Debate user FuckedUp on whether Scott Pilgrim is good

[Brick Face]

Wallace was the best character.

 

[CivilianOfTheFandomWars]

I honestly liked the art. Even if it isn’t the most artistically competent, I found it visually appealing in a cartoony way.
I just feel like it wouldn’t be such a meme if the Indie Comic speds didn’t hold it up as this generations Watchmen, if you see what I mean. It’s a good comic, I liked it, but it is in no way this masterpiece that some people have sold it as. And, let’s be real here, it has absolutely tainted the landscape of Indie Comics much in the way that Watchmen tainted superheroes.
You see a good amount of comics that are obviously inspired by Scott Pilgrim, and that’s fine. But the issue comes when variety is lost because everyone wants to recreate something else.

 

[I can't imagine]

This might just be me, but the what I got out of the comics was that most of the characters being shitty people was kind of the point. As the comic goes on, we learn that Scott is a legitimately 'off' guy, that Ramona is broken, and that they need to change that about themselves.
I thought they were well done, almost a commentary on 'modern' heroes, but that could just be me reading into it in a different direction than what was intended.

No, you're pretty much right. Bryan Lee O'Malley all but spells that out in the last volume.

I think the series is pretty good for what it is (a coming of age story about a dude with serious arrested development), but the fan base definitely propped it up to unrealistic heights.

 

[CivilianOfTheFandomWars]

No, you're pretty much right. Bryan Lee O'Malley all but spells that out in the last volume.

I think the series is pretty good for what it is (a coming of age story about a dude with serious arrested development), but the fan base definitely propped it up to unrealistic heights.

The dude literally fights the dark parts of himself and wins by accepting them, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable interpretation.
But yeah, the fans made it weird for the rest of us comic speds.

 

[Swiss46]

I liked it. The fights were funny.

 

[AMERICA]

My main criticism of the movie is how it romanticizes/downplays the obvious personality disorder of Ramona Flowers. Knives was an inappropriate choice due to her age, but Ramona is clearly borderline. Go find a nice, normie girl without the baggage.

The toonies/loonies whenever he'd defeat someone were a nice touch though.

 

[The Lawgiver]

My main criticism of the movie is how it romanticizes/downplays the obvious personality disorder of Ramona Flowers. Knives was an inappropriate choice due to her age, but Ramona is clearly borderline. Go find a nice, normie girl without the baggage.

The toonies/loonies whenever he'd defeat someone were a nice touch though.

The movie also made Scott weirdly unfittingly quiet and timid despite him being a loud obnoxious asshole idiot in the comic, albeit a sorta lovable loud obnoxious asshole idiot.

 

[Truckmeister6420]

I liked it as a kid. Dont like it antmore, honestly its just cringy now

 

[Red Hood]

I respect the fact that ultimately the main character is unlikeable and needs to work on that.

But I thought it was pretty cancerous even at the time.

The video game was fun though and was a decent retro beat em up before the Pixelshit explosion. RIP

 

[Pissmaster]

The video game was pretty good even if it was just a ripoff of River City Ransom

 

[FuckedUp]

Do you guys hate 95% of comedy films and TV shows because the characters are "unlikeable"? Most of the characters in Scott Pilgrim are practically Jesus compared to typical sitcom characters.

Also, I'm 99.99999% sure Scott is a "this is you" kind of character. Some of the analysis here sounds like it would come from someone who has "Squidward torture porn" in their vocabulary. No, I swear I'm Not Mad.

 

[Rich Evans Apologist]

The movie's better than the books, because it's got an aesthetic and sticks to it. The pacing and cinematography is largely more interesting than any spreads in the books, though comparing the artistic merits of comics to movies is a fool's errand. There's enormous problems with pacing all throughout the comics, subplots pop up that get forgotten about in a way that seems more like the dude was flying by the seat of his pants, and the art style is uninteresting until the 6th book.

There is nothing of depth to the series and there's no meaningful commentary. Maybe if you're, like, 12, and you've never read a story with a flawed protagonist (hint: fucking everything worth reading) or a G-G-G-G-GAY CHARACTERS-S-S-S-S! it's profound. Otherwise... it's middling.

