sandcoffiin:

is there a single instance of a program in 82 using a mirror or seeing their reflection on the grid?? do they even know what they look like??

Hmm I’d have to look, but I think not! I know they don’t have shadows, and … I can’t think of any examples of reflections either….

Semi-exception is when Clu is looking at the view screen in his tank and it’s visibly projecting the readout onto his face. But that’s not a reflection of him, it’s a projection of other stuff on him.

My headcanon about programs and their appearances (not really supported by canon, just my own ideas about how I imagine sentient programs would think)…. is that they recognize each other more through senses that read data and energy signatures, than through humanoid senses like vision. They still have those humanoid senses, but not exactly like how humans experience them, and not as reliant on them, because it’s in addition to a bunch of others.

(in my fic about Clu’s Bit, I described the Bit’s initial response to Flynn as basically a confusing mixture of familiar and unfamiliar – some of the “code” it could sense was recognizably like Clu’s, but there were too many differences. Visual appearance was mentioned but it was more of an incidental detail.)

Anyway. As for whether Encom programs have knowledge of their own appearance? I think they do, but it’s more an instinctive sense, a tag in their metadata, than an experience they get from having seen themselves.

I think it’s probably possible for programs to see themselves, but it’s not something that would happen very often by chance. I don’t think there are naturally reflective surfaces in Encom, but I think some creative programs could invent things that were capable of that function, if they wanted to.

(I 100% think Yori has done it.)