Iâm going on a ramble for a minute here, because Iâve been looking for an excuse and this pic is the perfect illustration for my incoherent mess of thoughts and feelings regarding Legacy-canon/Legacy!Flynnâs painful regression compared to 1982-canon/1982!Flynn.
I know I post a lot(?) about how much Legacy!Flynn makes me D: and D:< and *headdesk*, but honestly, the longer I dwell on it, the angrier I get on his characterâs behalf. His development between one movie and the next, as presented in the various Legacy-era materials, makes a tragic amount of sense; I can actually find an understandable line of thought and coherent development in his view of programs. But at the end of the 1982 movie, he had a good thing going for him. The path of eternal tragedy and damnation was not inevitable.
Iâm just forever WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY-ing over the fact that Kosinski & co opted for a sequel thatâs so a) depressing, and b) infuriating.
Okay, lemme first make clear why I keep conflating Canon As A Whole with Flynn at all, and why I donât do the same to any other characters. In 1982, Flynn is the one who discovers the digital world, explores it, and saves it. In Legacy, Sam is the one who discovers the digital world. But his journey is less about the exploration and the good of the digital world, and more about freeing Flynn. Everything he learns about the world is colored by his connection with Flynn, and whatever ideas he has about helping the digital world boil down to âget out WITH DAD and fix shit from OUTSIDEâ. Flynn is, in both movies, our tourguide/expert opinion/human perspective/what have you to the digital world. And in both movies, he serves more or less as the author spokesperson. Itâs not his fault the Legacy-era Powers That Be seem to hate the natives the 1982-era Powers That Be spent a whole movie making us care about.
Okay? *pets Flynn* Okay then.
Before disaster struck, Flynn was an overgrown kid. Obnoxious at times, yes, but not a bad guy at heart. He was the kind of adult that never grew up and was all the more brilliant for it. The excentric genius, open to everything and able to charisma anyone into following him in any of his passions. And he was passionate about a great many things. At first there was the digital world - the entire digital world. And Encom. And his family. And it was a struggle for him to balance them all, which is where the first seeds of disaster are sown. Then Jordan died and the ISOs emerged. Sources vary on when either of those things happen, let alone in relation to each other, but I personally prefer the ARG version of Jordan dying just a year or so before Flynn disappears. Because letâs be real: a grieving Flynn becoming obsessed with the ISOs because their spontaneous, âimmaculateâ birth gives him hope of somehow getting his dead wife back on top of them being the newest and shiniest aliens to poke and sorta-kinda making the now-familiar Basics seem boring in comparison? Is a hundred times more sympathetic than him deciding basics are inferior and disposable, rejecting everything his 1982 adventure and Ramâs death taught him, solely because ISOs were the newest and shiniest aliens to poke.
Okay. Mayby not solely. Which is where the pic above comes in.
In the first movie and related materials, itâs sort of implied that the personality of a program - even the very fact that they are a person to begin with - is spiritual rather than code-based. Programs look exactly like their programmers, and the novelization explicitly states that they act a lot like them too. If nothing else, we know that being a living and/or lively thing inside the computer doesnât take a lot, if any, effort on the part of the human programmer. Just look at Bit. Itâs a bit. A 0-or-1 option. And itâs alive. Of course, programs are still programs, so their programming will have a significant role to play in their behavior. But in the words of Brian Daley, the novelizer: âThe programs are only algorithms as human beings are only collections of chemicals.â If you assume a 50/50 deal in the nature vs nurture debate in humans, I think it would be safe to say the same goes for programs. Iâd also say: unless thereâs a psychological problem that needs fixing, and youâre looking for the most effective way of going about doing that, it doesnât matter. Itâs a person, with thoughts and feelings and self-awareness, and thatâs all that matters.
Long story short, 1982 canon says programs and other digital constructs are people. Like, Real People people, regardless of how they came to be and what plane of existence they reside in. And one of the big themes is that Flynn realises that they are real, and they are people, and they matter.
Then Flynn starts building his own Grid, taking what he learned in the Encom network in with him. And okay. In their natural state, programs have a tendency to be little Frankensteins of code + their creatorâs looks and personalities. They even instinctively mimic their creatorsâ relationships. And to get the amount of variety in personality and appearance seen on Flynnâs Grid, he may have had to develop some kind of manual randomizer of traits. (Maybe. Couldâve been more spiritual mumbo-jumbo instead.) One or both of those things could, in the long term, have made a dent in the lessons he learned in 1982. Maybe. On the other hand, prolonged exposure to and interaction with them should also have it even more clear that programs are real people with real lives and real feelings, people who matter. Right?
