I wasn’t going to reply to this anon, but it’s been making me think… and I think I finally do have some coherent thoughts in response.

I think that the original 1982 movie, besides introducing the idea, did do at least a few truly original and interesting things with it.

I feel less so about the rest of the franchise, and additionally, I will admit that the original movie also left a LOT of potentially fascinating plotlines unexplored, and the failure to ever continue these threads has caused the whole franchise to suffer in quality (in my subjective opinion, of course; I don’t believe in objective quality).

But.

My strongest feeling about the canon-fanworks divide is that, in most cases, fans have the best time when we view the source material as a brainstorming session… and the fandom (fic, art, discussion, the whole experience) as the actual creative work resulting from that brainstorming session.

I wouldn’t say this is universal. There are some original works that are coherent enough in themselves that something fundamental from them is lost, when you just use their premises as templates and wander off from canon.

But those are rarely– sometimes, but rarely– successful enough to have a large fandom. The qualities that make a work artistically coherent, truly original, and complete– aren’t usually the qualities that make it popular and famous. And that seems more true as time goes on.

But I think part of it is that fandom, by its nature, loves to partake in the act of creation.

So the less finished a work is, the more fans will be drawn to it– wanting to help create it, in as many ways as we can imagine.

My first fandom was Star Trek, The Original Series. As a brainstorming session, it was fantastic. Every episode brought up intriguing “what-if” questions. Very few episodes actually addressed those questions in a way that felt complete.

And this was the perfect fertile ground for fandom.

Most episodes were messy, full of plot holes, inconsistent acting, chaotic editing– there would be glimmers of a brilliant analysis, but then something else would distract, and the fan would be left with a storyline full of neglected implications, breeding in the mind like plotbunnies, with nowhere to go until you took things into your own hands.

That’s how I approach Tron.

Especially the first movie– because, of all the parts of canon, it brainstormed the most concepts that inspired my interest and my creativity.

But also the rest of the series– because once I got into the world, I started taking a certain delight in making connections within it– finding any piece of lore, from any part of canon, and figuring out how it could fit into the whole new interpretive world that I was building off of that initial brainstorm.

And to me, that’s the joy of being a fan.

…And yeah, no, I’m not personally as inspired by the newer works as I am by the first movie. But that’s left me with enough inspiration to last ages, so I’m good.

And, as always, I don’t demand anything more from any canon than a good inspiration. To me that’s what it’s there for.