Bryan Lee O'Malley does a great job with premises and introductions, an OK job with the rising action, and then consistently shits the bed on climaxes and denouement. Too much fucking crap gets introduced in books 4-5 that has fuckall to do with anything that could resemble a "theme" in the story or any of its core characters. You can realize this is obviously going to be the case when you look at the length remaining and ask, "so how will this add anything / be resolved?" It feels like a webcomic in that regard, which isn't what you want for a serialized graphic novel. The art improvements in book 6 feel pretty jarring, which don't help. The resolution is ultimately tepid and sophomoric, though the guy wrote the book when he was still so young as for most of his life experience to be drawn from pop culture, so whatever.

Movie, by contrast, is slick and stylish and doesn't overstay its welcome. By not trying to be DEEP or PROFOUND or ARTSY, it gets to just be a fun romp with a fun concept - which were the best parts of the books anyways. It also cuts out those fucking stupid, empty side-stories that people jerked off to sound like they were cool comic connoisseurs despite their apparent obliviousness to the vapidity therein. The game has cool pixel art, cool music, and was generally fun to play with a defined aesthetic.

"Seconds," a more mature-ish attempt at a very similar concept (dealing with one's past), shows that Malley just has the same damn problem with writing. The art is much, much more interesting in Seconds and the characters are generally better-developed, such that the first half of the book had me fooled into thinking he'd figured it all out. It similarly shits the bed at the mid-point and begins introducing way too much shit, veering fundamentally away from the characters and situations we've been building on to feature some wacky one-ofs, and essentially offers a milquetoast boilerplate ending that amounts to the most simplistic and surface-level analysis of dealing with regret that one could imagine, completely removed from its interesting premise.

This is something that most graphic novel authors seem to have never picked up on, though, so it's not as if he's unique in that.

 

[The Lawgiver]

It generally feels like the hyper-critical jargon about scott pilgrim got like shoved onto it retroactively after a bunch of holier than thou shits poorly aped off the art style for nearly a decade now with no signs of fucking stopping. I don't remember it trying to be super artsy pretentious or anything but maybe that's just me not picking up on shit. It also sure doesn't help that marketing teams and bugmen kinda tried emulating the humor of it but without the soul and spontaneity of the original so it came off as "haha how do you do fellow humans I too like the video games and movies!" I can totally get why people would try and retroactively start shitting on the source material, considering what happened with Sonic the hedgehog and the consistent rabid online presence of fucked up pants shitter fans that scream when his eyes turn green and make foot fetish shit of him constantly.
One thing's for sure, and it's that the scott pilgrim game was a lot more accurate to the vibe of the comics than the movie was, at least in my eyes. The plot's not the exact same as the source, but it's got that specific heart put into it.

 

[Gar For Archer]

I liked the comic for the most part. While the art style was a bit much at times (profile shots suffer from EXTREME anime snout-face to the point that some panels look like they're supposed to be animal people) it's generally not something that stuck out to me as bad. The common complaint about Ramona being a manic pixie dream girl is entirely the movie's fault, because in the comics she's a flakey bitch whose relationship with Scott is not at all portrayed as ideal. This isn't helped by the fact that in the movie she's more or less brainwashed by Gideon and turns into a damsel in distress, whereas in the comic she's running away from her problems completely of her own free will.

While I do like the movie, I think it kind of misses the point by making Scott a lovable dork instead of an asshole protagonist and turning Ramona from a subversion of a manic pixie dream girl into the archetype more or less played straight. Also, in retrospect it's VERY obvious that the ending was changed at the last minute because the movie goes out of its way to establish Knives as a better fit for Scott, with pretty much the entire final fight revolving around them, so him getting with Ramona in the end feels kind of out of place. I think it would've been perfectly fine to deviate from the source material on that point, considering the entire latter half of the movie is completely different from the books anyways.

It generally feels like the hyper-critical jargon about scott pilgrim got like shoved onto it retroactively after a bunch of holier than thou shits poorly aped off the art style for nearly a decade now with no signs of fucking stopping. I don't remember it trying to be super artsy pretentious or anything but maybe that's just me not picking up on shit. It also sure doesn't help that marketing teams and bugmen kinda tried emulating the humor of it but without the soul and spontaneity of the original so it came off as "haha how do you do fellow humans I too like the video games and movies!" I can totally get why people would try and retroactively start shitting on the source material, considering what happened with Sonic the hedgehog and the consistent rabid online presence of fucked up pants shitter fans that scream when his eyes turn green and make foot fetish shit of him constantly.
One thing's for sure, and it's that the scott pilgrim game was a lot more accurate to the vibe of the comics than the movie was, at least in my eyes. The plot's not the exact same as the source, but it's got that specific heart put into it.

