self in a time travel plot to keep from falling in love with her to begin with.
This means there’s a good chance that despite receiving character development, Scott will always abandon everything he’s learned to grow as a person and revert back to a form of this familiar toxicity the moment things get a bit too much for him to emotionally handle.
And while that’s not necessarily a problem, since people like that exist -- and fictional characters as a result -- and showing that sometimes people abandon the growth that they’ve gained over the years need to be presented just as much as those who stick with it for the long haul...
/What makes this a tragedy especially for the Scott Pilgrim of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is that since his encounter with Old Scott and Even Older Scott is supposed to be a parallel with Scott’s encounters with Nega Scott in the graphic novel, there’s a chance that the Scott Pilgrim from the Netflix show -- thanks to how nothing altered Old Scott’s perceptions of life and himself when Normal Scott went back and began to apply some of what he’s learned -- is also bound to the same fate./
That eventually, he’ll abandon everything he learned from seeing versions of his future self completely consumed by insecurity and ego wrapped in fragile masculinity.
/That no matter the timeline, Scott Pilgrim is forever doomed to be a victim to his own fragility./
Conclusion
Readers, I know that this opinion piece can be interpreted as a bit of a downer. And I apologize.
I WILL say however, that expecting all of my videos to have some type of “moral of the story disposition” to them -- despite me not being a fan of nihilism -- is very irresponsible of you.
What attracted me to the Scott Pilgrim story in the first place wasn’t the slice-of-life-ness -- mostly because I find Slice of Life stories boring by themselves -- but the comedy that Edgar Wright placed into the live-action while also keeping its comic book roots intact, and seeing Scott grow as a person.
And one of the things that I appreciate that Bryan Lee O’Malley did with Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is that by using his real-life 2014 divorce as inspiration, he illustrated that despite people getting better, they can also get worse afterward.
/Of course considering how it ends, it’s implied in Scott Pilgrim Takes Off that he’s gonna use his experiences with Old Scott and Even Older Scott to avoid that fate for himself from then on out. Especially since all of the evil exes have pretty much gotten closure over Ramona, Gideon isn’t weaponizing the Glow against her and Scott, and there’s no manifestation of Scott’s lingering insecurities and fragility hunting him down./
And depending on who you are and where your moral compass aligns, some may believe it’s irresponsible to just write someone off as beyond saving
I’M not one of those people, but I know people who are like that and I have nothing but the utmost respect for them and their patience respectively.
/For all I know, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off truly IS the fresh start that he and Ramona take at the end of the graphic novel series and should be looked at as such/
But just like Scott avoided coming to terms with his insecurities and self-sheltering for years...
/It would be foolish and unrealistic if I didn’t consider this dark timeline to be just as possible./
But I digress, Readers. Your homework assignment for the day:
Write in the comment section below what you thought of Scott Pilgrim Takes off if you’ve seen it.
Or, if you feel like sharing with the rest of the class if you think there’s any hope of Scott Pilgrim completely moving past his insecurities and overall fragility
Whichever question you decide to answer, I’d love to know your thoughts.
/A HUGE shoutout to my Patrons both big and small for helping make this channel possible.
Make sure you check out the card at the end of the video to join, or click the link to it or any of my affiliates in the description box below.
But until then, this is Readus 101. Class dismissed./
Comments
Juan Borla
Interesting take, Readus, but I fundamentally disagree with your conclusion. In my view, Scott's future is unwritten, again. Firstly, there's no indication in the show that changing the past changes the future - it seems to be operating more on multiple timeline rules instead of the Back to The Future style Lego 2 did. This means that Old and Older's lack of vanishing could just mean that's not how time travel works. In fact, the ability of Old Scott to yank Young Scott from the past without immediately destroying his own future would imply disappearance just isn't a thing that will happen. Thematically, though, I think Old and Older will always be a possibility for Scott. Becoming mature doesn't mean we lose the ability to be crappy, just the we gain the ability not to. Will Scott be able to maintain his newfound maturity in the face of future challenges? Don't know. But I do know he has the potential to, which he lacked before.
