astercontrol:

DeathNote/Tron crossover but it’s just User-Kira typing “kill” commands into his terminal and failing to catch Rinzler because he doesn’t know Rinzler’s real filename or what his face looks like under the mask

just leading him in an endless loop of a merry chase. A Light cycle, if you will

A retelling of Death Note as a programming story would be pretty intriguing, actually. The canonical use of the Death Note is really quite programming-like– following a lot of specific rules, and all enacted through writing text.

A programmer can, indeed, write a command to “kill” a program and also direct the program to perform a specified series of actions before it “dies”

And the programmer does, indeed, have to know the program’s name in order to do this

Knowing the “face” would have uncertain meaning, in programming terms– especially if the programmer has never been inside the Digital World and seen the programs with human-looking faces

But perhaps it could be seen as analogous to user permissions. In a computer like the Encom system, where the “faces” of programs are User signatures that resemble the faces of their creators–

– perhaps a programmer “knowing the face” of a program translates more closely to knowing who wrote it. And, perhaps, thus having access to the passwords of whoever wrote it.

Meaning: Light can’t kill Rinzler because he doesn’t know his true filename is Tron, nor can he break Alan-1’s original encryption.

(why is Light messing around in Flynn’s grid anyway? Why’s he even want to kill Rinzler? Who the fuck knows, who knows why that bitch does anything)