Oooh, my first actual hate comment!

I probably shouldn’t address this with as much compassion and respect for other viewpoints as I usually show, but I can’t exactly change who I am. And I do have thoughts in response to this, so I’m going to reply anyway, against my better judgment.

“I don’t know what you tron fans call yourselves” – we call ourselves Tron fans. I’m not aware of any catchy slang term like Trekkies or Whovians that refers to the fandom as a whole. That is a thing other fandoms do– like having agreed-upon portmanteau names for fanfic pairings, or having “start a flamewar” as the default response to a headcanon you disagree with– and the expectation for every fandom to do these things is fairly new.

“I just don’t understand the appeal of this ip”– Neither do I, honestly! I mean, I have written many, many long essays about things I like about Tron (primarily the first movie), and if you really do care to know about those, they’re pretty easy to find on my Tumblr. But I certainly don’t claim that all these things I like are unique to Tron. With many of them I have no real idea how rare or common they are in movies overall, because I have not seen enough movies to know.

And yeah. I don’t understand why Tron has become so deeply, obsessively appealing to me– a person who first got into it 3 years ago, and who, as a general rule, doesn’t even like movies or TV at all. Passive entertainment of any kind has always been, at most, “a thing to have on while I’m doing crafts,” or “an activity to do with friends.”

There have been exactly three times in my life when this rule has found an exception, and a property and its fandom have appealed to me so hard that I became actively, joyously involved in it. They were spaced out a decade or so apart: Star Trek TOS in my teens and twenties, Doctor Who in my thirties, and now Tron in my forties.

These experiences were not rational, by any means. They were my mind happening to be in a state of yearning for something vague and unquantifiable… and serendipitously encountering an experience that, in that moment, seemed to be bringing exactly whatever vague and unquantifiable thing the yearning was for.

I still haven’t managed to quantify any of these things. I have just lived with the results, and generally enjoyed myself. Each time, it has felt (and I say this with some uncertainty, as a person who’s probably more aromantic than not, in terms of real-life relationships) like falling in love.

And, from what I understand about falling in love, it is not a selection based on objective quality. If you go up to someone who is in love, and say “I don’t understand the appeal of this partner, I think they suck and everything they do has been done better by other people”… you have not brought either yourself or the person in love any closer to understanding the why of it all.

The line “all the films suck” is pretty hilarious to me, though. There are lifelong, diehard Tron fans who haven’t seen all three of the films… and yet this person is totally convinced they all suck. Did they eat a handful of garbage and go back for seconds? And thirds? Or are they just making judgments on things they haven’t actually seen?

I don’t doubt that there’s other fiction that’s done a better job with similar concepts. I am not aware of any with the exact premise that appeals to me, though.

“The story of some human who gets sucked into a videogame” isn’t the basic premise, in my mind. I’m fairly sure that what really interests me is the idea that the software in there has life of its own– and that the reason I like the first movie better is that it hints at how the programs’ life and culture works, and how it’s different from human life in ways that make some sense with the characters being programs.

And yeah, I’m very frustrated that these hints were never followed up on in Tron canon. Except in the form of the new Grid from Legacy, which seemed to me like a monument to Kevin Flynn’s failure to understand anything about program life– his attempt to recreate the human world in glowy aesthetic, ultimately failing both worlds to a catastrophic degree. (And how Kevin Flynn, however unintentionally, became the Disney corporation’s blatant self-insert character in this respect.)

Anyway, I’m open to recommendations about any other properties that have done a better job at the basic premise of “exploring the lives of sentient computer programs.” Or other similar premises (for instance I’ve already read and enjoyed Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, which posits a similarly complex inner world for the lives of characters in books).

I am not saying I would fall in love again– as I’ve said, that’s a very rare thing for me. But I’m not always looking for love. Sometimes just a fun time is plenty.

(And yes. I do enjoy glowy things. But with a preference for complex, multi-colored aesthetic, which Tron sadly gave up on after the first movie.)

(…I have mentioned this before, but the biggest draw for fandom isn’t “this property is good.” More often it’s “this property would be so good if it was good.” Fans love to partake in the act of creation, and where’s the fun in that if the creation’s already finished?)