Interesting question that came up in my DMs.

Has anyone like, ever written Sam/Beck?

I feel like they’d have a lot in common– the experience of having been mentored by Alan and Tron– of running a resistance against the various kinds of oppression in their worlds– of being the heirs chosen to take on the legacy of older heroes, etc

I mean sure, they’d have to meet after Legacy, and you’d have to assume Beck survived that whole time, and that Sam went back in later and found him. But all that same stuff gets assumed about Tronzler when he gets paired with Sam, so it doesn’t seem that much of a stretch…

Just wondering why that isn’t a more popular pairing.

I mean. this fandom does seem to go first for the somewhat dark and edgy pairings, the ones with complex power dynamics, like Sam and Tron. And maybe that’s understandable, as a fandom that’s been largely about love across huge power gaps ever since the beginning. (Program/User, god/worshiper, really what could be more vast?) And it’s also always been somewhat about complicated relationships, role reversals… so I suppose it’s the juxtaposition of Sam’s power over Tron as a User and Tron’s power over Sam as his childhood hero plus having the face of Alan?

I don’t really know. Sam/Tron isn’t my OTP; I’ve enjoyed a lot of well-written stories with that pairing but not mainly because of the pairing itself, so I can only guess at why others love it so much. As for my own actual ships, I’m over in the world where the original copies of the programs are living happily ever after in the Encom system and Tron has his idyllic little polycule with Yori and Ram and Alan-1.

….So I’m not even denying the appeal of power dynamics for me. (in my world Tron is a delicious little sub for Alan and Yori, and a hot-as-hell dom for sweet subby little Ram). But I’m not in the same world as whatever goes on in most of the Legacy and Uprising fandom.