When you love anything for a long time, even the sort of love that means you really sort of hate it after awhile, you develop a softness for its habits and tropes, such that when you see them elsewhere, you might get a little fluttery inside. A few years ago I was using a crosswalk and, out of nowhere, got a huge whiff of the same perfume my ex-girlfriend used to wear; the cognitive dissonance of being hundreds of miles away and years older mixed with the intense smell memory nearly caused me to get plowed through by a municipal bus. This is also true with things that aren’t people you can kiss, as I found out when I recieved issues 1-3 of Scott Pilgrim in the mail, thanks to my friend Doug and Oni Press.

There are a lot of reasons why I fell in love with Scott Pilgrim, and going into all of them would veer me wildly off-course here; this is, after all, ostensibly all about videogames over here, regardless of how bad I want to scream at you about nine million bands or books or whatever. So, first: If you want an introduction to the book itself, you could do a lot worse than reading its Free Comic Book Day entry, keeping in mind that it’s the weakest thing of O’Malley’s I’ve read¹. Second: The trope-juxtapositioning-as-affection-magnet trick I’m going to explore absolutely also refers to things involving other mediums; the title of the third volume, Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness, is but one. Needless to say, if you’re in your mid-20’s, you’ll find a bunch to happen upon and squeal about in delight.

Anyhow, there’s a lot to discuss with even such a small focus². Understanding what makes Scott Pilgrim so great in this (admittedly minor) way involves not only understanding what there is to notice, but why it works³. The basic idea is this: The plot of Scott Pilgrim is aide and abetted by being set in a world very similar to ours, but yet a world in which impossible things happen, and are treated without surprise. Now, this absolutely isn’t the first comic book (or serialized graphic novel, or whatever) to use tenets of magical realism in its storytelling; one could argue that this has been one of the main tenets of sequential art since its inception⁴. What it is is one of the first to do this in ways which are almost strictly pulled from video games. A good example occurs midway through book 1, when it is revealed that Ramona Flowers is able to remain amazon.ca’s sole deliveryperson thanks to her ability to rollerblade through passageways which detour through people’s minds and “subspace,” whatever that is. Scott takes this in stride — our first inkling of magical realism’s existence in the book — and asks if it’s “like in Super Mario 2.” This is a small thing on the surface, but the fact is that, aside from the nerds among us who immediately thought “Like a tesseract! Paging Madame L’Engle!“, this is probably the best stab at an analogue for “rapid-transit subspace highways” anyone reading this site could come up with on short notice; what the hell is a rapid-transit subspace anything if not, essentially, a warp pipe? At this moment, Scott becomes someone to whom we can relate to on a deeper level; when presented with an unfolding wish-fulfillment reality that exists outside the scope of normal natural boundaries, the first thing he does is go, “Oh — like in Super Mario 2?” This may not be what we would do, but it’s what we’d imagine we’d do.

As the series progresses, more direct correlations between video games and Scott’s quest to defeat Ramona’s seven evil ex-boyfriends becomes clear; at some point I stopped feeling as though this were an adventure novel and more that it was a Worlds of Power novelization of some Super Mario 3/dating sim hybrid⁵. When Scott defeats enemies they drop pocket change; a dramatic scene is given extra tension by virtue of the fact that Scott misses a save point; one entire fight scene is redolent of nothing less than Space Channel 5⁶. Again, none of it ever becomes a focal plot point, and the relationship between the series and video games never becomes explicit — but this is why it works; it allows us to transplant an outside source of otherworldly logic and apply it to the book, such that when Scott uppercuts someone over a forest, you can say, “Oh, I guess he’s got a lot of stat points in Strength” instead of just getting confused⁷. A lot of the pacing and distinctive mise en scène in Scott Pilgrim likely has its roots in several mediums with a fast-paced, epic feel — it would not be outlandish to compare some of these scenes to music videos or Stephen Chow films — but it’s hard to keep from reading Ramona’s fight with Envy as anything but a boss battle after Scott receives an item box for defeating ex-boyfriend #2⁸

Finally, it’s important to note that (ostentibly) the main plot of the book centers around the development of a relationship between Scott and Ramona, and the effect it has on Scott’s group of friends. Dating and interpersonal relationships are probably the only things this book’s demographic obsesses over more than comic books and video games, and due to the way the narrative scrim is woven, when Scott (for example) hooks up with Ramona for the first time, there is a simultaneous sense of romantic elation, and also an inexplicable sensation of having beaten an insufferably difficult end boss. Friends; readers; I would be lying if I said that this is not more or less how I felt when I lost my virginity. Consider my cultural zeitgeist tapped; consider having yours tapped as well.

¹ This isn’t a dis; comparing a ridiculous and delightful 17-page one-off to a long-form project with a wildly ambitious story arc which spans multiple volumes is like taking Guided By Voices to task for never writing “Dopesmoker.”

² Obviously, spoilers ahoy.

³ The major themes, which are brilliant, are mostly concerned with the perils of dating and maintaining friendships^† in one’s mid-20’s; I know of no other graphic novels currently available which handle these topics with any sort of comprable honesty, insight, or wit. Much in the way that Blankets would have been life-changing for me at the age of thirteen, Scott Pilgrim has clawed its way into my oaken, grumpy heart.

^† O’Malley’s biggest coup in these regards was in making a character who, on paper, as a character outline, is sort of a douchebag but completely charming — and then managing to have him charm you while you read about his (sort of douchebaggy) exploits.

⁴ Not that I’m going to cover any of that here, either. Ain’t I a saint.

⁵ Or a successful take on Thousand Arms! Oh, burn!

⁶ …although O’Malley would later state in an interview that it was instead intended as an homage to Bollywood films, so there goes that theory.

⁷ In fact, the best part of Free Scott Pilgrim (if you haven’t already read it) is the discussion concerning stat bonuses, as granted by different sodas.

⁸ …and can’t even use it, for lack of “taking that skateboarding proficiency in the fifth grade.” Holy shit, do I love this series.