monstrousgourmandizingcats:
kurhanchyk:
my preemptive answer is that because people refuse to commit main characters to it but i’m sure there are many reasons
#i think it’s also because many people write about them from an atheist’s perspective #i.e. they write like they can’t believe a character would take a religion and its tenets seriously #without being a caricature of fundamentalism
(from @lilybarthes)
It’s a good video! I highly recommend it. Watched it a few hours after it dropped and was thinking about it again this morning.
OP isn’t wrong, exactly (saying this for everyone else reading, not at you, OP) and the pasted tags are excellent & about a real issue, but actually further from the thesis of the video.
That thesis boils down to fiction that creates religions, like fantasy novels or RPGs, is very prone to only really depicting the religion’s myths and sacred texts. The creation stories, the pantheon melodramas, that kind of thing. Adjacent to this is a big focus on belief. Both of these, ReligionForBreakfast (RFB) suggests, are due at least in part to (unexamined or deliberate) Christocentrism.
The thing that’s missing, that RFB proposes as what he thinks would make a big difference and be good to see in fictional worlds, is action. (“Ritual”, for certain definitions of the word.) What do followers of a religion, or people within that religion’s culture, actually do? How does it appear in daily life, in art and architecture, customs and food, etc.? And not just the Official Approved actions or activities, either.
It’s a really solid video, just under 20 minutes long, link here for the interested.

this just makes me appreciate the depiction of User-belief in Tron 1982 all that much more.

like. in a way it’s utterly unlike ANY real human religion (“gods” are pretty much proven, they communicate with their people all the time, those who try to spread atheism are either 1. on a 1984-esque power trip trying to get you to admit two plus two is five, or 2. redefining belief as being about trust rather than about existence. Also everybody has their own personal god who made them specifically. That’s not a thing in any IRL religion I’m pretty sure)

But in another way it’s deeply relatable, with the everyday details of faith (as small as those scraps are) feeling surprisingly real.

you’ve got Crom whose belief in his user feels as prosaic and matter of fact as an employee’s belief in his boss. You’ve got Ram who knows his User is a bit distant from him (having written him for commercial distribution, to serve multiple end-Users) and his approach is to pay his service forward by just being adorably sweet and helpful to everyone. And still reverent in his own way when he realizes Flynn is a User, even though not his User…

And then you’ve got Tron who’s probably the most “pious” believer we see…. but even so, the way he talks about the Users while he’s imprisoned sounds like he believes more in HIS own ability to carry out his rituals, than in the Users’ ability to do anything on their own.

He knows he’s an instrument of the gods and he trusts their plan for him (until Flynn messes with that a little bit anyway). But he also knows the reason he’s an instrument of the gods is because the gods NEED him in order to get shit done. He loves his creator, but has few unrealistic expectations.

I know I talk about this all the time, but (even as a pretty religion-critical atheist myself) I adore that movie’s portrayal of religion.

Because of just how fresh it is, unlike any other movie’s portrayal – and yet how engaging the little details are, the subtle differences between different believers.

And how it wasn’t just a theoretical cosmology, but a part of everything – it’s also their job, and their family, and so on. Actually pretty reminiscent of what religion WAS like, when it was a more ubiquitous part of life.

And it’s not even hard to see where the idea comes from– it’s an obvious progression from asking “what if computer programs could think about their human creators”– but just that act of personifying, turns it into one of the freshest pieces of worldbuilding I’ve ever seen.