Scott Pilgrim was never the guy the movie made him out to be

polygon.com:

Scott Pilgrim isn’t getting any older. That’s really his problem, when you get right down to it. In 2010, the year the character made his big-screen debut in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, he was a youthful but dissipated 22 years old — a typical product of millennial slacker culture, energized out of his torpor through his quest to win the heart of his dream girl, Ramona Flowers. That quest, and the self-discovery that resulted from it, turned Scott Pilgrim (both the character hailing from Bryan Lee O’Malley’s early-2000s graphic novels and the Edgar Wright-directed adaptation thereof) into a touchstone for a whole generation of semi-sensitive young men who came of age in the early 2000s. For them — for us — Scott was the quintessential Nice Guy: quasi-living proof that the sensitive, needy, guitar-strumming mediocrities among us could inherit, if not the Earth, then at least a girl with really good taste in CDs.

Thirteen years later, Scott Pilgrim remains just as young as he ever was, but the world hasn’t — and therein lies the trouble. Because 2023 isn’t 2010, and the version of Nice Guyhood Scott embodied has, through the passage of time and societal reckoning, turned out to be a lot less charming than we originally suspected. Looking back from our vantage point a decade later, we have to wonder: Was Scott really ever the nice guy we imagined him to be? Or were we always just trying to make him a reflection of the same weird, flawed guyhood we were living in at the time? As the franchise prepares to make its return to screen life on Netflix soon, it’s worth asking the question: What does Scott Pilgrim’s fight against toxic masculinity look like in the world of today?

If we want to understand what kind of guy Scott