Tron: 1982: The Irreverent Gay Version

[Armada]

Hokay! I am fed and ready for storytelling Round 2!

TRON: LEGACY: NOT AS GAY AS THE FIRST ONE BUT WITH BETTER MUSIC AND PRETTY LIGHTS

or, wait, hold on, actually, because some stuff happened in between there that requires explanation

TRON: 1982-1989 OR SO: THE BORING PART

Alan and Lora get married. Flynn gets married to and has a kid with somebody offscreen, and then she dies, so we don't have to pay any attention to her. Flynn, who is an utter moron, decides that what would be a great idea is to actively hide the existence of program-people, decommission ENCOM's laser thing, and install a smaller version of it, along with a desk-touchscreen-computer, in a secret room under the arcade that he still owns because... sentiment, I guess. He attempts to split his time between his kid and the small country he's trying to run, which works out for none of the above. With the kid, Sam, he's just sort of absent. Eventually he up and vanishes, gets presumed dead, and Sam goes to live with Alan and Lora and has a basically normal life aside from it not involving his parents.

TRON: 1982+LEGACY: THE INTERESTING PARTS WITH IMPORTANT CAPITAL LETTERS

The Grid, which is what the desktop thing winds up being called despite not containing a grid of any sort, starts out with nothing on it. Flynn imports Tron and presumably some other people, then realizes that there's a reason we make computers run their own brains, and wishes up a program he calls Codified Likeness Utility, which is a retrofit to the little hacker program from the first movie, also named Clu, but whatever. Clu's purpose, supposedly, is to act as a stand-in for Flynn and make decisions when he isn't there. In practice, Flynn does not bother coding him the normal way, just pulls him out of thin air and literally tells him, "You're going to make the perfect system." First thing. Flynn is a goddamn idiot.

Over the next half-decade or so, Flynn fucks around with the Grid and the people living on the Grid pretty much however he wants. Nobody does anything because it's "the will of the Users," except for Clu, who is getting steadily more frustrated with Flynn's inability to sit still for three goddamn seconds and answer questions like "what do you mean, it'll figure itself out?" Around 1986 or so, Flynn discovers that the segment of the Grid he let "grow wild," called the Sea of Simulation, has produced program-people on its own, called Isomorphic Algorithms, or Isos. He is fascinated by them and drops all his other projects to figure out what their deal is, eventually setting them up throughout Tron City and in an enclave of their own which... has a name that I don't remember.

Since Flynn's other projects are people, they don't take it fantastically well. I get the sense that by this point Tron was the only basic (normal program) who was still staunchly supporting Flynn; at the very least, most other basics were off doing their own thing, and Clu was quietly planning to murder Flynn somehow.

In 1989 User-time, Clu brainwashes/convinces the Grid's security team - both of these things are very vaguely defined, but the general idea is that he now has a lot of very good fighters doing what he wants - and stages a coup against Flynn. Tron puts himself between Flynn and what are probably his former friends/coworkers in order to buy Flynn time to run away, which he does. Unfortunately he runs in the opposite direction as the laser transport point island thing, and gets trapped in the Outlands, which are what happens when you don't defragment your computer often enough. The laser is only open for a millicycle, or eight hours subjective, and once that's gone he's stuck. Tron never shows up and given that his last known status was being pummeled to death by six other guys, odds are he kicked it.

Clu destroys the Iso enclave and, over the next few subjective centuries, gains control of the Grid less the Outlands and wipes out most of the Isos. He dumps a virus into the Sea so they can't come back, and generally proceeds to try and make a "perfect system," which goes about as well as you'd expect. There are some stragglers, after whom he sends the former security programs, now called the Black Guard. I'm not sure why, because everyone's jumpsuit things are black and their circuits are reddish-orange, but whatever. Nothing Clu does makes a whole lot of sense, which in itself does make sense considering that he's operating under a terrible directive with about a quarter of a brain. Anyone who objects to this gets "rectified," or brainwashed into a loyal foot soldier. Flynn never reappears and eventually turns into a sort of not-particularly-helpful rumor. I forget if there was any Jesus-allegory "the Users will return and save us" bullshit, but odds are high.

