toomanyfanficsnotimetowriteem:

astercontrol:

toomanyfanficsnotimetowriteem:

Sometimes I think about the ages of the human characters from Tron. I don’t know if we ever explicitly get their ages, so I always assume they’re as old as their actors were at the time. Does anyone ever seriously consider that Kevin Flynn, at the very least, probably served during the Vietnam War? If his Wikipedia page is right, Jeff Bridges himself was in the Coast Guard then. I just wonder about how Flynn’s experience might have affected the way that he is.

…Oh gosh, that would mean losing Ram might not have been the first time Flynn lost a buddy to war.

Oh damn. WOW

…I guess if I try and imagine it, I personally end up thinking of him as a Vietnam draft dodger. He’s sneaky like that. (And I think he would absolutely be in the camp of “hippies who opposed the war”)

I don’t THINK any of the choosing-who-to-draft process was done by computers back then, but if it had been I can imagine that being one of his early hacking jobs.

“Now Clu this is important, this isn’t just correcting my bank balance or phone bill, this is a must”

I am of two minds about it. It’s entirely possible that something like you’ve proposed happened. It fits Flynn’s overall character, especially the sort of hippie-like lingo he’s got going on in Legacy.

It’s also possible that Flynn was drafted and became the type of guy is after the war, perhaps as a coping mechanism. Unless there’s a comic or something I don’t know about that explores it, we don’t know what he was like before Lora knew him presumably around when he joined Encom (which would have been around 1979, still after the war ended). Grandpa and Grandma “Flynn” may not even be his parents, if Betrayal is to be believed. (I like to headcanon that Flynn is, in fact, an orphan.) How much do we really know about Kevin Flynn?

oooooh I am LOVING this exploration

(from what I’ve read, the Vietnam war was also where a lot of American guys started using various psychoactive substances. So even if part of what Flynn is like, during the original movie, can be explained by “he’s a stoner”… it’s possible that the war was where he got that habit, if he did serve.)

Also, very interesting thoughts about being an orphan. I feel like this may connect to some of the thoughts I’ve had…

I’ve speculated about his age before, specifically in comparison to Alan’s age. Alan acts more mature in many ways– to the point that when fanfic shows them in a scene together and goes the epithets-instead-of-names route, we keep seeing Alan get called “the older man.” But Bridges is actually a little older than Boxleitner– a matter of months, not years, but still– if their ages are the same as their actors’ ages, Alan isn’t the older of the two.

So the immature way that Kevin Flynn behaves, if it’s not due to being actually younger, could be related to any number of things that interfered with him getting to have a healthy childhood and young adulthood. Which could include such things as drugs, war, and/or spending some time in the foster care system…

(wow, all this sure adds a deeper and more serious layer to the kind of person Flynn is, huh.

I mean, he’s always been fun to laugh at, but… damn.)