The Master Control Program– despite being so cartoonishly evil that any fun aspect comes from laughing at how overblown its lack of likable qualities is–

–well, despite all that, I’m a little shocked to find that out of all the deliciously queer-coded characters in TRON, it’s the Master Control Program who’s actually been the best exercise in the sort of linguistic flexibility that one needs for an inclusive understanding of gender.

The MCP goes by he/it pronouns. Both. Or at least, the MCP is called by he/it pronouns, sometimes within the same line by the same character. Like when Dumont claims to be “old enough to remember the MCP when it was just a chess program,” and then adds, “He started small and he’ll end small.”

Now, we don’t know exactly how this is decided. Maybe “it” refers to the old chess program and “he” refers to what the MCP became since then? (although if that was the case, then Dumont should have swapped out that first “he” for an “it,” too). Maybe the MCP has preferences about this and maybe he doesn’t; maybe everyone who talks about the MCP chooses a pronoun at random every time! We don’t know.

It’s beside the point. The point is, when I’ve watched that movie, I’ve seen pronouns switch out so often for the MCP that I never actually standardized the pronouns I used for it.

And it’s not just pronouns, but nouns too! The proper noun “Master Control Program” has a whole fleet of variants. Sometimes it’s “The Master Control Program.” Sometimes it’s just “Master Control Program” and sometimes just “Master Control,” and even the three-letter abbreviation switches back and forth from “MCP” to “the MCP,” and one time Dillinger even gets all over-familiar and addresses it as “Master C.”

What’s its preferred name? Who even knows! But the fact remains that when I was learning what to call it, I was also learning how to refer to someone who WANTS pronouns and even names varied up from time to time.

And, even if I don’t often meet people like that, it’s still making me noticeably more conscious of which name or pronoun I’m using, whenever I use one… because of this knowledge in the back of my head that I don’t always use the same one, and the little question “okay why did I pick this one in this context?”

Which might not even have an answer, but still, my point is that it went through my mind. Which doesn’t happen when I’ve got a fixed, standard pronoun or name for someone.

I don’t even know where I’m going with this. Maybe it’s just another one in my increasingly huge collection of posts whose core thesis is “TRON movie makes brain think.”

But yeah. Gender of the day: this fucker.