Meanwhile, Sam is 21, has graduated college, and decided that what he wants to do with his life is hack into ENCOM and wreck their shit. He releases the latest version of ersatz Office onto the internet and replaces the presentation for it with a video of his dog, then BASE jumps off the building and somehow doesn't die or get arrested. Alan shows up to deliver a very well-worn lecture on being responsible, or something like that (it's clear that Sam has never listened to this so I didn't bother either), and kicks off the plot in the form of telling Sam that the lights in the old arcade have kicked back on for some reason and would he please go check it out. Sam is much more certain than Alan that Flynn is not going to magically unearth himself, but goes anyway and finds the little secret room with the laser and the computer. He turns everything on and pushes some buttons.

And hey presto, he is now in a computer! Wowee. He gets picked up by, what else, a Recognizer, and sorted into a group of people going to the Games. He doesn't already have a disc or a jumpsuit thing, so they give him one and pit him against some other random program in a bracket-style tournament. Eventually he faces off against Rinzler, one of the Black Guard, and there is a short but hilarious shot of Rinzler splitting his disc apart to make two discs, and Sam trying and failing to do the same thing. Rinzler gets in one good hit on Sam's arm, stops when he sees blood, and hyperfocuses on it. You do you, man. Sam gets put in 3v3 Death Snake But With More Than Four Directions, and a program lady shows up in something like the weird lovechild of an ATV and a monster truck and hauls Sam's ass out of the fire.

Program lady's name is Quorra, and it turns out she lives in the middle of nowhere with Flynn. There's a few seconds where Quorra and Sam are standing around awkwardly and she starts chatting about the books on the bookshelf. "Do you know Jules Verne?" she says.

"Uh I guess so?" says Sam.

With all the sparkling enthusiasm of a True Fan hoping to meet an idol: "What's he like?"

Quorra is adorable and Flynn is an idiot.

Flynn's guiding philosophy has apparently been to "take himself out of the equation" for the last thousand years. The logic essentially goes that Flynn has some kind of on-switch for the laser on his disc, but he doesn't dare try to cross the Outlands, the City, and the Sea to reach it for fear that Clu will take it and invade Userland with it.

Sam, reasonably, points out that this is bullshit, and also the portal is open now anyway, they had better get there first. Flynn has inertia going for him. Quorra helps Sam steal an old lightcycle and they head off to the City in search of Castor/Zuse, the program who helped her escape the city while Clu was taking over. Flynn goes after them and catches up with them once pretty much every named character shows up at Castor's place. Sucks to be Castor, because he tries to cut a deal with Clu for Flynn's disc and gets killed anyway. Our Heroes run for it and regroup in a bit. Flynn explains that he could kill Clu by "reintegrating" with him, but that this would also kill him too, for... poorly defined reasons.

There are a lot of poorly defined reasons in this movie.

Anyway, the plan is still to book it to the portal and hope they can reach it before Clu, because then they can just... I dunno, uninstall him or something. Turn the computer off. Set the place on fire. Whatever. There are plenty of pretty stunts along the way, it is a very visually impressive movie even if it doesn't make a lick of sense. They steal a Solar Sailer and Quorra gets dinged in the arm, which because she's a program causes her arm to turn into dust and fall off, and in the process of debugging her (which, adorably, involves opening up her disc and pulling out little glowy moths from her code - literally, debugging her, get it - ) Sam finds out Quorra is the last Iso on the Grid, this being the other reason Flynn has been hiding in the Outlands doing jack all for a millennium. This is a vaguely significant revelation but doesn't actually change anything, except that Quorra and Sam make friends on the way to the Sailer depot thing.

They get there at roughly the same time as Clu, steal back Flynn's disc and also a plane, and leave for the portal island with Clu and the Black Guard in pursuit. They shoot down all the Guards but Clu and Rinzler, and at some point Flynn sees Rinzler and recognizes Tron's circuitry, only an hour and a half later than the rest of us. Tronzler, on seeing Flynn, has some (?) of his code (?) revert (?) and instead of shooting at Flynn and co, rams into Clu's plane and knocks him out of the... well, the not-sky. They fall, Tronzler tries to do two different, contradictory, things at once, and Clu grabs his - it's this baton thing, it turns into a one-person plane or a lightcycle based on context - and leaves Tronzler to slam into the Sea. See, Tron? Friends don't leave friends for dead. C'mon. The last we see of Tronzler is him sinking, circuitry flickering between red, blue, and off.

