Another pass on Legacy and another run through the novelization of Tron proper, and something's bothering me. There's a lot about Kevin Flynn's behavior that adds up more to a case of anti-hero or (come Betrayal and Legacy) something dangerously close to villain. Of course, part of that in Legacy are the writers; Horowitz and Kitiss run entirely on grayscale morality and characters who aren't as clear-cut on the alignment scale as they appear on first pass (just look at OUaT and LOST). That being said, here are the points bothering me about that character.

1) He's established as a guy who has a natural gift for business, programming, and persuading others to do what he wants (Alan and Lora should have been immune to his bullshit, but look how fast he can rope them into a half-dozen felonies), but is otherwise a full-blown Man Child. His primary motivation on the first film is to get revenge on Dillinger for stealing his ideas and a ton of money. Defeating Master Control is the only way he would be able to get back to analog so he could enjoy the credit and cash. Anyone else's concerns could be a second thought at best.

2) Even right before he makes his attempt at Heroic Sacrifice, he kisses Yori, a doppelganger for his ex-girlfriend (and who he knows is happily attached to his new Program best friend). It's very obvious he's using her as a substitute for the gal who got away (who is, from a certain POV, her mother), which kinda adds to the squick.

3) After he does get back to analog, he proceeds to steal his friends' work (Lora's laser, Alan's Program) and conduct highly irregular and dangerous experiments in his arcade's basement, all the while lying to his friends and even his wife about what he's really up to! Seriously, these people are loyal and devoted to him and his cause. Alan keeps the damn pager for 21 years. Roy loses everything just as he's approaching retirement. Repeated digitizations could have done God-knows-what to his DNA, but he tells Jordan NOTHING. And after all this, he thinks so little of his friends that he doesn't even trust them with the truth? With a "in case I die or vanish, here's some instructions?"

4) And what is he doing in cyberspace? Millions of sentient, artificial life forms with their own society, goals, thoughts, and feelings, and he explicitly refers to their world as a "game," and "[his] gift to the world," with little if any consideration for them.

5) When the Isos come along, he's so delighted by them that the Programs seem secondary concerns at best. When things inevitably go south on him, he saves Quorra (last Iso), but throws millions of Program lives (including Tron's) under the proverbial bus in the process.

6) Regarding the Isos. Yes, it was a horrible, evil, Sith-Level monstrosity that Clu committed by inciting hatred against them. The creation of Abraxas and cold murder of Radia just scratched the surface. The Iso Wars, bombing of their cities, mass genocide are even worse. However, the Grid was falling apart from gridbugs, system failures, and capacity issues before the coup (see the Betrayal comic). It went from being on the verge of irrecoverable crash to stable enough to run uninterrupted for nearly 21 years. The other disturbing element was that Flynn was delighted about the Isos, enough and go on and on about how great Isos were, how much of a "miracle" they were, his "gift to the world." The Programs get slapped with a denigrating label of Basics, and Flynn doesn't seem to be interested in them (to the point of possibly throwing them all under the bus, Tron included, just to he could save Quorra and his own ass). But aren't the Programs also miracles? Aren't they also life from nothing with unknown origin? Aren't they also sentient lifeforms with their own social order, dreams, sense of humor? Weren't they also worth respect? Wouldn't even the simplest accounting script like Ram rewrite everything - science, medicine, religion - just as much as an Iso could?

7) Quorra says he fought against Clu, but there is no evidence of it in TRON: Uprising and his idea of "fighting" in TRON: Evolution was to code up Anon to do battle for him and die to rescue Quorra.

Even worse is that the two other main characters of Legacy are his devoted disciple (who was saved by him while millions of others were left to die or worse) and the son who has desperately wanted to find him, characters who likely have a very large blind spot when it comes to his degree of culpability. I figure that the writers were probably intending a more flattering picture than this, but add up these points, and it doesn't look good for him.

Rebuttal? Additions to the list of disturbing behavior? Something I missed? order abortion pill abortion pill buy online where to buy abortion pill

To be honest, I'm leaning more towards J's argument here. While Flynn may not be a villain, he's certainly no hero either. Not so sure about the stuff for the first movie, but for the second one, I think J's pretty spot-on. Flynn screwed up big time, and the only mistake he actually admitted to was making Clu flawed.

