[WARNING – Slight spoilers for “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” Ahead. Watch it, then come back!]

It’s hard to remember the exact when, but I certainly know where I first discovered Brian Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim novels. While the inside has drastically changed into a holder of Funko’s, merchandise, and DVD’s, back in 2006, Books-A-Million for many became the place to find the manga collections of favorite anime shows and to discover new unknowns, with big brands Viz Media and Tokyo Pop helping young artists near and far find their careers or hold hope for one. Oni Press was an outlier, making it immediately stand out from the sets, and like another big indie hit, Megatokyo, it wasn’t a byproduct from Japan. So, being me, I got curious, picked it up, and immediately fell in love with the mean streets of Toronto, Canada, one volume after the next.

Scott Pilgrim is the story about an awkward 23 year old that was more or less maintaining in life, jamming with his band, aimless at what the future held when one day, at a party he wasn’t invited to, he falls in love at first sight with our female leading character, Ramona Flowers. Ramona was alternative, beautiful, and was new to town (just moved in from NYC), working a job delivering for Amazon through the Subspace Highway that also goes through Scott’s dreams. They meet, they hit it off, but then one after the other, her past love interests in the form of the League Of Evil Exe’s come to battle Scott because, in the simplest motivation, they’re mad because they weren’t chosen. Working his way through the ranks, Scott along the way finds that, just like the league’s members, he too is problematic for similar yet different reasons, eventually fighting his own dark reflection in the form of Shadow Scott, making for a quick change in time to face down Gideon Graves, the 7^th and most powerful Ex, and win Ramona’s heart, all ending with a scene of the pair, hand-in-hand, walking through a reset door in order for them to try again.

In my view, that’s really where Scott Pilgrim Takes Off truly starts, and that’s what makes the 8-episode set really shine. In storytelling, the richer your characters are, the ones that make the most impact and allow such elements as the environments and scenarios they’re put into shine that much brighter, the better. By the end of “Takes Off”, I had a sudden realization; As much as I loved the unique types of exe’s that Scott’s opponents would turn out to be in the original novels, other than Ramona’s very limited flashbacks, we knew nothing about them. From Matthew Patel all the way to the twins, we knew they felt burned by love in the past, that they hated Scott for just being the next person in line for Ramona’s affections, and that they were powerful for different reasons, but that’s it. They were dominos in Scott’s path to be toppled on the way to “winning” Ramona.

“We’re not actually evil, it’s just branding”.

– Lucas Lee

One of my favorite quotes from the series is directly from Lucas Lee, Ex #2 in the original order; “We’re not actually evil, it’s just branding”. There’s a ton of commentary on how it is ok, for specific stories, for bad guys to be just that at the end of the day; bad. However, in the story being told, with all the gamer references, special powers, and impossible scenarios, it’s one that takes place in our world, and mostly revolved around elevated emotions surrounding the very toxic ideal of a person being a prize to be won, an aspect that’s challenged to varying degrees in each version of the story. What I’m getting at is these people are human, dealing with human emotions, and coming from very human situations that we’re supposed to believe makes them into these homicidal figures. When the end of the first episode diverted from just allowing Scott to win, suddenly the story had nowhere to go, despite having Scott’s name attached, and it is still his story, but that loss was a gain I didn’t ever theorize expecting.

From there, it is Ramona’s story in how she takes a very different type of loss, but also exposing for the audience what kind of effect Scott had on her from that first date as she seeks to prove he’s still around. And then the dominos fall a completely different way. It’s also Roxie’s story, for how she still harbors ill feelings not toward Scott, but Ramona for leaving her at a vulnerable point while attending college. It’s Lucas’s story, the big shot actor that has an enormous ego, to the point where reading his own scripts is a waste to him, even as his movies are failing at the box office. Even Gideon, even though he is who we previously know best from the League, get more fleshed out after a slight fall from grace early on as kind of a regular guy. By the end, the very one-dimensional motivations given previously fall apart, and we’re left with cool cast members that bring way more fun, laughs, and most importantly, depth to the story.

After a successful comic book series, film, and amazing game that is an ode to beat-em up side-scrollers, I’m over the story rehashes of the Pilgrim-verse. I did not expect to like anything about the new series, aside from the art style and maybe a little filler. What we got was so much deeper than that, and it is a refreshing take that isn’t agonizing to watch, not because the story beats are common knowledge at this point, almost 20 years since its debut, but because there is multiple glaring problems with Scott and his journey that only slightly get touched on by the end of the final volume. “Takes Off” does allow Pilgrim to grow a bit, but more importantly, with O’Malley guiding part of the direction in the remixed tale, almost every key character of his gets their own personal story as well, and that couldn’t be more deserving for the cult classic.

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