When i see someone make that point about how fans will claim female characters are too uninteresting to explore in fanfic, but will make up elaborate backstory for male characters who barely even exist in canon….

a part of me always tries to figure out how it applies to Tron

Which always gets weirdly complicated

And I’m talking about just the 1982 movie here because that’s all I have energy for right now. And the 1982 movie did feature two of the most fantastically interesting, brilliant and badass lady characters I’ve ever seen, Yori and Lora. Who do show up in fanfic fairly often, and I think tend to be given the amount of respect they deserve, usually.

(Canon gives them an impressive amount of respect to begin with, even though they’re pretty much the only women in the movie– arguably maybe not even two different people; they are played by the same actress, and are sort of doppelgangers– one is a program written by the other, a programmer who is apparently unaware that her creation is even a living entity…)

(but, technically, they do communicate at one point, sort of.)

(About…. an orange. Oranges aren’t male. So… Bechdel test status is debatable.)

Anyway.

The shipping is more often m/m than f/f or even m/f, despite these women being in canon romances with important men in the story. But come to think of it there’s… not even a whole lot of shipping, or a whole lot of fanfic in general, about the first movie. Most is set in Uprising or Legacy, after Yori and Lora have been pretty much removed from the story as far as anyone can tell. And other women characters have been introduced, and some of them are pretty awesome, but… I’m getting off track. I don’t feel like enough of a Legacy or Uprising fan to judge how the newer women characters are treated by fanfic.

Anyway. In regard to the original movie.

I have written about Yori a lot in my fanfic. And her canon romance with Tron (not in conflict with my m/m shipping, since I see them as non-monogamous with plenty of room for that). I haven’t put her in a f/f ship yet, but then that would basically HAVE to be with her creator, since there are no other named women characters in the movie. I probably will. I LOVE program/programmer shipping, but I haven’t really gotten to the point of writing that explicitly for any of the characters yet (except my own f/f OC couple, which is a whole other thing, lol). It is a thing I’m looking forward to very much, though.

I absolutely HAVE also written fic about male characters who appeared for mere seconds in canon, extrapolating big fat backstories and behind-the-scenes character arcs for them. Example. Another example (nsfw).

I have also written two fics where a few barely-existing background women from the canon movie got names and partial backstories.

But…. I do have to concede that there’s less exploration of the female characters than the male ones.

One thing is: Even if canon gives a male and a female background character equally small amounts of screentime, the quality of that screentime is usually different.

The most expansion I’ve done on a minor male character was the one who, in canon, would be described as “nameless enemy guard that Flynn punched out and then absorbed into his own circuits to disguise himself.”

Second-most expansion I’ve done on a minor male character (ranked second because in this case I didn’t have to do as much, because there was more to begin with) was the one who, in canon, would be described as “villain’s lackey who gets a couple of brief speaking lines.”

Another one I’m considering writing about, someday, is the one who, in canon, would be described as “good-guy Lightcycle rider whom the bad guy destroys in the first scene– theorized to be the same character as the bad-guy Lightcycle rider whom the good guys destroy in a later scene… inspired by the fact that they’re played by the same bit-part actor… sparking the theory that maybe Sark had the ability to derezz his opponents into a cut-and-paste buffer instead of outright killing them, and then gave them the option to live and fight another day if they agreed to convert to his side.”

Meanwhile…. the most expansion I’ve done on a minor female character? was the one who, in canon, would be described as “walks through the distant background in a very strange-looking outfit, alongside several others, while Yori mentions that they are ‘Inoperative Data Pushers’ but never explains what that means.”

Unsurprisingly, it’s a less elaborate backstory.

In the scene where Tron finds Yori at work, she’s surrounded by other apparently female programs, doing similar jobs. If you were to try and work any of them into a story, the background extra you’d be trying to turn into a character would be something like…. “worker #6 from the line of identical workers on the solar sailer dock.”

Even less to work with. Despite similar amounts of actual canon presence.

Now, there are fans who would gladly extrapolate more onto even the most unimportant background extras. I have a friend who frequently comes up with scenarios involving the Inoperative Data Pushers, Yori’s coworkers, various background women in Flynn’s Arcade, and even the unseen source of the female announcer voice that says things like “Transport to Lightcycle Grid.”

But these scenarios are all extremely horny…. and the sort of discourse that demands more f/f shipping would probably disregard them as nothing but sexualization and fetishization.

That’s…. a LOT of the m/m shipping, though, too, honestly.

Thing is, fanfic is a damn horny place, a lot of the time.