King's right; there's a huge amount we don't know, and that makes it all the more frustrating. You want to believe the official story. Clu being a complete monster helps. The viewpoint characters being sympathetic helps. It's only after the second or third (or more) watching after running through Betrayal, Evolution, and Uprising that I started going "something's not right. Too much is not adding up. Is that really the whole truth?"

Traahn Wrote: (I've also always wondered if Disney/Lisberger maybe nixed the love scene because of the love triangle they created; possibly accidentally created. Lora being Alan's girlfriend and Flynn's ex. Yori being Tron's boyfriend, yet Flynn kisses her. So, adding a Tron + Yori love scene in the mix might've just been construed as 'too much,' especially given the Flynn kiss. (The Flynn kiss is pretty powerful timing-wise, so it's not like you could easily decide to get rid of that in favor of the love scene. For me, it's a bit of a toss up on which to keep, if both situations can't be in.)

Disney studios would not dream of signing off on an OT3 (not even in the modern era - see Aurora/Phillip/Mulan in OUaT or Will/Elizabeth/Jack in PotC), but it's the best dodge I can make here. Programs likely don't have the same concepts of family or sexuality as humans, so for all we know, there were some permissions granted on that Solar Sailer.

Traahn Wrote:Also, I've never interpreted the programs as 'children' with the Users being their 'parents'?? I guess with the programs seeing their Users as a deity, it's possible to think that way, but I feel programs are more supposed to be parallel lives; alter egos. And from a program's perspective, Users are more mythological Gods.

Here's where the doppelganger issue runs smack into some real world religions (the concept of God as an over-Father), and some very deeply embedded tropes about creating life. The idea of parenthood says "you made this new life, you're responsible for it!" In practice, it's talking about biology. In theory? Well, you create life - even synthetic life - you're a parent. Even Frankenstein's monster saw Victor as an abusive, neglectful jerk of a dad. Jack Pumpkinhead insisted on calling Ozma "father." I'm sure the implementation in the Tron-verse would get very complicated and send Team Bradley scrambling for the aspirin, but "child" is a decent approximation. (There are some first-rate fanfics that run with this, BTW.) Canon even hints at it when Flynn apologizes, then embraces/mutually kills one "son" (Clu) to save the other (Sam).

Traahn Wrote: Plus, he had done it a bunch of times, so it's not unreasonable to think he felt pretty safe. Do people always tell others when they're about to go sky diving, bungee jumping, on a hike, etc.? Not the same thing, I know... but could be seen as somewhat similar.

BASIC safety and courtesy when it comes to hiking, mountain climbing, or any dangerous sport is to either not be stupid enough to solo it, or be VERY good about leaving an itinerary. Never venture out unannounced, let others know your approximate route and time you plan to be back so that if something goes wrong, Search and Rescue can find you. Every year, a dozen people or more get lost on Mount Rainier, ranging from teenagers on a day hike to veteran climbers. Yes, you can go and do dangerous things alone, but you ALWAYS leave your lifelines open in case shit hits fan.

Flynn's careless and caviler treatment of his loved ones is a large sticking point, especially seeing what they were willing to do for him. He didn't love or trust them enough to tell them the truth? To say "in case I vanish or die - and ONLY THEN - open this envelope" (We know Roy and Alan would follow instructions) He didn't love or trust Jordan enough to explain things? He thought so little of Sam and his Programs that he didn't plan for a sudden death like Jordan's?

Traahn Wrote: I'd be delighted, too, if every other program that ever lived was manually created... given a specific task/purpose in life... and then all the sudden an ISO pops up out of the primordial ooze. In a way, he could re-create the 'ordinary' programs any time he wanted,

Again, here's where we have a big gap of information that might help or muddy things further. When Ram was killed off, it definitely wasn't treated like "well, crap, the insurance software needs a reinstall" Clu 1.0 was a decent enough fellow that got killed off, and we all saw that Clu 2.0 was a very different animal than his predecessor. As far as we can see in-universe, each Program is a unique lifeform, an individual person. True, they have hard-wired directives they cannot (and probably don't want to) break, but they seem to have quite the flexibility to decide how they carry out their functions and expand into new functions (Ram went from insurance salesman to gladiator. Paige went from medic to soldier. Beck...long way from mechanic to revolutionary). Even restoration from backup could be tricky - the only case of it we saw was in Tron 2.0 (I know, non-canon) where Mercury was re-installed and acted disturbingly mechanical until her "settings" and memory was restored.

