so while I’m posting fun conversations from the Discord server, have this absolute crack headcanon about Clu1:

Or maybe "compiler? I barely know her!"

"I barely recognizer!"

(lol in the scene where Clu1 gets attacked and yells "a Recognizer" I always do a double take be my auditory processing wants to hear it as "I recognize her!" and I don't want the headcanon that Clu in his last moments realized he was being hunted by his ex girlfriend or something)

and then:

LOL me telling my brain I do not want this headcanon, but brain just goes "oh hey if Lora was Flynn's ex then does that mean Yori was Clu's ex? Did MCP make her leave the Solar Sailer dock to go pilot that Recognizer and chase Clu down, like 'let her fight one of her own kind'…..brain shut up!

aaand after a bit of delightful clowning around over what Yori and Clu’s previous relationship could’ve been like, then:

Aster (Tiliquain) Yesterday at 1:08 PM
And somehow he survives after the movie (maybe all the programs absorbed by MCP are released back into the system when MCP explodes I dunno) and they all reunite in a big hug and he joins the polycule

Lmao if he's their new boss though
Like Flynn decided to repurpose him to be sysadmin in the encom system
"FLYNN that guy is basically a search engine and he's subby as fuck. Why"

…But we ultimately agreed that

this would work out fine because Clu could be a powerless figurehead while Yori was in charge, and
it sure as heck would be better than Flynn making a self-insert program with directives to actually control stuff (we saw how THAT turns out).

…All joking aside, though… I don’t think there’s any definite reason Yori and maybe Tron couldn’t have already known Clu1 before the events of the movie.

I mean it might bring up the question of why they didn’t react to Flynn with obvious signs of recognition. But I feel like this is easily explained:

in a system with a limited number of Users at work, meeting two programs from the same programmer (who therefore look alike) can’t be that rare. Not necessarily rare enough to even be worth a mention.
When Programs meet each other I imagine there would be many other forms of perception at work, besides seeing the outer appearance of the render (we don’t even know if that looks the same to programs anyway!)
Yori totally DOES act as if Flynn is familiar to her when she first meets him. She doesn’t bring it up, probably because there’s an obvious explanation already in her worldview… but you can see she’s shaken by it.

“my ex and future polycule partner. welcome to the system. maybe we can kiss later”