Anonymous: <p>You know, you’ve really given me a lot of hope with your perspective on fandom longevity. Tron is my first truly obscure fandom that I’ve been a part of, but it’s so small that I was worried about it dying out once Tron: Ares loses its momentum. But like, seeing how long it’s been around purely as a labor of love for the series makes me extremely happy to see. The fanworks on here are generally better than anything disney could chuck out and ruin the rest of canon with.</p>

I’m so happy to know that I’ve given you hope. I mean, I am extremely new to this particular fandom myself– not Ares-new, but I just got into it a couple years ago, through a completely random serendipitous little accident that (and I don’t consider this exaggeration) changed my entire life. In ways reminiscent of several converging Rube Goldberg machines and several lines of progressively large dominoes all triggered by some butterfly flapping its wings somewhere.

And so… I can’t say I know Tron fandom as deeply as people who have been here Many Years.

But just looking back through what’s been preserved in fandom over those years, I can see there have been fans the whole time. Even when it was just a few– there was always someone active, somewhere.

And even a few fans will matter– to each other, and to others downstream in time, perhaps many, who’ll find their work later on.

It did help to have basically grown up in very lively fandoms for very dead canons, where the love of the material coexisted with a healthy ridicule for its creators and full recognition of its flaws (to the point of attacking them through fanworks, either with selective ignoring and retconning of the parts we didn’t like, or creative-as-hell made-up explanations to spackle the plotholes till they made sense.)

….I’ve mentioned before how Tron, in 1982, sometimes seems to trust himself as an instrument of the Users more than he trusts the Users themselves. When Ram asks him if he thinks the Users are still there, his reply is that “they’d better be” and that he didn’t want to find out otherwise when he’d “bust outta here.”

His own success at escaping was a given. The persistence of the Users was not.

Tron, I think, knew the Users were imperfect– and that, itself, was the foundation of his worship of them. He needed to serve them because they needed him. His purpose, to “fight for the Users,” was given to him precisely because there are some times and places in which the Users cannot fight for themselves.

And to me, that’s…. kind of what fans are. Only we’re a lot less reverent than Tron about it.