big fan of characters who have it all under control when theyre put in situations but no idea how to be like a regular guy doing regular stuff when all is said and done.
Ok here's a dark little thought about post-1982 Flynn.
So, on the Discord we were discussing something I've mentioned a bunch of times before: the idea of copying a program to another system.
The reason I believe Legacy Tron was a copy, is basically just this: In real-life computers, unless a program is running off a removable disk, copying is the only way to move it from one computer to another. If you move a program to a new computer, the original will, by default, still be in the computer you moved it from. You'd have to actively choose to delete it, if you don't want it to be there.
And a few more ideas that came up were:
- What if this happens when moving a program out into the "real world," too? Like Quorra, at the end of Legacy? Does it leave behind an in-system copy, who can't ever fully leave the system, except by being deleted?
-What if this happens to digitized Users, too? What if Flynn left behind a program version of himself, when he got back out of the Encom system, that first time?
-What if it happens every time? What if Flynn went back in and out of the Encom system a bunch of times, and every time it created a new Program Flynn?
-What would happen to all these duplicates? Would they simply be stuck there forever unless they were deleted? Could they be merged together?
And since then... my mind has extrapolated this to the backstory of Legacy, in some really disturbing ways.
What if, by the time he makes the new Grid, he's figured out a way to stop these proliferating copies from happening every time... But he still knows how to make it happen on command, if he wants to.
And what if this is how he created Clu2.
This would explain why Clu seems to be made in his image in a way other programs aren't-- seems to be a duplicate of him on some deep level, perhaps even sharing his memories.
And it would also explain why he's so sure that neither he nor Clu would survive reintegration.
Because that would mean he's done it before.
Not on himself -- but on his earlier copies, in his attempts to reduce their numbers without outright killing them.
He found that his copies never survived being merged back together. And based on his knowledge of how it works, he sees no way his "real" self could survive it either.
Maybe he doesn't know for sure what else would happen, if his real self were to merge with a copy. But he has plenty of experience to suggest that neither one would survive.
And the fact that he, prior to all those "zen" years of becoming more enlightened, was someone who did all that to his programs...
...might also explain part of why Clu turned out the way he did.