assuming the mistake

I’m not going to argue here that video games or comics contain more positive depictions of women than do movies, because that would be crazy. Rather: they could. Movies are old enough and big enough now that their artistic expectations have become indistinguishable from their technical features; somehow, the need to have a male protagonist is as unavoidable as keeping a film under two hours, or lining the sound up with the visuals. Games and comics are still relatively new, and relatively small, and still doing a lot of internal thinking about how they can and could work. As those get figured out, they’ll inevitably get wedded to aesthetic features, and harden into conventions that become self-reinforcing as audience expectation determines what will and won’t be rewarding. Scott Pilgrim represents one particular argument about how comics could work, and it’s an argument I like. But mostly, I like that it’s having this argument. That’s not really present in Scott Pilgrim the movie, and while I understand how that happens, and while I did enjoy it, I’m not entirely happy about it.