Getting through the Kickass Video Essay of the Week is always dangerous because it makes me desperately want to make video essays myself, except I wouldn’t know Adobe After Effects if you slapped me across the face with it, YouTube terrifies me as anything except something I consume, and all my actual best thinking is done via Tumblr afterthought tags because in my head I imagine it’s sorta like glancing sidelong at the camera and adding additional context to any given moment or thought like I’m in the Emperor’s New Groove
also I genuinely do hyperfixate so it would be niche topics I can’t imagine anyone else on the planet finding entertaining (except me) like, “Is the Grid It’s Own Character?”; “Are Programs Posthuman?”; “How Kevin Flynn Destroys the Sublime”; “Why Tron Legacy is a Horror Movie”; “The Grid and the Closet” and it analyzes how, symbolically, a dude constantly leaving his heterosexual day life to live within a neon-lit fever dream where traditional procreation is literally unheard of and everyone wears skin-tight body suits and stilettos and oscillate between high-octane performance and nightclubs, and he’s unable to talk about this double life to others outside of this place, might be construed as possibly a lil LGBT+ (would this make CLU a physical manifestation of Flynn’s own fear of his homosexuality?); over an hour of me going through Scars 1 and 2 screenshot by screenshot and it’s titled something like “WATCH TRON UPRISINF” in all misspelled caps where it’s painfully obvious I have no background in Film Theory but by god that’s not about to stop me,
and idk something like “Identity in Tron” where I cheekily compare Tron Identity and the Uprising episode “Identity” that have nothing in common other then a fixation on identity discs and like what are those? Halo symbolism? The soul? Are programs angels? (insert here about previous scholarship on this bc I *know* somebody’s talked about this somewhere already) Are programs without discs fallen angels? Is Tron Identity purgatory? Is Query on the level of a User with how easily he manipulates information on a program’s disc? Does the Grid have its own disc somewhere??? Where’s the MCP’s disc?? Why is there a pawn shop in Argon; do programs really buy and sell used goods, and is this due to an ever shrinking amount of space/memory on the Grid? Is currency on the Grid held within the disc? Does this mean programs are their own currency? Is this capitalism or communism if the means of production (the programs) are also the currency? If a program steals another program’s disc and learns all their secrets, could the disc-less program not just take the thief program’ s disc and use it as their own, since it technically holds all their memories now? What happens when a program’s disc runs out of space; do they all intermittently explode in a giant cloud of amnesia like Cass does? If seeing Tron’s face was enough to momentarily snap Beck out of his amnesia via the power of friendship, does this hint at the possibility that programs may not need discs at all?
and so on so forth until my brain finds something else to chew into infinite nothingness
@big-overload-little-derez: #this is all amazing#halo/disk symbolism made me scream at a certain point in good omens (dammit castor)#tron better not be his own currency because the crypto bros already sully his name (and Bit’s too)#there are whole essays to be written about parallels between tron and wizard of oz so YEAH gay subtxt#and the first scene where the encom trio meet up they literally find flynn under the rainbow#argh
Write your essays
haha i mean I kinda sorta did, a bit
the one about wizard of oz started as a conversation
and then expanded into more literary comparisons
…the one about Castor started as an incoherent squee
and became a small part of a gigantic crack-fest involving many other connections joined in an utterly chaotic web
…connections are… kinda my thing
(i am pattern recognition program)
Programs are absolutely angels and Legacy is a gnostic text if you squint. :3
Angels = beings created by divine will to serve a particular purpose. Look human, are absolutely inhuman though. Translate that over to the digital world and you’re in computer heaven, bro. Everybody’s an angel, bro. The Legacy-era discs being modern frisbees adding on that halo imagery is just icing, bro.
Legacy just makes it better by making the Grid monotheistic thanks to Flynn’s shenanigans, and then making it all go tits up. You could absolutely make a demiurge out of Flynn, and Quorra’s leaving with Sam is almost a gnostic act of escape of the imprisonment of the messed up physical reality.
Alternatively, you could just go classic Milton with Clu-as-Satan. And poor Rinzler is what happens when an angel doesn’t fall, but gets dragged from heaven.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.