Thinking about that ask I got about “dark and edgy” versus “light-hearted” Tron movies.

And the more I think about it, the more I realize that part of the reason I like the original movie so much is that it’s got SO much silliness, and yet also has extremely dark themes.

Not all of the dark themes are front-and-center in the story. Some of them only stand out after you’ve thought about it a while. But others are VERY clearly there. There’s violence and gladiator battles-to-the-death. There’s dictatorship and enslavement. Good guys are forced to murder senselessly for the bad guys’ amusement. Friends are imprisoned together for ages talking about their hopes for when they get out and then one of them is killed just after they escape. There are villains grappling with how they’ve gone too far and are afraid to go farther but can’t turn back now.

And yet there’s also utterly absurd silliness! There’s the way Crom blusters through his introduction as a compound interest program who’s not made to fight in video games. There’s a Bit that flies around going Yes and No and sassing Flynn as he does maybe the third-worst possible job of trying to drive a Recognizer. There’s how Flynn acts before the whole adventure starts– he is just an absolute clown and practically every single scene with him feels like a comedy.

The original TRON movie went SIGNIFICANTLY past the threshold of “this movie has so much silliness in it that it qualifies as a Silly Movie, regardless of what other deeply sad and serious stuff also happens in there.”

That threshold isn’t even “more than half.” It’s a small amount, proportionally. But silly is a powerful ingredient. It doesn’t take very much to make the whole thing Distinctly Silly-Flavored.

But… that’s a very fiction-centric trope.

If real life were held to this standard, real life would be far past that threshold. There is outright horror in this world. Lots and lots and lots of it. But mixed inextricably in with the horror and tragedy is more than enough silliness to make this, by fiction standards, a thoroughly silly world.

But we, as real people who are affected by the horror and tragedy as well as the silliness — we don’t judge the world by fiction standards.

And I think I’m realizing that I don’t really judge fiction by those standards either.

You don’t have to. I think some of the greatest writers don’t. I think some of the greatest fiction of history isn’t present-day-Hollywood easy to categorize as Deep Dark Edgy or Angsty Drama or Silly Light or Filthy Smutty or any box like that. I think the best of it has a big helping of each.

I wrote a fic about some of the “lightest” canon themes in that movie, like how Flynn keeps ending up in bizarrely homoerotic situations with Tron and Ram where he has absolutely no idea what’s happening, and then suddenly at the end he kisses Tron’s girlfriend for no clear reason, and then she kisses Tron and no one seems to care. My fic is Flynn’s POV through all that nonsense and it’s a serious story, about the painful emotional distance of socially navigating a world where people don’t give the same signals you do, while you deeply care about respecting their boundaries even though you’ll never understand them, and finally finding common ground because they, too, have known the feeling of facing someone you care about and not being able to articulate what you want.

I wrote a smut fic where that goofy compound interest program Crom loses his virginity to Ram and it turns out he has six tentacles that he uses for extra counting hands so he can go up to hexadecimal. And it’s a sad angsty fic with, like, theology and philosophy and moral dilemmas about loyalty.

I wrote a fic about losing your purpose and questioning what you even are and splitting into multiple selves and being separated from someone you need to reach by a communication gap you’ll never bridge, and being torn between loyalty to someone from a world you’ll never understand and loyalty to someone who’s basically you. And it’s from the viewpoint of the fucking BIT.

There is no dark and light. There’s fucking rainbows of color, everywhere.

And not many movies these days show it.