Omg wow, I don’t even know. The creation of the Basic programs on Flynn’s Grid is another detail I find…. difficult to parse.

And I’m sure I don’t know all the canon or possibly-canon lore on it– there’s more Tron source material than I’ll ever be able to absorb anyway, especially as someone who doesn’t play video games. In constructing my own headcanons I tend to go by just the two movies as “lore which must be accepted or explained,” and pick and choose what makes sense to me from everything else.

Which is not a task that’s done yet, or even being done consistently.

…For instance, you can tell from my other post that I’m still totally waffling on how much of the Betrayal comic I accept as canon. At least some of it contradicts canon directly (like Dumont’s lines about the MCP) so I’m side-eyeing it as a source overall.

But , as with any source material, I will take the bits I find really compelling. It’s all fiction, and it’s all for fun, so why the hell not.

As for Flynn making all the programs on the new Grid. That is one spot where my suspenders of disbelief stretch near to breaking point. I NEED a clearer understanding of how his creation process works, if I’m gonna even try to imagine details.

There were thousands of programs. Maybe millions. Did he write them on the outside or on the inside– and how would writing a program even go, on the inside? Was each one coded from scratch? Or are most of them copies or slightly changed copies?

Would it even be possible for one person to create that many different programs, of that complexity, in that amount of time?

I do quite like @CoupleOfDays theory that Flynn didn’t actually create them all himself, but crowdsourced them from other programmers all over the world, through some code repository he set up. To me that seems like the most realistic way for so many programs to be generated so fast, with such a level of diversity.

But in any case…. when we try to think about the programs’ outfits and aesthetics, like you mentioned – or really anything about their individual personalities– we have to face a really, really big question.

Are we going by the same rules by which programs come to life in the Encom system in the original movie?

Or do things work differently on Flynn’s Grid?

In the first movie, the life and sentience of programs was a spontaneous thing, never really explained. Maybe some sort of spiritual magic, maybe some idiosyncrasy of Encom’s central computer itself – but the details of how a program manifested weren’t something the programmer could choose or even know about.

And it happened to all programs, even the simplest ones. Even little financial calculators like Crom and Ram, who would have absolutely no reason to be deliberately programmed with anything resembling true intelligence.

The programmer writes and compiles a script; absolutely any script. And it goes online in the Encom computer system. And there, inside, it manifests– just miraculously appears with a human form. And no human chooses or even understands how these programs end up looking the way they do.

Did the programs in Flynn’s Grid experience the same thing when they came online there?

If so, then it’s likely that Flynn didn’t even choose their outfits or anything about their aesthetics. The inherent, natural laws of the system –whatever those were, and whether or not Flynn understood them on any level– simply dictated, somehow– based on something about the code of the program being activated– just exactly how that code was going to be rendered in visual form within the computer world. Flynn had no say in it.

Or did he?

After all, this one was a computer he built. Maybe he had enough understanding of its workings to tweak the protocols for how it generated the appearances of new programs.

If so, that could explain why their faces all looked different even if they were all created by Flynn. In the Encom system, programs had their Users’ faces by default. In a Flynn-built system, there might be more versatility.

And if he did have control of the outfits, and got to choose to make them look the way they did–

Eh. I don’t even know.

Maybe his thought process resembled what I’ve seen expressed by some creators of Tron fanart. “Goddammit. My HAND hurts. That was TOO many circuits. I am NEVER drawing an Encom program again.”

…