in some ways i love “power imbalance” ship discourse. it’s like watching dude bros debate power levels. you’re trying to turn an extremely complex and nuanced scenario into crunchable numbers. i think that’s why so many people are fixated on age gaps tbh. and then often they fail hilariously because they’ll be like “well, it’s a five year age gap between adults, so that needs to be addressed–” and then not even consider the insane dynamic of (check notes) dating your direct commanding officer with mind control powers in a fantasy military setting
trying to turn an extremely complex and nuanced scenario into crunchable numbers
EXACTLY
like. I am honestly so glad that there is so little Ship Discourse in the Tron fandom
like. just imagine the fights you could have over the power imbalance in post-Legacy Sam/Tron. One is a thousand years older than the other. One belongs to the class of beings whom the other views as literal gods. One is a semi-clone of the other’s surrogate father who raised him from childhood. One is the person the other owes everything to, after saving his world and restoring him from the jaws of death. One came inches from slaughtering the other for sport while brainwashed and carrying out a genocide for a dictator. One is the human programmer in charge of a computer in which the other is a goddamn program. And which one’s which in that list? it alternated every sentence.
in which fucking direction is the power imbalanced there
(but hey. we know what happens with Identity Disc-ourse in the source material. We know how Weaponized Identity can straight-up slice your head off. No Disc Wars allowed, this is the fuckin’ User world)
thinking some more about this and realized I can add another few levels of power-imbalance fuckery to this:
One has idolized the other like a superhero since childhood
One has something similar to the inadequacy complex of a less-favored sibling in regard to the other, due to being both 1. created by the same guy that raised him, AND, in a sense, “raised” by the same guy that “created” him, and in both cases he was the one less cared-about
…okay. gonna go cry about them for a while now