Traahn Wrote:Depending on what she's capable of doing, do you save the Golden Child, or the masses. Flynn would have arguments either way... neither of which is entirely right, or arguable, entirely wrong.

In some regards, that might make things even worse. Okay, you save Joan of Arc, but it means allowing the English to kill every French citizen in a hundred miles. Save one "special" person but let millions suffer, die, and endure fates much worse than death because they aren't "special enough." Would certainly suck to know your God abandoned you to something very horrible because you weren't special enough, and no matter what you said or did, he was still saving his precious one over you and everyone else. Under the circumstances, I'd probably sign on with Clu willingly upon hearing that! I wonder if that wasn't one of Clu's better arguments to turn the population against Flynn, actually.

Traahn Wrote:TRON: Uprising and Tron: Evolution don't count, hehe.

The only things that technically "don't count" are 2.0 and Ghost in the Machine, due to Disney Oswalding them from canon. Even then, they work for secondary sources.

The argument is something I've seen alluded to. Some fanfic writers like grey_sw, ExpositionFairy, and Cyberbutterfly have done a bit of deconstruction on the circumstances in Legacy and things maybe not being as cut and dry as it appeared. I consolidated a lot of the arguments I saw in their stories and the stuff that bothered me and decided to put it out there to see if anyone else noticed the same things.

Gosh, yes. Some of this, I've been saying for years.

It's late, so I can't promise how coherent this reply will be, but it's T:B especially that bothers me. It casts Clu into a much more gray light and brings up a lot of interesting issues that get our brains thinking, but it also has bad implications for both Flynn and Tron. Honestly, if I want to like Flynn, I cut T:B right out of my headcanon.

Parts you forget: the way Flynn blatantly takes advantage of everyone in that particular piece. It looks like Alan's left scrambling at the company trying to make him look good and cover up for all the times he screws up, goes AWOL, etc. ... and then he waltzes out of the company altogether and leaves Alan at the helm (and remember, Alan's a programmer, not a businessman. He no doubt wants to be in front of a computer screen, not a boardroom).

Jordan's obviously left with much of the childrearing (he can't even bother to show up for the prenatal medical appointments or make it to the birth on time, and he barely does any of the baby prep work considering it seems to be a big deal to have him even go to the store to pick up something for the baby's room), considering the extent to which he falls apart on that front after she dies-- and then plops most of the responsibility on the shoulders of her parents (which they even call him out on... and it doesn't seem he listens).

Tron, Clu, and Shaddox are barely hacking it in the Grid, and Flynn doesn't even bother to take it seriously when they point out-- multiple times-- that everything's pretty fucked-up. He's so excited about the Isos, but it sounds like he never actually interacts with them. Is there anyone he doesn't use, anyone besides himself he has the least bit of consideration for?


He's immature in the first film, and while I may take some exception with character continuity into the second, that part doesn't change-- for all he's supposed to have gained all this wisdom in a thousand years of having his non-action arse plopped on a zafu, he sure as hell hasn't actually done so (I've argued this in other places).


I've felt, through both films, that he's had little sense that programs are equal to users. Now, we could argue this either way, I admit, but I also have to admit that while I can sit on this side of the screen and say one thing about program-vs-user worth, once I'd been looking programs in the eyes, I'm not sure I could sing that particular song anymore.


Let's not talk about how he leaves Tron behind-- twice-- without a second glance or a tear in his eye. Again, we could argue about this: it's what Tron wants, and it may be more betrayal on Flynn's part to not listen and stick around to endanger BOTH of their lives, and it'd be pretty shitty if Tron dies fighting for Flynn and the thing he's fighting for doesn't come to pass anyway because Flynn doesn't get the hell out of Dodge like Tron told him to. Still...

