dot_fennel | Scott Pilgrim conjecturing (Reply)

This post contains Scott Pilgrim spoilers through book 4. It also contains pointless nerdy conjectures sparked by a piece of information posted on the artist's website.

I had expected 7 books in total, since, you know, seven evil exes. Perhaps that number also seemed more reasonable because of Harry Potter. But anyway, scottpilgrim.com says right there on the front page that there will only be six.

Ramona has variously said she has six, seven, or eight evil ex-boyfriends. I had been assuming that this meant seven 'boss battles', with her count varying with whether Roxanne was included ("I'm not a boy!") and whether the twins counted as 1 or as 2. Now I wonder, though: does that number include Gideon? He's presumably the figure Ramona is sitting at the feet of when Scott accidentally enters her head in book 4, and if I recall correctly, she's slightly evasive about whether he's "an ex-boyfriend" in book 1.

So this is a pretty thin reed, but I've been trying to figure out whether 'the twins' sound like a typical second-to-last boss or third-to-last boss for a video game. Gideon is a pretty typical final boss: shadowy, with an emotional connection to one of the main protagonists. Penultimate bosses tend to be brawny and overwhelming, I think: Sagat (Street Fighter II), Goro (Mortal Kombat), Pyramid Head (Silent Hill II)... ah, I'm drawing a blank. In Rock Band, Iron Maiden's "Run To The Hills" is the second-to-last song in all the solo tour modes, and it involves doing the same punishingly-hard thing over and over and over again for four minutes, whereas all the FINAL songs are longer tracks with some ebb and flow, some chances to rest and changes to show off punctuating the climactic challenging bits.

Given how scared Scott seemed at the idea of fighting twins, I guess they do make sense as a penultimate boss. But the foreshadowing about Ramona still being attached to Gideon really makes me expect some kind of surprise there, and the back-and-forth about exactly how many evil exes she has seems like the most likely spot for that to come in.

Also, is there actually a Chaos Theater in New York City? O'Malley is apparently scrupulous about using existing Toronto locations, but "Chaos Theater" sounds suspiciously like it might have been invented for a climactic showdown.

(Also also, I got NES emulation running on my Mac so I could try playing Clash At Demonhead. I'm not sure I see the appeal.)