astercontrol:

coldgoldlazarus:

One of the most interesting unanswered questions in the Tron universe, is given the whole thing of Programs looking like the Users who wrote their code, what would a Program written by multiple different people look like? Some sort of amalgamation or average of all their features?

The second most interesting unanswered question is given that aforementioned duality, why do the majority of programs on Flynn’s grid not look like him? Were they all copied or imported like Tron was?

And the third question that has nothing to do with the movies but I still personally really want answered… Do you think the Tron universe’s version of Mozilla Firefox looks like a digital foxgirl?

I mean I drew him as Robin Hood once but yeah

also in regard to the first question: The closest thing we have to a program with multiple creators, in the first movie, is the MCP. Who seems to have increased the number over time as follows:

1. originally written by Walter Gibbs to be a chess program
2. heavily edited by Dillinger to be a system administrator
3. then spontaneously started absorbing other programs by other Users to increase his own power
4. thus reaching a state where he technically has so many creators that he starts saying things like “no one User wrote me” and “I’m worth millions of their man-years” and he no longer cares about any of his makers, or the bond he shares with them, because he’s diluted it so much

and at the end, as he’s defeated, we see what appears to be his original form (humanoid, played by same actor as Gibbs) so we can probably extrapolate that he just royally messed up his shape through the act of collecting Users like funko pops

if he’d only collected a handful of them we can imagine he might have still looked like a weirdish humanoid

Maybe the Inoperative Data Pushers (those guys in that one scene who look like a glowy bulb or a bundle of resistors or a fuzzy critter with a snout, but are still vaguely similar to humans in overall shape n size) are collaborative projects with somewhat reasonable numbers of co-authors.

(I mean, in my fic I wrote them as Encom-native ISOs with Automata ideology, but that’s just one possibility and I welcome others)

(@coupleofdays has explored these questions too! Including the one about Flynn’s Grid programs, who I agree are probably crowdsourced from some big code repository Flynn set up because there is just no way he wrote that many different programs by himself anyway)