Huh. Interesting question. Not the type of topic I usually discuss at length on here, but I can perhaps see where the question comes from.

(cw for discussion of child sexual abuse and ages of consent, both real and hypothetical)

Various things this could refer to.

The link it now has with Jared Leto, and his reputation for sex-pest behavior towards multiple people, including some underage?

The usual suspicion about adults being fans of any property that’s ever been marketed towards kids?

Or something about the content of the fiction itself?

If the first two… well, I don’t worry about that significantly more than I worry about it for any other big fandom. There are much more kid-oriented movies and shows that get lots of adult attention, I doubt the focus of criticism for that will ever be on Tron.

And besides the fact that I basically do not interact with Tron Ares in my own fannish life, Hollywood is full of sex pests… any franchise big enough will eventually include some of them.

I mean… yeah, there’s always some risk that a particular fandom could be singled out for association with that… in violation of all logic, in comparison with other fandoms that get away with much worse connections to the same shit.

Because the Discourse about fandom does tend to be steered by cults of personality; by how many callout posts have been written by highly popular online critics.

And so, inevitably, the fandoms we end up agreeing are Evil and Irredeemable are chosen by a process best described as… chaotic.

Worrying about that is pretty futile, because there is no logic to it, and no way to predict it.

And I guess the same is true of the third possibility: that the criticism could end up targeting the actual storyline and characters.

In this respect I’m… maybe kind of surprised it hasn’t happened already.

Not just in regard to Kevin “all his friends are fourteen years old!” Flynn. But also the entire concept of computer programs as sexual beings. Like… it feels the most meaningless kind of theater, every time I see the rules channel in a Tron discord group say “no NSFW content about characters under the age of 18.”

I mean, I can see why these clauses get included– it’s to make sure Discord knows we’re trying to comply with the spirit of their policies– and the fact is, their policies do use that terminology, instead of a more Harkness-test-based wording like “above the age of majority for their species.”

Which also… wouldn’t exactly work for programs, IMO. But “18 years” works even less.

Because, everyone I’ve seen write or draw smut about Tron characters seems to consider it unquestionably fine to include the 1982 programs. And in 1982, all the programs are under the age of 18. Computers capable of running them literally had not existed for 18 years.

Unless we’re talking “in-system” time… which is clearly different, but there’s never a coherent explanation as to how, and claiming that a character is “over 18 years old” would be pretty meaningless since that world doesn’t even seem to use years.

The Tron Wiki only attempts to explain time on the Legacy Grid, and its attempt also isn’t perfect… but no one really adheres to that, either. I’ve never seen anyone argue, for instance, that a sex scene between a programmer and his newly-created program would be equivalent to parent/newborn incest.

And this is for the same reason that the “age of majority for their species” wording doesn’t quite fit programs. From all we see in canon, they’re created with all the capabilities of adulthood from the first moment. (With some fuzziness about what qualifies as the alpha or beta stage, and whether it’s in any way equivalent to any human stage of development– personally I would say not, but there’s room for interpretation there.)

And their relationship with their programmers has lots of layers, yes, but the most prominent is “deity.” It’s not an overwhelming norm, across world religion, for deity/worshipper sex to be considered totally off-limits– or for the first newly-created mortals to be considered children! (for instance, in most current interpretations of the Bible, humans created directly by God are seen as adults– God told Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply” pretty much immediately after he made them.)

(Furthermore, some of what we consider “sexual content” in Tron fandom is… the sort of thing that Tumblr responds to with “We have got to get normal porn back on this site.” In other words, the sort of thing that a person outside the fandom might have difficulty even considering sexual.)

So… in short, yeah, I think that if the antis decided to focus on Tron, they could find material to get mad about. Wouldn’t make much more sense than anything else they find to get mad about– but it’s a risk.

…And I’m glad I’ve built the skill of being able to stop worrying about risks I can’t do anything about.