Anonymous: <p>I think it's telling that, at the height of the series popularity, all the lewd Tron art was almost exclusively gay. Then the hetero material showed up as the series declined in relevancy. </p>

Hmm.

I’m not sure what exactly this is “telling” about, though…. higher percentage of gay fanart being a sign of greater popularity? Hetero pairings being an omen of downfall? Any of this being important in a specific way to the Tron franchise in particular? At what point does anon believe that the series “declined”?

From what I can tell, it’s been wildly fluctuating in “relevancy” (in the sense of “how many people are talking about it”) for the whole time it’s existed (and opinions on whether it’s good have been wildly divergent, even within devoted fandom, for each part of the canon.)

My own ability to see patterns is generally too overactive to trust. But it’s struggling to see any consistent patterns here.

1982:

Inspo for gay fanworks very tempting, since there’s a lot of homoeroticism in the film but nothing outright canonically gay. Inspo for straight fanworks somewhat less tempting, because the heterosexual storylines in the canon are already some of the best and most compelling m/f movie relationships ever, and fanworks are there to give the fans what they don’t get in canon. Inspo for m/m/f threesome fanworks very tempting.

Actual ability to share any kind of fanworks, especially erotic ones, is VERY limited by both the technology and the taboos of the time. Few Tron print zines from the 80s survive today. We can’t actually know how much smut of any kind was made for that movie in the years right after its release.

Legacy:

Definitely a more fertile time for fanworks, including those that are lewd and/or gay. Inspo for gay art in the canon: well, the fight scenes with Rinzler are compelling, and Clu and Rinzler are overall pretty compelling characters with lots of angsty backstory that’s left mostly to the imagination. Generally catnip to fan shippers, and Tron fans do seem to love doing deep digs to speculate from tiny crumbs (they got an ARG, for fucks sake).

Female characters are basically just Quorra and the Sirens, who are compelling in different ways but not always the ways that appeal to a majority of fanfic writers. Their interactions with the male characters never qualify as canon hetero relationships; they’re portrayed in ways that seem like they’re trying to tempt heterosexual fantasy but nothing is canonized.

Basically every potential pairing is left unconfirmed, and the closest we get to queer-coded interactions are those with Zuse (who weirdly gets only a small share of the fanworks??)

Not sure whether the prevalence of m/m over m/f fanworks for this movie is a sign of anything in the movie itself, or just a sign of the times– fan shipping in 2010 was just very m/m slash-focused in general, I think.

Uprising:

Also lots of potential ships, both m/m and m/f, that tempt fantasy but don’t go anywhere canonically. I see a lot of m/m and m/f fanworks these days about the Uprising characters.

Feels about equal to me, but that could be my own bias; would have to actually study the data to make any statement on the exact ratio, either currently or at the time the show was airing.

Evolution:

Fanworks I’ve seen have been mostly m/m, but I haven’t seen enough of the game to speculate on any canon-specific reasons.