Clu chases them to the island. Sam and Quorra get to the portal, but Flynn is slow and gets caught. Clu gets ahold of his disc, only to find out it's Quorra's disc, which, while not a wild improvement on the situation, doesn't have the portal key thing on it. Sam starts the transfer, and ot buy them time and because it's... dramatically appropriate, I guess, Flynn reintegrates with Clu. This also manages to destroy a fair portion of the immediate-to-mid-range environment, because Clu is Not On Board with this plan.

Sam and Quorra got out in time, and Sam copies the Grid onto a memory chip since the whole thing is probably half a gig tops, and most of that is probably the Sea. There is a vague sense that they will Do Something About All This Eventually, but the sequel has been in development hell for a while so who knows about that. Roll credits on the two-hour-long Daft Punk music video.

I can scrounge up the attendant fandom for Further Reading (TM) if anyone would like, but given that a solid 60% of it is porn, it'll have to wait until my mom's friend isn't sitting next to me. Also if I am to become The Tron Person I may as well have an appropriate icon.

[Armada]

Invitation to Deflate does mean exactly that, but bear in mind I wrote up all that from memory and a few glances at the wiki, and I was not alive in 1982, so there's that.

ok i'm gonna assume that 'Invitation to Deflate' includes the above post so here is a pile o' nitpicks and further commentary mostly based on the premise that i know computers and i totally watched TRON a zillion times when i was little (and skipped over the torture scene at the beginning).

I absolutely did not skip any of the torture. Mm, torture.

Given the era, I expect that the idea was that ENCOM had not “servers” but a mainframe computer — that is, ONE REALLY BIG (for its time) COMPUTER. All the action happens between programs/processes/terminals/other resources on that one big computer. So “navigate the server” is closer than “navigate the firewall”.

Fair enough; my relevant computer experience goes back to about 2005, and honestly I'm not sure the people who wrote this knew much more about computers in the 80s than I do.

I expect that Dillinger had a terminal in his desk — the Master Control Program is running on the mainframe (and, to unwarrantedly use UNIX terminology, as root) and merely talking to Dillinger at his desk.

This seems likely, given that it/he talks to Flynn at the laser terminal too. We first see it in Dillinger's desk though, so I figured it was close enough and sounded funnier that way. Also, damn, did I spell Dillinger wrong throughout that whole thing...?

I blame the grid bugs.

What I want to know is why did they install a terminal in the beam path?

You have answer your own question.

Whoa. SIM cards are a great analogy.

Thank you! For various fic purposes I've justified them with a processing boost in that it gives you "more brain" to work with, more or less, which seems reasonable. I mean, they're still clearly not normal, but that at least is sort of beneficial, to justify Flynn's version.

IIRC, the trails go away exactly when they exit the arena, so possibly they're a feature of the arena rather than the cycles.

Really? I just plain forgot this one, then. I think in Legacy there's a controllable toggle.

These days, the things that interpret user input are just more programs; in older systems there was, one way or another, a lot less intermediation between the user input and the workings of the operating system and even the physical CPU. It's quite possible that a user could have “magic” abilities from the perspective of a program —

— except that this argument totally doesn't make sense to apply to a digitized User on the inside of the system. So it's got to be ordinary interprocess interactions with different access bits. Wow, that digitization system sure is DWIM.

Regardless of how we explain it, Users Are Weird And Possibly Magic is a nifty element.

Right, like - Users are literally gods to programs, and presumably Flynn knows more or less what he's doing on the User side of it, but he sure does look surprised whenever he does... basically anything. I mean, not that I haven't totally exploited Users Are Weird and Possibly Magic, but it doesn't really make any sense.

On the other hand, I headcanon that Tron at the very least is written in ENCOM's proprietary code (ENCode?), so the whole DWIM thing could be super useful for when Flynn was trying to get him to play nice with the Grid. Especially because it wasn't like he was getting Alan's advice about it.

You dropped a word: it's the Solar Sailer Simulator. So I assume it runs on the same stuff as all the video game stuff simulating motorcycles and tanks. Of course, it still makes no sense in that suns do not (naturally) make SOLID ENERGY BEAMS.