1982!Tron goes out of its way to show that thereâs much, much more to a programâs personality than just the code its programmer wrote. Yet in Legacy, programs get a complete personality overhaul via just code-manipulation. Aside from the obvious question (how does that even work?!*), what are we supposed to take away from this? That Cluâs actions are just that heinous, or that something so easily altered really isnât worth as much as a Real Person? Iâm usually fond of option c) both, but in this case A and B kind of cancel each other out. :\
(* My personal head!canon is that rewrites only have such a dramatic effect when they happen from inside the computer. When a program is edited from the outside, you only change the code thatâs actually written, the functions, not the âsparkâ of âsoulâ or whatever makes them a person. But when youâre face to face with the program, person to person, you can, if you want or arenât careful, make a much bigger impact.)
How often and how severely alien do they have to be before Flynn stops seeing a race of living, thinking, feeling creatures and starts seeing âjust programs, it doesnât matter if they all die, their code can always be reinstalledâ? After a thousand years of loss, guilt, grief, fear, isolation, frustration, defeat and food that tastes like motor oil, a thousand years of hell, I wouldnât have been surprised if that was what he ended up thinking. It would have made sense - tragic sense - if the suffering he went through had burned up every shred of compassion Flynn had for programs. But not a single word of canon so much as hints at that. Heâs supposed to be a Zen master by the end of those thousand years, moved beyond such things. So when did that dismissiveness take root?
Lots of options and questions, lots of potential to go back and forth on the issue. Which is great, from a storytelling standpoint! Thereâs just one thing putting a damper on it for me. Are we supposed to agree with Flynnâs preference for ISOs and disregard for Basics, or be critical of it? (It would be nice to know not only in regards to Flynnâs character, but it would also help as a bit of a guideline to how programs really work. âCause right now I have a metric ton of headcanon about how I want it to be and almost none of it is based on hard facts.)
On the one hand, Flynnâs treatment of the Basics landed him a thousand year stay in HELL. On the other, the grand finale - save the ISO and kill the Basic, save the biological son and destroy the digital one -Â doesnât suggest he should have learned differently. The lessons he learned - that the perfection he tried to achieve through Clu and the basics was worthless - actually reaffirms the attitude that led to his downfall.
And so we have a movie with more Basic characters than human and ISO ones; Basics with a dozen different personalities and worldviews and coping mechanisms in the face of a dozen different kinds of suffering; Basics who display love and loyalty, sacrifice and brokenness and bravery; we have Betrayal, and Uprising; but all the most prominent ones are villains. And the parting message seems to be that Flynn sacrificing himself for one human and one ISO makes up for all the mistakes he made and all the suffering he caused, to everyone. Even the Basics he couldnât give less of a shit about at that moment.
Meanwhile, in a pitch-perfect display of symbolic irony, Tron - who was once a protagonist; who was once a fighter, a lover, a friend, a victorious hero - is taken down in a 1:18 minute (!!) flashback, has a whopping five lines of dialogue, spends the entire movie brainwashed into a program with no resemblance to his own identity, which gets no recognition or sympathy aside from one line that could just as easily be a fucking accusation, and when he finds himself again at the end⌠itâs only to crash into a giant ocean of pure virus and SINK.
Seriously, guys. What impression do they expect us to take away from this?
The Tron universe, like Toy Story, takes lifeless items we use and discard at will IRL and turns them into human-equivalent, living beings. Thinking, feeling beings that faithfully serve us, that adore us, whose continued existence and wellbeing are pretty much entirely dependent on us. Thereâs a certain amount of responsibility on the human charactersâ parts thatâs inextricably tied to the premise. Namely: if you hurt them, or neglect them, or otherwise mistreat them, youâre no better than a puppy-kicker.
1982!Flynnâs story was all about coming to understand this, and accepting his responsibility. Legacy!Flynnâs story is that he kicked the puppy. And when the puppy bit back, he put only a minimal effort into making it right again for the wounded creature in his care before killing it. And weâre expected to consider that a happy ending.
No matter how much I like the movie otherwise, because of that I canât watch it without feeling a little dirty.
(I really really hope that when Tron 3 comes out, it josses EVERYTHING I SAID HERE. Also holy shit, why do I always do this at way-too-early-in-the-morning, I am either going to regret posting this until the end of time or Iâm falling back into my Post-Traumatic Fandom Syndrom from times spent in wankier fandoms. *hides under blankie*)
