{"id":779,"date":"2010-08-17T00:01:36","date_gmt":"2010-08-17T04:01:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2010\/08\/17\/read-this-scott-pilgrim-4\/"},"modified":"2010-08-16T22:56:53","modified_gmt":"2010-08-17T02:56:53","slug":"read-this-scott-pilgrim-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2010\/08\/17\/read-this-scott-pilgrim-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Read This: Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"image778\" src=\"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/scott-pilgrim-4.jpg\" alt=\"scott-pilgrim-4.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p><b>NOTE:<\/b> Very little of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.powells.com\/partner\/29017\/biblio\/1932664491\"><i>Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together<\/i><\/a> makes it into the movie, and what does turn up does so in a highly altered\/condensed form.<\/p>\n<p>Which is a bit of a shame, really, because this installment of the story puts Scott Pilgrim&#8217;s love for Ramona to a test more real and more serious than the battles with the seven evil exes&#8212;the return of his best friend from high school, the girl he never dated but maybe could&#8217;ve\/maybe should&#8217;ve. Also, he&#8217;s working on proving to Ramona that he&#8217;s not a slacker by getting a job&#8230; which turns out to be way too easy, something we could say about a lot of Scott&#8217;s life. The other aspect of this book that is most unfortunately lost from the movie is the nuance of Scott&#8217;s friendship with Kim (seen above)&#8212;that also goes back to high school (as we saw back in <a href=\"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2010\/08\/13\/read-this-scott-pilgrim-2\/\"><i>Scott Pilgrim vs. the World<\/i><\/a>). Events in this book make it clear that the urban fantasy elements framing Scott and Ramona&#8217;s relationship are &#8220;real&#8221; enough that Kim can experience them, too&#8212;so this isn&#8217;t all just in Scott&#8217;s head.<\/p>\n<p>It started building up in <a href=\"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2010\/08\/13\/read-this-scott-pilgrim-3\/\"><i>Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness<\/i><\/a>, but this is the point where it becomes so clear Bryan Lee O&#8217;Malley is using <i>shonen manga<\/i> and video game metaphors to tell a very serious story about emotional maturity. One of my favorite bloggers, Chris Sims, wrote a fascinating essay last week about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.comicsalliance.com\/2010\/08\/10\/archie-married-life-betty-veronica\/\">why making the <i>Archie<\/i> gang grownups doesn&#8217;t work<\/a>: &#8220;If you make him the typical aimless twentysomething, his relatable problems suddenly aren&#8217;t that funny.&#8221; And that may be true of the <i>Archie<\/i> characters because of the decades of accumulated cultural relevance they&#8217;ve acquired, but Scott Pilgrim and his friends don&#8217;t have that restraint; we&#8217;re getting to know them for the first time, so while it may be disconcerting to have the comic veer from &#8220;Big Battle as metaphor for relationship issues&#8221; to &#8220;serious conversations about relationship issues,&#8221; it&#8217;s a narrative bait-and-switch that totally works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NOTE: Very little of Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together makes it into the movie, and what does turn up does so in a highly altered\/condensed form. Which is a bit of a shame, really, because this installment of the story puts Scott Pilgrim&#8217;s love for Ramona to a test more real and more serious than [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}