After last week’s post about the end of National Novel Writing Month and my goals for maintaining my writing habits going forward, I feel kinda bad writing about my continued deep and abiding exhaustion. Being at work has been draining, as it always is, and I’ve found myself frequently feeling spread too thin. Doing too much is kind of my defining character trait at this point, since I can’t really seem to figure out any other way to live my life and do the things I’d like to do. There’s just too much that I need (or desperately want) to do. So, I’m going to talk about the thing I bought myself as a treat for being a Responsible Adult (aka, doing all my DIY and cleaning projects before people showed up for Thanksgiving) and then read during my post-Thanksgiving recovery weekend. I finally decided to buy and read all of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels. Specifically the large color ones. This has been on my to-read list for at least a decade at this point, but I usually just forgot about them (my reason for not buying them in the past five years) or didn’t have Graphic Novel Money when it came to buying books (you can get more book per buck with a paperback and I spent a lot of years needing to manage my entertainment budget very closely). I mean, I really enjoyed the movie and one of my closest friends loved the graphic novels, so it felt long overdue. Plus, I got a huge Black Friday discount on them despite ordering them over a week before Thanksgiving, so that helped. It also helped that there was a Netflix show that recently released and I figured I ought to read the graphic novels first.

I’ll get into the Netflix series in a week or two, but I definitely enjoyed the graphic novels more than the movie. I feel like the story is more complete in the graphic novels (which makes sense, since its got a whole lot more story real estate than the movie does), but I honestly don’t really feel like the movie was about something more than “a guy fights the evil ex-partners of a woman he wants to go out with and becomes a slightly more mature and less terrible person along the way.” The graphic novels feel more like a story about two people who have spent their life avoiding all of their problems and mistakes who run into each other, start to go out, and then wrap each other up in each other’s messy lives. Sure, the movie shows Scott getting caught up in Ramona’s messy past pretty heavily, but it also minimizes the specific messiness of her past while almost entirely erasing the messiness of Scott’s past. It also really emphasises the somewhat fecklessness and harmlessness of Scott, a position the graphic novel presents and then slowly undermines throughout the entire series. I still enjoy the movie, but I really feel like it made some choices to trim down the series that removed more than they absolutely needed to. Sure, it winds up as a loose adaption that fits the pacing of a movie better (which is why I still enjoy watching it), but I really feel like they could have done more with the characters in the movie if they’d focused on being a loose adaption rather than cramming in as many references as they could have.

Anyway. The one thing I keep thinking about as I get further and further from the day I finished the graphic novels is that the story was ultimately about two people growing up. While it centered the narrative through Scott’s point of view, it was just as much about Ramona as it was about Scott. Both of them are avoiding their pasts. Ramona by running from hers and Scott by forgetting about his. Both characters are incredible hypocrits who seem perfect for each other because they’re flawed in such incredibly similar ways. Both of them have similar coping mechanisms, both of them seem to have consistently been the person in the wrong in a lot of their past interpersonal conflicts, both of them seem incredibly easy for other people to like and hate depending on the day and the person’s most recent interaction with our protagonists, and both of them seem intent on leaving the lives of those around them littered with the detritus of their own life as they seek to avoid doing the work required to grow up.

I could probably write a whole blog post about the sexist tropes of Ramona settling for Scott the entire time and how, despite being a rather worthless layabout who doesn’t have a job, he’s the one depicted as the character to make the first move to help both him and Ramona start to clean up their lives. Sure, Ramona has a stable job, a decent social life, and seems like a somewhat decent person at her worst, but she doesn’t really make progress to change until Scott starts pointing out that he’s trying to be better than he was before and that it should matter that people are trying to grow beyond the mistakes of their past. His entire character arc hinges around the idea that he is trying to be better, mostly for Ramona at first but eventually for his own sake (which the movie kind of wraps into the “fighting for myself” bit at the end that gives him the weapon he needs for the Boss Fight), and it sort of wraps Ramona into that change as well rather than give her an arc of her own.

The problem is, Scott being pathetic at everything but fighting is kind of the point. He’s a bully. When he’s finally called out for forgetting his past and essentially erasing everything from his past that he doesn’t want to think about or remember (heavily represented by his insistance that he doesn’t drink, sometimes while he has an alcoholic beverage in his hand), we see a few corrected flashbacks. Scenes that, in his memory were heroic or him doing the right thing, were corrected to show him being a bully or emotionally neglecting his high school girlfriend. Sure, the villain mentions that he was messing with Scott’s mind a bit, but his terrible memory is a choice he made to avoid thinking about all the mistakes he’s ever made or about anything that might upset him. Ramona is supposed to be seen as strong and dependable because her whole thing was walking away from people. Almost all of her relationships ended because she left people behind, striking out on her own or playing people against each other so that she could just leave them and the wreckage she caused behind. Now, there’s probably a lot of ways that the comic could have shown that sort of behavior without falling dangerously close to a lot of sexist tropes, but we didn’t get that. We got this.

More than anything else, the graphic novels emphasize the way the world and the people around our two protagonists change around the much larger timescale covered in the graphic novels. Scott and Ramona remain static for the most part, though we start to see some change in Scott as he realizes that he needs to be a better person (a realization largely forced on him by other people), despite how much the people around them grow and change. There’s multiple times where Scott doesn’t realize something has changed until someone either points it out to him because they’re sick of him acting like nothing has happened or until he realizes something has changed and asks the people around him what it was. I’ve known poeple like this and find it infuriating, so I don’t really blame any of the other characters in the graphic novel for being as pissed off at Scott as they are in any given scene. I’d probably have stopped letting him into my home a long time ago. But that’s beside the point. The point is, the story is ultimately about growing up, learning to change, and trying to accept people for who they are and who they’re becoming rather than boxing them into the shape of the person they used to be. A theme I find very compelling, given my own efforts to change and the absolute wall I’ve run into with some of the people who used to be in my life and who refused to change or even engage with the person I am and am becoming rather than the image of a past version of me that they have in their head.

This theme of change and working to be a better person one step at a time really hits hard these days. I’ve been working on incrimentally improving my life for the past couple years while also struggling through some of the worst and most difficult times in my life. It’s not easy and I don’t always make forward progress, but it really matters that I’m trying. I might not succeed all the time, but I’m still trying. Even if I fail, as long as I’m doing my best to make ammends and to minimize the impact my screw-ups have on other people, then I should be given the space I need to change. Not necessarily forgiveness, of course, since no one owes you that, but I should not be confined to the shape of the person I no longer am. I mean, that’s not all in the Scott Plgrim graphic novels. Some of that is me using Scott Pilgrim to talk about how tired and burned out I am after a month of pushing myself despite knowing that I’d wind up exhausted and burned out if I did, but the seeds of those thoughts are there. Self-improvement is a process and no one just wakes up different. It’s a slow series of changes until you suddenly realize you’re different than you used to be.

Anyway, I’m tired and still need to go watch Scott Pilgrim Takes Off so I can finally see the story that happens after the early twist I had spoiled for me (turns out Bluesky is just like old Twitter in that regard: spoilers for things in less than a damn day from when they’re released), so I’m gonna leave this all here and hope you’ve had time to enjoy a story even if there are parts of it that are flawed. Sometimes, if you’re a little generous, a flaw isn’t always that bad. It can be a chance to improve or an intentional bit of commentary. Not all characters should be perfect. Sometimes we need to see someone fuck something up so we can get the catharsis of seeing them realize their mistake and work to fix it.