2. Um, yeah. Yori. I can't think of many ways to make that NOT a shitty thing to do. But it's been debated here before and the consensus seemed to be that the hysterical women were making a mountain out of a molehill and apparently kissing your buddy's significant other/kissing someone else while you're in a relationship is No Big Deal, so that's all I'll say on the subject.

4. I could go on and on. Like, think of human history and conquering civilizations and exploitation and etc. etc. And he wants to perpetrate that on yet another society? Lack of forethought, or does he just not care?

5. I'll give him this... the programs weren't going to have it much better under Clu. The part that gets me is that he still didn't have any altruistic feelings for them. Or for Q for that matter. The ONLY thing that gets him to fight Clu is Sam being in danger-- after all, he's had no desire to get Quorra out of there prior to that, so I don't think it's her safety he was fighting for, which has to feel pretty crappy for her. For that matter, the only thing that actually gets him off his ass is Sam's action-- otherwise he's obviously happy for Sam to get trapped there, too, as long as Flynn doesn't have to actually do anything. Okay, we can talk about apathy and depression etc. (see my Beat of Your Heart fic) and give him a wee bit of a pass, but...

6.

J Wrote:It went from being on the verge of irrecoverable crash to stable enough to run uninterrupted for nearly 21 years.

The other disturbing thought this brings up is: was Clu right??

Traahn Wrote:I've always seen that as maybe more a writing accident than Flynn being a jerk. (I've also always wondered if Disney/Lisberger maybe nixed the love scene because of the love triangle they created; possibly accidentally created. Lora being Alan's girlfriend and Flynn's ex. Yori being Tron's boyfriend, yet Flynn kisses her. So, adding a Tron + Yori love scene in the mix might've just been construed as 'too much,' especially given the Flynn kiss. .

Besides the possible controversy of love scene, I always figured they couldn't find a good place to put it. I mean, it's an action movie. It would've made no sense: Tron's like, "we gotta go take down the MCP *now*; my user's calling me, let's go! ... oh, wait, I will stop to get it on." It would've been a stretch to make it work.

Traahn Wrote: Also, I've never interpreted the programs as 'children' with the Users being their 'parents'?? I guess with the programs seeing their Users as a deity, it's possible to think that way, but I feel programs are more supposed to be parallel lives; alter egos.

I've never been able to get into it, either. I've created a lot of things in my life, from writing to music to art to yarn and a lot of other things, and I would never see any of that as remotely being any sort of "child" substitute or avatar, for many reasons. Even if I were to find out that, say, a piece of music I'd written had some kind of sentience, I still wouldn't feel that way.

KingJ.exe Wrote:They're standing, waiting to be rezzed into the Lightcycle Grid, and Tron says that his user wants him to take down the MCP. Flynn pauses, doesn't say anything for a second, and then "My user wants me to do that too." I think that's the way the scene went, either way it has the same idea.

Other way around, actually. Flynn says something like "I'm starting to remember a lot of things. Like, my user wants me to go after the MCP." Tron's uncertain, then says, "My user wants that, too." At this point, Flynn is still definitely looking out for his own interests: get the hell out of there, and get his evidence.

J Wrote:I kinda end up here. He wasn't a bad man with bad intentions. That would be his digital doppelganger who chose the nastiest way to implement his directive out of rage and jealousy. His crimes are more out of selfishness, stupidity, and carelessness than malice, but that really doesn't excuse things. His boneheaded actions and lack of forethought ruined the lives of every character in the films.

DING. At what point does a person's selfishness/lack of consideration for other people surpass "they don't know any better/don't mean it" and become a fault? Certainly if you reach adulthood without managing to notice/care that you are as self-absorbed as he is, some of the culpability starts falling on you.

J Wrote:Yeah, there's the kicker. Two movies, a graphic novel, a game, and the animated series - and there's so much that's a big, fat question mark

Won't be the first time i"ve said this, won't be the last. There was so much in any of this material that it seems they either didn't think about, or didn't know what to do with, so they glossed over and hoped we wouldn't think about it either. If Disney was smart, they'd scoop up everyone from this forum, put us in a room, let us argue it out, and cherrypick ideas and problemsolving and explanations for their next film-- because obviously the writers all sucked at it and thought about it all a lot less than the fans have.

