so, in a previous post, I mentioned the theory I tend to go with, about an in-universe reason why blue is the bad-guy color for Lightcycles, while also being the good-guy color for armor circuitry:

• Things were all blue before MCP took over.
• MCP tried to change everything red to match him.
• Circuits accept color-change more readily than Lightcycles.
• So, the MCP’s attempts to change bikes red resulted in a lot of glitchy bikes, some red, some orange, some yellow, and some unstably changing colors all the time.
• And the MCP rejected those failed glitchcycles and assigned them to User-Believer conscripts, while keeping the superior, unchanged blue cycles for his own warriors.

And then…

Then, I was taking a closer look at the order Flynn and Tron and Ram went in, as they escaped from the Lightcycle Grid.

If you recall how they escaped: An enemy Lightcyclist was trapped between his own jetwall and Tron’s, forcing him to crash into the wall and make a crack in it. Flynn rode his bike into the crack, and then Tron and Ram followed him.

Logically, the journey from there on should begin with Flynn in front, right?

Well….

This is the scene immediately after they enter that crack in the wall.

At first it shows three bikes in a row– the orange one in front, followed by the yellow one, and then finally the red one, all viewed from the front at a low angle, as they emerge from a narrow passage.

Already this is confusing– Tron had the orange bike, so how did he get in front so fast?

But then, to complicate matters further: right after they turn a corner, there’s a cut to them exiting a tunnel onto a larger gridded area of ground, as they’re chased by Recognizers. And suddenly the yellow one’s in front, followed by the orange one, then the red one!

Somehow, within just a few seconds, Tron and Flynn seem to have switched places twice?

I hadn’t consciously noticed this before!

Which is interesting, considering that my headcanon (particularly, the part about “glitchy color-changing Lightcycles”) actually provides a simpler explanation for this than most other ideas I could imagine!

Then again… maybe it’s a combination of things. Maybe some or all of those three Lightcycles do have a glitch that causes them to change color. But maybe things are also further confused by the three of them moving around and actually switching places a few times during their travels…

And perhaps also by the fact that there are three colors on Tron’s team to begin with.

We don’t know the whole history of this. Perhaps the team is always red, orange and yellow, for Ram and Tron and whoever their current teammate is– but maybe when they rez onto the Lightcycle grid they don’t always get assigned the same colors from that spectrum.

Or, maybe they’ve always all been the same color before!

This actually seems likely, when you think of it– after all, the enemy team is all blue, with their communications calling each other out as “Blue Leader” and “Blue bikes”–

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while Tron’s team seems to have chosen “Gold-1,” “Gold-2” and “Gold-3” as their call signs. Which would make a lot more sense if they were usually all gold!

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So.

Perhaps it’s the presence of Flynn that mixed things up there.

I’ve talked before about how Flynn is “different” in intriguing ways– how his User-Power does unpredictable things to the system. I’ve even speculated that unpredictability itself is part of his User-Power–

–that Flynn, as a User, succeeds in part because he simply bends the Grid’s laws of probability around himself.

That’s why the one who realized “there’s something different about him!” was not the obvious character (Tron, the security monitor whose One Job is to watch what comes into the system and notice Anything Unscheduled happening)–

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–but Ram. The actuary. The statistics-and-probability nerd.

And, considering how much Flynn hung around under rainbows, before his own little isekai-trip “over the rainbow” into program-land–

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…it’s actually kind of fascinating to imagine that his influence on the digital world often took the form of altering the colors of things!

Refracting Tron’s “gold team” into three different values from that same half of the color spectrum– and making himself not only their literal good-luck-charm, but also, the almost-as-literal “gold at the end of their rainbow.”

yep. I’ve made enough jokes about Kevin Flynn being gay, now’s time to riff on him being Irish. (As I assume he is, with that name.)

Is he God, or Saint Patrick? The Pat-TRON saint of being a lucky sonuvabitch.

Who better to lead the grand exit of a bunch of Lightcycles. …Which, remember, are practically the same game as Snake.

Anyway!

The gold bike mostly remains at the front end of that line of Lightcycles, after that one initial weird switch-up of color at the beginning.

But the pursuers seem both unlucky in their shots (thanks to Flynn’s luck-power. IMO)… and also confused about where to shoot.

Which, personally, I attribute to a combination of:

• they weren’t expecting the bikes to even have different colors before Flynn’s weird magic influenced that
• the colors may have shifted, at least once
• the bikes may have also actually switched order a few times

and therefore:

• the enemies’ strongest clue as to which character was which, probably came from the order they’d be expecting them to ride in.

I’m assuming, at this point, that killing Tron was probably their biggest goal. The MCP was more likely to want the User alive, and Ram was probably considered unimportant. Lethal projectiles would be aimed at Tron first.

And if I’d been choosing the order they’d ride in, I’d put Tron at the back.

No, this isn’t a “Tron’s nice ass” joke, get your mind out of the gutter– I think it actually makes sense that the one with all the protective security-program instincts, and the most skillful Lightcycle maneuvers, should cover the rear. He’d draw fire away from his companions and then manage to evade it himself.

But instead. Ram put his little sacrificial-lamb self back there. Like Patroclus disguising himself as Achilles. Dammit Ram.

Tron’s got both Patrick and Patroclus ready to die for him. He better realize how damn lucky he is.