Yeah, I definitely agree that its fans and critics alike both think it's way deeper or meaningful than it actually is. The PDF's I read had an author commentary at the end of each volume, and it's very clear he was just writing a slice of life romance that draws from a lot of his own experiences, and not some sort of deep critical commentary on the characters and their relationships. It didn't try to beat you over the head with any sort of message (political or otherwise), just presented you with dramatized versions of very real relationship issues that you either found relatable, or you didn't. It's not super deep or groundbreaking, but that's okay because it never really tries to be any more than a fictionalized version of the author's life experiences.

The movie's better than the books, because it's got an aesthetic and sticks to it. The pacing and cinematography is largely more interesting than any spreads in the books, though comparing the artistic merits of comics to movies is a fool's errand. There's enormous problems with pacing all throughout the comics, subplots pop up that get forgotten about in a way that seems more like the dude was flying by the seat of his pants, and the art style is uninteresting until the 6th book.

There is nothing of depth to the series and there's no meaningful commentary. Maybe if you're, like, 12, and you've never read a story with a flawed protagonist (hint: fucking everything worth reading) or a G-G-G-G-GAY CHARACTERS-S-S-S-S! it's profound. Otherwise... it's middling.

Bryan Lee O'Malley does a great job with premises and introductions, an OK job with the rising action, and then consistently shits the bed on climaxes and denouement. Too much fucking crap gets introduced in books 4-5 that has fuckall to do with anything that could resemble a "theme" in the story or any of its core characters. You can realize this is obviously going to be the case when you look at the length remaining and ask, "so how will this add anything / be resolved?" It feels like a webcomic in that regard, which isn't what you want for a serialized graphic novel. The art improvements in book 6 feel pretty jarring, which don't help. The resolution is ultimately tepid and sophomoric, though the guy wrote the book when he was still so young as for most of his life experience to be drawn from pop culture, so whatever.

Movie, by contrast, is slick and stylish and doesn't overstay its welcome. By not trying to be DEEP or PROFOUND or ARTSY, it gets to just be a fun romp with a fun concept - which were the best parts of the books anyways. It also cuts out those fucking stupid, empty side-stories that people jerked off to sound like they were cool comic connoisseurs despite their apparent obliviousness to the vapidity therein. The game has cool pixel art, cool music, and was generally fun to play with a defined aesthetic.

"Seconds," a more mature-ish attempt at a very similar concept (dealing with one's past), shows that Malley just has the same damn problem with writing. The art is much, much more interesting in Seconds and the characters are generally better-developed, such that the first half of the book had me fooled into thinking he'd figured it all out. It similarly shits the bed at the mid-point and begins introducing way too much shit, veering fundamentally away from the characters and situations we've been building on to feature some wacky one-ofs, and essentially offers a milquetoast boilerplate ending that amounts to the most simplistic and surface-level analysis of dealing with regret that one could imagine, completely removed from its interesting premise.

This is something that most graphic novel authors seem to have never picked up on, though, so it's not as if he's unique in that.

Not knowing how to properly end a story is hardly a problem with just graphic novels either. There's way too many stories with a solid premise and execution for the first 95%, but it's clear the writer(s) never planned out the overarching story so the ending comes out of nowhere and doesn't really follow up on the themes of the rest of the work. I can actually think of very few long works that actually DO have a satisfying ending that pays off on the story's themes.

 

[FuckedUp]

ITT:

Also yeah, if you've only seen the movie, you know nothing about what the graphic novels are like. They're also filled to the brim with clever (IMO) commentary, like "he's so fired" when he's jumping into a portal thing when fighting in the middle of his work shift.

 

[MemeGrey]

Its my least favorite Edgar Wright film and it has aged poorly. If you are an adult and still like it, kill yourself.

 

[Pissmaster]

There was a time when the blu ray was worth like $30 and I should have sold my copy 'cause i just checked ebay and now it goes for like $3

fucking dammit

 

[byuu]

I don't remember it trying to be super artsy pretentious or anything but maybe that's just me not picking up on shit.

Just look at the pretentious hipster who made it:

 

[Chad Nasty]

Can I debate you on how you are a slut for the piss?

 

[Milwaukee Macho Man]

My group of friends chose to see The Expendables over Scott Pilgrim and the loser of the group got super butthurt over it.

He made us watch it later on DVD and it was the cringiest nerd power fantasy shit I ever watched but that's just me. I prefer my cringey macho military power fantasy.

It was fine from a technical level I guess?