Whoops, that I did. But wait, isn't the hangar the "Simulator" part? I mean, it's not called a lightcycle simulator, so...? Tbh this comes out to picking what color to paint the nuke, in that it's not like the rest of it makes any sense.

Solid energy beams, that, I remind you, Flynn can stick his arm in to... redirect, or something. Man, no wonder Tron looks at him like he's nuts, nothing this guy does seems reasonable.

I always took that as stealing credentials ("I Am On The Red Team, Honest"), and the derezzing was going to happen regardless.

Yeah, and I think in the comic Tron uses a little gadget to disguise his circuits as someone else's, but there's... not really anything else that could've killed the guy, iirc. Doesn't Flynn basically knock him over and that's it? I'd been operating under the assumption that if it was more complex than "print: Hello world!" it would be sturdier than that. It's not like anyone even attempts to explain it, though, so both interpretations are fine. *shrug*

I actually think that it's a pretty good analogy. IO devices require particular system calls, are super-slow compared to the ordinary run of instruction execution…

Can you imagine how goddamn slow Users must seem to programs? Everything's at like 1/50th speed, give or take. D'you think there are programs that get impatient waiting the half an hour or whatever for their User to tell then what to do?

I can only assume that Flynn's Userness gives him some sort of super intuition for how to make things happen when he really has to and doesn't think about it too hard (see also the turning-red thing).

As to why it should work: The MCP's proper operation has been disrupted and Flynn puts himself/his code in the MCP's process, taking over all of its privileges (and of course changing the color scheme). Then he's root and can do whatever he likes, namely complete the original mission and trigger the laser.

And note that the MCP is a beam into the sky just like the regular I/O towers, so one imagines that one of the things it has is dedicated I/O access (to Dillinger's office terminal among other things).

I stand by my statement that Kevin Flynn has never had a clue in his life and I don't expect him to have one now. The explanation for why it works seems solid, though, and didn't the MCP dump a bunch of... processing power or something into Sark?

That also neatly explains why every terminal in the building is fucked once Flynn goes back, too, since he overwrote the thing running the computer and then did the equivalent of deleting all that. And you're right, I forgot that the monitors all showed it too. Why the evidence is even around to be found, though, I have no idea. You'd think in the intervening three years they'd have changed systems, especially if the video games thing was lucrative enough to make Dillinger CEO.

I assumed he told his friends everything, given his using the line "Greetings, programs!" at the end. Of course, whether they believe him (and whether anyone's willing to step in front of the laser to test it out…)

He can't have, if you take Legacy as canon, and I can see them just going with it as a Weird Thing Flynn Does. Also, it's rather in character for Flynn to think of digitizing like, idk, walking into Narnia or something. It's not the "real world." Plus I would expect Alan and Lora to be All Over That - Lora's work, at the very least, heavily involved the laser, and you can bet "programs are actually tiny people inside the computer and they have, like, emotions" would be of major interest to her, and there is zero way she would have let Flynn dismantle the project if she or anybody else managed to digitize a person and get them back.

To be honest, I kind of find "Lora finds out about the program people and shortly thereafter so does the rest of the world" to be a far more interesting story than Legacy was, but it would be... quite the genre shift.

[Kappa]

I love everyone in this thread <3

[DanielH]

Did you say “millicycle” up there? That’s worse than the other not-knowing-about-computers stuff you mentioned. A cycle is the smallest unit of time that makes sense for a computer, except at the lowest hardware levels and even then one one-thousandth of one is not a reasonable unit of time.

[Armada]

I did not make up millicycle, so I am not the person you want to take up that argument with! Hilariously, though, the wiki points out essentially what you did, that it doesn't make any sense and has no relation to anything from real life. Unfortunately, that's what they used, so that's what everyone's familiar with, so we're kinda stuck with it.

[MaggieoftheOwls]

I absolutely did not skip any of the torture. Mm, torture.

Friend, you have come to the right place.

[Armada]

Friend, you have come to the right place.

*cackles* I know! I came here from Effulgence primarily. I am delighted to be in the right place.

[Kappa]

:DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

[Timepoof]

Pffff