J Wrote:In some regards, that might make things even worse. Okay, you save Joan of Arc, but it means allowing the English to kill every French citizen in a hundred miles. Save one "special" person but let millions suffer, die, and endure fates much worse than death because they aren't "special enough." Would certainly suck to know your God abandoned you to something very horrible because you weren't special enough, and no matter what you said or did, he was still saving his precious one over you and everyone else. Under the circumstances, I'd probably sign on with Clu willingly upon hearing that! I wonder if that wasn't one of Clu's better arguments to turn the population against Flynn, actually.

If you consider Evolution canon, than yes, it is one of Clu's arguments. In the scene where Anon(you) is in the games and Clu is making this big speech, he mentions how Flynn has thrown all Basics aside in favor of the ISOs.where to buy abortion pill ordering abortion pills to be shipped to house buy abortion pill online

Traahn Wrote:I don't trust anything in Tron: Betrayal.  It's been a long time since I've read it, but it seems like we get a glimpse of the 'new' grid early in it (like within a few pages) and it already looks like the grid made by Nike that's featured in Tron: Legacy with Nike gym clothes circuitry. Whereas Kosinski/Lisberger said the new system looks the way it does because of some Galapagos Island evolution that took like, what, 30 years to create on the server.

To be fair, I also don't especially count anything the directors/producers say outside of the film as canon, either.  You don't get to leave holes in the material itself and then come back later and explain to me, out-of-universe, how you meant things to be because you did some bad writing/world-building.  Show it to me in the story if it's so important for me to know.  If you can't figure out a way to get your story across IN the story, without resorting to a bazillion author's notes, you need to work on your storytelling.

(That said, there's that little conversation Sam and Flynn had on the SS that implies the Grid used to be different, but that could be taken many ways-- visually different, politically different, etc.-- so I don't take this as proof.)

Traahn Wrote: I think there was something else it either got wrong or was just too quickly Tron: Legacy-ized for the sake of jiving with Tron: Legacy and being contemporary for today's audience, as opposed to showing the antiquated, insignificant and undesirable , and it rubbed me the wrong way.

I feel like this may have been an out-of-universe practicality thing... maybe they were afraid audiences would have trouble tying it in if everything looked different?

Traahn Wrote:And anything other than the movies is non-canon to me, no matter how much it seems to tie to the films.  ... I like to keep media like that as "one-offs" from the official movie canon.

Yes, definitely.  (I feel the same way about "novelizations" of films, too.  Unless the novelization was written by the film's actual writers and I know for sure it reflects their intentions for the characters within the films, I consider it sanctioned fanfic.)  Never mind things like video games. 

I know this is like one of my mantras, but really, you can't run a story franchise on material that requires that a fan own an expensive video game system and then buy the game-- especially since this happens to require that they own *multiple* expensive video game systems and then buy the game for each-- to have the full story.  You can't keep splitting up across more and more media and expect your fans to jump on it all.  (Especially if the story keeps changing with each new thing that comes out, and possibly conflicting with/near-invalidating what you put out earlier.)  If you want to make your additional media supplemental, as most franchises are, then fine, but I shouldn't need to dig up, pay for, and then jump through that many hoops just to get the basic plot.

I have a love/hate relationship with T:B.  It brings up some interesting things, and explains some things I otherwise would've wondered about, but it brings problems too, and, of course, downright contradictions.

Traahn Wrote:Sounds good to me.  I hate it when films or games strive to tell you each and every little tidbit of everything; fill in every gap.  I prefer some theater of the mind.  Some mystery and unknowns are not necessarily a bad thing.  For me, it diminishes the enjoyment if there are answers to everything.  Every nook and cranny explored.  Every minute accounted for.  Every thought known.

