I pretty much always disregard “word of God” pronouncements from the owners of a media property in regard to what’s canon.
Largely because (claimed) authorial intent mostly just doesn’t matter to me compared to what I actually see in the source material
But this goes at least triple for anything owned by Disney.
because i just know whatever they say publicly has gone through layers of review by their PR teams, and is probably chosen for maximum audience appeal and/or likelihood to get you to buy something
And as such it makes no goddamn actual sense
for just one example. What in the hell could even be meant by saying “Beck from Tron: Uprising is seventeen years old”
what are “years” in his world. what does any specific number of them mean, for entities that are created fully formed and don’t seem to age and grow. How does the time dilation relative to the “real world” factor into this.
this makes less sense than if word of god claimed that Beck owns seventeen dachshunds
I don’t even write Uprising fic, I don’t even care about this one way or another, I’m a 1982 fan
And all I can say is I’m thankful Disney doesn’t bother to announce any of its dumbass headcanons about the original movie. that shit is OURS by now
<3
As an Uprising fan that confirmation rubs me the wrong way and I still disregard Beck or his friends as “teens”.
Pushing aside the fact programs are ageless beings, Beck and his friends work a full mechanic job and go out to party at clubs, neither of which a 17-year old isn’t capable of. They are at the very least in their 20’s
Yeah I mean… I can see both sides of this. In terms of their personalities, they do seem like they could be anywhere from late teens to early 20s (at least, human personalities in that age range do vary a LOT, and I could imagine humans of any of those ages acting pretty much like them. I’ve known teenagers like that, and I’ve known twenty-somethings like that; none of it’s implausible).
But that’s just “personalities and the ages they could correspond to, if they were human.”
In terms of their role in society – how they spend their days, the level of independence they seem to have– like you said, the jobs, the clubbing– that does correspond better to the 20s or 30s than to any other human age range.
And I think it’s kinda silly to even expect them to fit into any societal box that humans would. They’re software in a computer. On the code level, they’re basically debugging scripts.
For whatever reason, they manifest in human form, and their job manifests as a mechanic’s garage. Probably the same mysterious phenomenon that made the original Encom programs and their world spontaneously come to life, a phenomenon that’s now been harnessed and fine-tuned by Kevin Flynn to create a world of his own.
Flynn did seem to be trying to make this world more like the human world. But there’s no reason any of it has to function exactly like humans and mechanic jobs in real life.
There’s certainly some things conspicuously missing. Parents don’t seem to exist in there, although mentors do. Some programs appear to be “younger” than others, but it’s never clear why. Never clear what caused them to be compiled later… or just what their “youth” represents on the code level of things. Being in development? Being on their beta run?
(If so, this isn’t how beta runs work in most computers – there’s supposed to be a User helping the new program figure itself out.)
(but then, nothing in that system turned out the way it was supposed to.)