I KNOW RIGHT!!!

what HAPPENED to his decorating style?? The guy goes from THIS

to THIS

I mean. YES, there’s typically a difference between “bachelor pad of a young unmarried guy” and “home of that same guy when older and influenced by being a husband and father”

…and Flynn’s certainly a special case. Because the first imageset was the bachelor pad of a guy who’s… not 100% straight and who’s confident enough about that (in the year 1982!) to not even care about trying to hide it…

and the second imageset is after he’s settled down with a woman (supposedly; we never actually SEE Jordan, we just hear news reports about how him being with Jordan was the publicly available story about his relationship status, but that’s another whooooole headcanon discussion) ….and become a husband, then a father, then a widower in much too short a time, and then gotten stuck inside a tyrannically ruled computer for a length of time that’s apparently centuries for him.

So there are …a LOT of things that could be influencing this change.

Jordan’s influence would be the one I’d consider if it was only a bachelor-to-married-man transition. And it might still be a factor on some level.

I don’t think anything is canonically said about her interior design preferences, but she is said to be an architect. She could have had very particular ideas about how the interiors of buildings should look, and overcome Flynn’s personal style with hers when they began to share a home.

….Oh god.

Pattern Recognizer is pointing out that this interpretation could tie in with another observation I’ve made. The one about how– if you’re just going by the tendency toward colorfulness and chaotic creativeness– Flynn and Yori have weirdly compatible home-decorating styles.

Now, we don’t have any proof that Jordan (if she even existed) ever went into the Encom system with Flynn, or that either of them ever got to see Yori’s apartment. But we also don’t know they didn’t.

So maybe Jordan saw a similarity between Flynn’s decor and Yori’s. Or, maybe she just visited Lora at some point and saw a similarity between Flynn’s decor and that. (I mean, we never see Lora’s home, but Yori probably has something in common with her User when it comes to aesthetics, right?) And if Jordan was a bit of a jealous spouse, she might have come down particularly hard on Flynn for hanging on to habits that she associated with his ex.

…I don’t really believe this interpretation, though.

Because I very, very much doubt that Flynn ever got very far in any relationship with someone who tended toward jealousy. Flynn has “pansexual polyamory” written ALLLL over him. I’m not 100% convinced Jordan was ever anything except a public-facing beard for the Encom Polycule… but if she was actually a real partner to Flynn in any way, I have some serious trouble imagining they had a closed relationship.

Anyway.

The spare, calming, partly-domestic-and-partly-high-tech design of his safe house is very clearly two things. 1. a reflection of his “zen” philosophy, and 2. an extremely obvious reference to the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

So, perhaps Kevin Flynn made a deliberate choice here to reject his youthful creativity, and embrace something wholly divorced from his own original thought–

–and, instead, derivative from a specific story that, perhaps, over the years, he came to view as a parable about the dangers of what his own creativity could do.

The rest of the Grid itself doesn’t have this specific style. But does seem to follow a similar sparse color palette. We don’t actually know if this is how Flynn designed it– or if he originally made it more colorful, and that was repressed under Clu’s dictatorship.

If it was Flynn’s choice– if the chaotic and colorful aesthetics of his youth faded into this more simplistic style around the time he first created the Grid?—then, I’m not sure how to explain it. Jordan’s influence, again? Flynn’s technical ineptitude for programming any simulation with more complex colors than a 1980’s arcade game? Flynn’s obsession with making the Grid in his OWN style, uninfluenced by anyone else, to such an extreme that he integer-overflowed into cutting out some of his own style because it was too much like the style of the Original Encom system?

I don’t know.

But , if Flynn’s original design for the Grid was more colorful, and Clu’s dictatorship was just exceptionally effective in repressing all of that…

then, one could imagine that after Clu was destroyed, the Grid might end up taking on more of its true color again.

Just as the Encom system did after the fall of the MCP.