I do too, but there comes a time when the gaps actually make you question how the universe could possibly work.  I like to fill in cracks as a writer, but sometimes I feel like I get out the wood putty and then notice there's a gaping hole beneath the surface that I can't even figure out how to work with, that either derails me completely or leaves me scrambling for creative and plausible ways to get that filled before I can go on with what I wanted to do.

Traahn Wrote: Kat Wrote: I've never been able to get into it, either. I've created a lot of things in my life, from writing to music to art to yarn and a lot of other things, and I would never see any of that as remotely being any sort of "child" substitute or avatar, for many reasons. Even if I were to find out that, say, a piece of music I'd written had some kind of sentience, I still wouldn't feel that way. That'd be awesome, though. Write a paragraph and all the letters that comprise it are your little children living in the page  Cute! hehe

At least I wouldn't have to change their diapers or send them to college...


where to buy abortion pill http://blog.bitimpulse.com/template/default.aspx?abortion-types buy abortion pill online

A few things to remember. Yes, Programs act like people but they are, in fact, programs. Flynn or any other user can write, run, or terminate one and it's done all the time from outside. You ever close a browser window? You just derezzed a program. It's "life" is it's current session. Do you remember in TRON 2.0 when the one program says the system reset is coming and for you to "save yourself"? He then says he's been saving himself every few millicycles. Elsewhere, you hear some ICPs talking about losing data during a reset. They come back from storage. They are programs.

Nobody on the Grid died. Sam saved the whole thing on a flash drive, it's all there. The whole thing and all the Programs in it can be restored from backup.

Programs, of course, aren't usually so blase' about it. They don't want to be derezzed because they aren't in control of if and when they're ever restarted, and downtime is like death even if it's temporary. A system reset is one thing, they know they'll be automatically be reloaded when the system comes back up, but if they're terminated during runtime a user has to restart them. Who knows how many cycles that will take? What if the User decides to delete you instead? You might lose memories or updates if you weren't saved properly. Still, derezzing is rarely permanent.

Not so for ISOs. A User didn't write them, didn't have any hand in creating them, and can't restore them either. Once they're gone they're gone. So, to a User they take priority. They die like we do. Programs don't.

Flynn knew this. He wasn't worried about the system being at risk because he was just alpha testing it anyhow. He was learning it's limitations and capabilities and so long as he didn't die in a system crash it wouldn't have bothered him as in fact the crash data would give him important information about fail conditions. He would have had to stress test the thing anyhow before he opened it to humans, make damned sure it was stable and safe.

That's why he didn't tell anyone but his own kid who wouldn't tell anyone that would take him seriously. He was alpha testing and taking all the risk onto himself and himself alone. He did seem to feel he was close, as he promised to bring Sam in soon. That would be the beta testing phase and when he would likely also bring in Alan, Lora, etc. He felt he had to get it ready though before he risked bringing in anyone else.

From his friends and family's perspective it's selfish for him to risk his own life, but he was playing hero and trying to accomplish something great. Not for himself, but for humanity. Flynn didn't live in a mansion, and he gave away a multi-billion dollar company like it was nothing. He wasn't in it for personal gain, he wanted to change the world for the better. He dreamed of making a real difference for the entire world.

As far as Flynn's prioritizing the Grid, the movie screwed up by painting that as the wrong call. Flynn even says to Sam "I'd trade all this for more time with you", and that actually pissed me off. The Grid can change EVERYTHING! It can solve world hunger, create instant travel, and allow millions to be housed in luxurious living conditions for price of a single home server and the electricity to run it. It can even extend human lifetimes by thousands of years. He'd damned well better make that his priority! The needs of the many who can benefit from this technology outweigh the needs of the few friends and family members who feel neglected.

Lora and Dumont never knew that humans could be digitized or that there was a world inside the computer for them to go to. They made the laser as a storage and transit device for objects. It turned out to be so, so, so much more. I don't think he was trying to screw them out of anything, Dumont may well have been dead by that point and he outright gave Encom to Lora's husband making her a billionaire. She can't say she wasn't well compensated for her work, and I think he of all people would make damned sure she got her due credit.

So Flynn was niave, idealistic, hardheaded, and a dreamer, but he was no villain. And in the end his decision to abandon his dream was the most misguided thing of all.