I barely remember 2010, but I remember Scott Pilgrim being to hipsters like Fight Club and American Psycho are to incels; They totally missed the point of the movie, thought it was aspirational, and the results in dive bars and shitty venues across America (maybe just the midwest?) were disastrous.
Was this real? Did I mandela effect it from the negative zone or something? Am I just getting old?
Everyone I hung out with loved the movie, but nobody missed that Scott is a disastrous human being. The movie actually insists that no, you cannot just weasel your way out of problems with the Power of Love, you have to learn Self-Respect so that you can also respect others and acknowledge your role in creating the current situation before you can move on.
And of course, the gag where “Nega-Scott” is actually a really good guy… because regular Scott is terrible. The movie is pretty clear about this.
But he also gets the love interest with whom he’s been creepily obsessed, and his high school girlfriend who he cheated on has a ridiculous turnaround and tells him to go for it.
The movie might show him as an asshole, but it also rewards him in a way that feels made to fit a male perspective.
I can’t remember the movie super well but the comics make it clear that Scott’s view of Ramona is heavily rose tinted and she’s a shitty useless asshole too.
This is the problem with the movie. It cuts out all Ramona’s complexity and Scott’s rose-tinted view of everything.
Most important pages in the comics, IMO, are these - all from Vol 6 btw, which IIRC was still being done while the movie was in production.
INCLUDING YOU - and she’s 18 here
The movie completely gutted Envy, which I’ll never forgive it for. These pages of them talking are some of the best
Not having Lisa Miller (and also some of this stuff) was rough too.
Scott accepting the NegaScott as part of him
I always appreciated them admitting their flaws as well. It’s always been “talking and fighting” which the new show gets right.
As someone who can never get out of their head, I really appreciate the role the glow plays.
Envy was a really important character
After 6 volumes of her being the big ex, this is very satisfying
Anyway, the anime gets all the character complexity even with the twist, it’s so much better than the film, which involved a ton of flattening.
I think its a semi-autobiographical story about Bryan Lee O’Malley and Hope Larson’s relationship and just them maturing from the kinda shitty Toronto hipsters they were to be more fully developed people. They end up together because they were married at that time and they even have a cameo in the film
This sort of treatment of shitty male protagonists was seemingly obligatory for my entire childhood. I haven’t seen enough movies recently to know whether it’s still the case but I’d guess it is, if slightly less so.