This is the second draft of this text. I have tried and failed to write a coherent narrative or at least to structure those thoughts in a way that they are not a rant about random buzzwords, trying to show a formative part of me in ink, then in pixels for randos on the internet to see. But how can one begin to strip emotionally? then have the guts to put those misformed thoughts for people to see.
I try to think of the first time I felt like this, like seeing a home I never had and wanting to be back there.
It was in middle school, when I had no money of my own and kept hearing my parents arguing loudly, those arguments always boiling down to that same thing: money.
I would browse the playstation network store, looking for demos or anything new to consume which had no cost other than having an internet connection. I stumbled upon the demo for scott pilgrim vs the world: the game, I decided to give it a shot, it looks like something similar to final fight, so how bad can it be? I cluelessly press X to download.
I boot up the game and I get to the character select screen and pick stills, i think he looks cool and will not at all influence any later awakenings for me later on.
When I spawn in the first level, a guitar riff which is simple yet fills me with some strange feeling of home.
The scenario could not be more different than the place i was living and grew up in, snow was something i got to see in random small mounds every two or so years. But this rendering was showing it completely covering the streets, I draw this comparison dear reader as my first example of the stark difference between the life portrayed in this game and my environment.
It is neither the only one, nor the most important, but it is the first example of the difference in what I would later realize was my material conditions.
following through the first level, what I saw was a town with even terrain, clean streets, and the people who were not trying to beat me up seemed happy enough, To put some contrast, even as i write this in 2025 some streets in my town which is the capital of a state has unpaved streets, and even those who are paved are often uneven, cracked, or just completely taken up by a “don vergas” who extends their garage to the edge of the street.
This was the first time i was made to feel like i was stuck or that i was dealt a “bad hand”, my family was not rich, but we never had to sell my playstation or go without electricity or even internet like i had heard some of my classmates tell me, i though i had a good life, but i couldn’t quite put my finger onto what exactly made me feel so… sad i had gone to the US many times by that age, i visited New york, massachusetts, texas, and california, so i had seen what streets of a so called first world country looked like.
what i later realized was that by no creation or even intention of ubisoft, or oni press or even brian o’malley was that i was seeing an advert, an advertisement for a way of life, the band, the outings in town, “teenage love” with my peers, that was being “sold to me” and mind you, most of that stuff is fine, i am not happy of having had to compete for girls my age against slimy 23 year olds as a 15 year old kid, and ironically enough that is a part of what happens in scott pilgrim and scott gets off basically… scott-free.
This writing seems all over the place (as I type this reading it off my pen and paper journal I honestly think I did an okay job so far).
Here is where I reveal my thesis: For most of my teenage years I felt like I, at some level, wished I was a “middle class” white kid living in a “boring town”.
After that every time I went to the US I wished that my heritage amounted to no more than a fact to spice up a white kid so to say instead of a very visible part of me, quite honestly this had before made me feel a constant underlying dread of being different or rather not accepting myself, add to this my later wrestling with bisexuality, thinking i should just pick a side, although i preferred women i could not ignore the attraction i felt for the same sex, I could not in good faith call myself straight.
all this doubt, when reading the visual novel seeing scott reminiscing of his younger years was like seeing what someone living in the first world would have, that was “not stolen from me”, it was never meant for me. I just felt inadequate and liike i was missing out, i had not the privilege of not being broken.
This text is about scott pilgrim i swear, through this retelling i have been jumping around my teenage years, from 13 to 17 to in retrospective paint an overall picture of my emotions during those years to a thing I experienced for the first time: Homophobia.
I cannot remember how i got to know that the little guy in a green sweater in the coffee shop was gay , for a 13 year old’s standards i was pretty non homophobic i would like to think, i had just absorbed some attitudes through osmosis of my environment, like thinking gay men are flamboyant and weird but outright hate to them? I had no reason to think what they did was immoral and the only people who would hate homosexual people would be a very out of touch old person. yeah, calling people gay was a funny insult because they probably would not do gay stuff i think and that would be funny i think, i at the time subscribed to the south park idea of calling people a fag as an insult, not because you are homophobic, but just cause, and i still kinda do subscribe to it, but maybe that is because that is a foreign word to me and saying but i do say “joto” a lot and all my LGBTQ+ friends do so to as well, but i digress with cultural differences, i think i should say slurs less but i get the white man, they are fun to say, the origins and the harm not so much.
So, back to the story, when i was playing i think the full game, not the demo with my little brother, my dumbass thought it was a good idea to tell my dad the random factoid that a character was gay , expecting for a “that’s cool” and him moving on, but instead i got a stern look from him and him asking “why are you playing games like that and much worse, showing them to your little brother?”, after a few seconds of silence i reealized that was my cue to stop the game and tell my brother to play something else.
I am sure if i were to tell my dad about that incident he would not remember it at all, but i remember it as the first time i experienced homophobia for real (even before realizing i was not straight look at that!).
There is this feeling of having missed out among my fellow AMABs of having missed out, and the truth is yes but actually no.
I am sure someone out there lived the perfect teenage dream of having a band, getting a pretty but not insanely hot girlfriend who loved them as much as a teenager can, drank beer in the woods and all that bullshit teenager stories tell, but that is an outlier on the teenage experience, which i later realized, i was not at fault for anything except being a bit too shy and not taking initiative, but that is what being a teenager is all about.
I used to have some semblance of envy for taller and more confident boys who were liked by girls and call them both vapid, and they were, but i was vapid and stupid too, maybe a girl would have liked me more if i was not an opinionated contrarian swastika drawing edgelord (i blame psychicpebbles in the sleepycast for making me think that shit was acceptable) I did a lot of stupid shit when i was a teenager but i got better i think, ic annot turn back time and undo, unsay so much shit i regret, save myself the pain of having to learn my lessons over and over again, but at the end, unlike scott and ramona i did get better and tried to atone for the sins i made as a stupid teenager.
This writing seems so surface level, but if I were to go into detail I might as well just write an autobiography and review everything I have ever done.
I still really like scott pilgrim.
The visual novel is the best.
Then the adult swim short animation from 2010.
Then scott pilgrim takes off.
then the tie in game.
and ONLY then the movie.