One of the exercises my pattern recognition loves, for some reason, is to take widely accepted ideas in fandom, things that are basically considered obvious from canon, and figure out ways that the truth could actually be something else.

This is an obnoxious thing to do, sometimes.

I get annoyed at my pattern recognition routines for this.

Especially when I don’t even have any particular reason to want the new interpretation.

And especially when (like a lot of my sudden weird inspirations) it happens in the middle of the night.

—-

But it is difficult to fight against.

Because whenever there is “proof” that something isn’t true in canon, a creative enough mind will find ways around it.

• If the proof is “no character ever mentioned that, and they would have mentioned it if it were true"…. all it takes is a plausible reason for someone to keep something secret, or even just not to bring it up in a particular context.
• If the proof is "a character literally SAID that was not true"… likewise, all it takes is a plausible reason for someone to lie.
• If the proof is "it involves a character who is dead in canon,” we just need a reason why the character is believed to be dead but is actually not. (This is especially feasible in canons where there is a potential in-universe mechanism for someone to be copied, resurrected, etc.)
• If the proof is “we saw something happen onscreen that is extremely incompatible with the new interpretation,” then there’s always the possibility of that onscreen event being some type of illusion (especially in canons with magic or technology that make that very feasible).

And I am especially irritated with my Recognizer… (I think that’s what I’m going to call it from now on– Recognizer, an annoying little Pattern Recognizer that buzzes around my head like a tireless insect, looking for puzzles to solve that absolutely nobody needs solved)…

…for becoming fixated, lately, on the question:

What is it, exactly, that makes TRON 2.0 incompatible with Legacy?

(Thank goodness the Recognizer isn’t trying to take the comics into account… yet, at least. If I had to watch it try to reconcile Betrayal and Ghost in the Machine with the other canon and with each other, I’d probably eat my computer.)

Anyway. So far I’ve got:

1. The structure of ENCOM. I need to look more closely through all those emails from 2.0… they show the power balance of the company changing in ways that seem to diverge from what we see at the beginning of Legacy. (At least Flynn seems to have disappeared in both? Though the times may not line up.)

• However, I imagine a lot could change at ENCOM between 2003 and 2010. And we have to remember that not everything said in every email has to be true. Some might even be spoofed emails, sent by FCon for whatever deceptive reasons they might have. We can theoretically disregard any 2.0 canon that comes from the contents of an email, if we can explain it on those grounds.

1. Alan’s family. In 2.0, Lora is apparently dead from a digitization accident, and she and Alan have a son. Neither of these were mentioned in Legacy (although lack of mention isn’t proof in itself). Also I believe Lora appears, alive, in some of the supplemental Legacy material.

• Going from what I saw of the game’s plot, we could imagine that Lora was somehow recovered, later on, from the data that became Ma3a. (If I recall correctly she was eaten by a Seeker? But that doesn’t necessarily mean destroyed?) Anyway, if enough of her ended up being recoverable, she could theoretically have been found and rerezzed back into the User world, sometime between then and the events of Legacy.

1. And, of course, possibly the biggest obstacle: In 2.0, Alan is aware of the world inside the computer.

• He got digitized in there as part of FCon’s sabotage attempt. It appears (though it doesn’t seem absolutely certain?) that this was the first time he’d been digitized into the computer, or even knew it was possible. But after the events of 2.0 he definitely knows about it.
• If Alan knew this could happen, it would be… challenging, at the least, to explain a lot of how he acted in Legacy.

—

(And this line of speculation, I think, is really what my Recognizer is focusing on.

See, I don’t think it even cares all that much about reconciling 2.0 into the canon. I think it mainly just wants to believe there were some early days when Flynn and Alan and Lora and Roy had fun together exploring the world inside Encom and meeting their programs.

If it were a rational being, it would just make up an AU for this.

But it is not a rational being. It’s a deranged pattern recognition subroutine, and its entire obnoxious goal in life is to find or force connections between things, until it can figure out a way everything makes SENSE together.

Sometimes the most nonsensical thing you can possibly do is try to make everything make sense, Recognizer.)

—

• First issue: If he knew that people could be digitized into computers, why did Alan not find out what had happened to Flynn?
• Well… maybe he did know. Or had good reason to suspect. After all, someone’s been paying the electric bill at that arcade to keep the computer running all these years.
• If so, though– why had Alan not tried to get Flynn out of there?
• Maybe Flynn had specifically requested for him not to, not unless he paged asking for help.
• Or: maybe Alan had tried. Maybe he’d even gone in! Maybe he barely made it back out with his life, without even being able to confirm Flynn was in there somewhere. Maybe he looked through the code trying to fix things from the outside, but realized there was no totally safe way to extract Flynn at this point or even identify him for sure.
• Or: Maybe he did extract Flynn from there, time after time. Maybe Flynn kept going back in, and getting his stupid ass in trouble again and again. And the more it conflicted with his job, and the more stress it put on Alan… the more Alan decided, I am too damn old for this, this is a job for someone young and crazy and reckless like Sam, but even Sam is gonna have to wait until Flynn actually admits he needs help and actually pages me asking for it, the stubborn idiot.

• In any of these scenarios, though, there’s the further question: why did Alan not tell Sam more about what he was getting into?
• And there, again, we can only speculate:
• Maybe Alan reasoned that Sam has had many years to file away his dad’s old stories firmly under the heading of “made-up tall tales,” and if he told Sam the whole truth, Sam would refuse to believe it and just be angry.
• This may or may not be actually true about Sam… but if Alan thought it, he may have refrained from telling him to increase the chance Sam would actually take on the task.

• In any case, Alan sending Sam in there is… an ethically questionable decision at best.
• Hell, even if Alan didn’t know about the world inside the computer, sending Sam in was a questionable decision. He didn’t know what would be waiting there at the arcade for whoever answered the page, and for all he knew it could be something dangerous. For all he knew, whoever answered the page could be walking into some hostage situation, with the mafia holding Flynn captive and demanding company secrets or something.

• But… I can see his reasoning, even if I side-eye its ethics a bit.
• Whatever he knows or doesn’t know about the computer system, Alan knows he’s not cut out to handle danger nearly as well as Sam is.
• And he knows Sam, of all people, would want the closure of doing this, finding out Dad’s secrets on his own.
• And, if Alan knew something about those secrets already– that even explains why he kept this solely between himself and Sam, instead of involving anyone else who might be better equipped than either of them to handle ordinary, real-world dangers.

But… all this notwithstanding, there are probably still some hangups for my Recognizer to deal with.

The one it’s gotten stuck on now– perhaps even stuck enough to let me go back to sleep– is in the Next Day short.

Specifically, the very end, when Alan and Roy are alone together.

Everything up to that, the Recognizer can disregard any statements it doesn’t like, because they could have been lies or omissions for the benefit of the public.

But assuming Roy and Alan both have been inside the computer– as the Recognizer stubbornly wants to believe– they don’t have any reason to lie about it to each other.

So Roy’s very last line– “Why do you think Flynn gave you the cool nickname?” makes no sense, if they’ve both met their programs and know they were named after them.

But honestly… nothing about that last line makes sense, in any interpretation.

Namely:

• Even if they hadn’t ever met their programs as living personifications, they know they wrote their programs… and presumably Roy’s program was also named Ram outside the system.
• Alan (from the earlier interviews in the short) clearly knows he was nicknamed after the program he wrote, so I can’t see why Roy wouldn’t already know the same.
• Ram is an obviously cooler nickname than Tron.

So…. shut up, Recognizer.

Stay stuck.

For now, at least.