I wanna know what you guys’ hot takes on the Tron franchise/fandom are 👁👁
In the original Tron film, Tron is described thusly by his creator: “It’s a security program itself, actually. It monitors all contacts between our system and other systems. Finds anything going on that’s not scheduled, it shuts it down.”
This description, and the way he’s portrayed in Tron Betrayal, and in the flasbacks in Uprising, leads me to one conclusion: When he’s not being a freedom figher, when system is working as intended… Tron Is A Cop. Or perhaps a border patrol guard.
Considering how he’s portrayed in media like uprising and betrayal, I genuinely believe Tron being like a cop might have been intended, but I’m not gonna say I Like it.
I personally like the notion more that he’s like a paladin or a knight, like what Bruce Boxleitner says about the character, but I can’t deny that the cop motif is there in canon.
Yeah, I do prefer to think about his as a fantasy knight, though of course real life knights have some similar implications of upholding opressive regimes and such.
I belive one problem is that Tron is the anthropomorphization of an object that I do actually want to act like a ruthless police officer. I want the security and antivirus software on my computer to be as efficient as possible, to keep out intruders, neutralize viruses, and make sure that other software haven’t been taken over by outside influences. It makes me think about a film I haven’t actually seen, but that I know the general concept of: Osmosis Jones, where a white blood cell is portrayed as a cop hunting a “criminal” in the form of a virus. Again, that’s how I would want my immune system to work, and I’m going to vaccinate myself to make sure my police force is equipped to fight the bad guys (though there might be an interesting analogy there for how autoimmune diseases causes your immune system to attack your own body).
The problem then is that viewing the real world as a computer system, and human beings from other countries or a different class as “viruses”, is of course utterly reprehensible. One should be careful about what parts of the computer world one uses as allegories for the real world. And to be fair to the Tron franchise, it usually seems to avoid the problematic implications by focusing on problems caused by internal bugs in the “ruling class” part of the system (I think both the MCP and Clu could be viewed as this) rather than outside interference.
Very good point!
And I would also add that
1. the difficulty in applying a rigid set of rules, and rigidly-thinking enforcers authorized to follow them, to any complex real life problem…. is a thing that can fail badly— both in distinguishing dangerous criminals from regular people doing no harm, AND in distinguishing malware from legitimate freeware/shareware (side-eyes my computer and its refusal to trust that I ever might possibly fuckin know what I’m doing)
2. This can’t really avoid being a problem even if the rules are made in good faith and followed faithfully and without bias– but it gets IMMENSELY worse when the rules are both made and enforced by Corrupt Assholes
3. I think Tron both tries to explore that and also fails
4. But I still love it, so sue me