“hey Tron, wanna help me get some stuff upgraded with the Grid’s new internet connection?”
“Not tonight, Kevin Flynn. My Grid-to-outside internet connection works well enough for now. And I am busy tonight… My User is throwing a party, and has invited me to attend virtually.”
“Hah!! …a party? Your User? Hahaha… what kind of party?”
“… A LAN one”
“…hey Tron”
“yes Flynn”
“how was the party?”
“which party?”
“yknow. The LAN one. Which I am totally not upset I wasn’t invited to– wait, were there OTHER parties?”
“It went fine, KevinFlynn”
“…just fine?”
“it went great”
“do you wanna tell me about it? like was it fun? you play something? was there a tournament?”
“yes there was, Flynn”
“cool! who won? Did you win? Did Roy win?”
“A–”
“…NEVERMIND”
so… i wrote this post very early in my slide into Tron obsession… and I didn’t intend it to be an AU, or a post-Legacy headcanon where Flynn suvived somehow
because I was still convinced, just based on how Alan acts in Legacy, that after 1982 he did fully find out about what was going on in the Encom computers, and got to know his program very well
(and had his own secretive reasons for not openly talking about it, in the Legacy scenes we saw)
(and that the Encom version of Tron was still there, being Encom’s security software, even later on while the Legacy Grid copy was being Rinzler)
(because that just made sense to me, considering how “moving a program to another computer” actually works IRL, and also how Encom would still need security software)
so… this scenario was a thing I just totally believed could’ve happened, at some point between the movies, with Alan and Tron in the Encom grid (which I guess I was still calling “the grid” in my mind)
and guess what.
So there.
(And yes Flynn was not always invited to the LAN parties. And yes he was mad about it.)