#writing tag!

[teh-kittykat]

Tron: The Animated Series (1986-1989)

What do you mean you haven't seen Tron: The Animated Series? It was my favorite cartoon when I was a kid!

So this all started as an exercise in how to explain why Sam inexplicably had merch for a 2010 movie in his 1989 house. In-universe there would have probably been toys using the 1982 aesthetic since that was what the video game used (and Sam DOES have an 82 Tron figure in his house!) but why the Grid stuff?

Enter THE CARTOON.

It was the 1980s everybody who was everybody made cartoons to sell toys. Encom made home gaming consoles by this point, and they would have had peripherals like Nintendo did. They had licensed characters like Nintendo did. You see where I am going.

Encom wants to sell Encom Gaming Power Gauntlets. Kevin wants to introduce kids to the ideas about the Digital Frontier since he's a futurist and knows kids will be mentally flexible enough to digest the new zeitgeist if it's fun and animated!

Production of the cartoon ran from Kevin's official retirement as CEO until his disappearance. Three official seasons with a fourth in production. Season three's airing was cut short due to the furor surrounding Kevin's going missing, but the "lost" final episodes of S3 were restored when the DVDs were eventually released for an anniversary collection.

The cartoon was also successful in syndication through the 1990s and early 2000s since it successfully anticipated the Educational/Informative movement-- Tron: The Animated Series actually does teach kids some of the basics of computer science around the silly adventure stuff. Think Captain Planet meets Captain N the Game Master for the overall tone of the series. It's not realistic, but you get the general concepts and issues.

The cartoon's popularity among millennials keeps Tron alive in pop culture to the present day. The IP remains a perennial revenue stream for Encom, and every so often they'll throw the fanbase something to keep the money going. (This is an ordeal to the program himself, since he has to deal with hackers sent by groups named after him on the reg.)

What's it about?

Young video game enthusiast Jethro "Jet" Keene lands himself the after school internship of a lifetime getting to work at Encom in a special new program for teenagers with attitude run by Kevin Flynn (voiced by himself).

However, it's not all fun and video game testing with the sweet new Encom Power Gauntlet. Thanks to some cartoon physics hijinks, Jet finds himself transported into the Grid, the Boss's new experimental computer system!

Jet gets to work with Clu (they hired a voice-alike for him) and Tron (ditto) to find a way back home to the real world, solving problems and learning how to code along the way... and that was the pilot episode.

Because this is a cartoon for children, Jet is naturally the regular User of the Grid instead of Flynn, though Flynn makes occasional appearances to dispense Yoda-like wisdom and is revered by all the programs inside the system as the Creator.

There are also no lasers or anything like that-- Jet does a silly toku-like thing with the power gauntlet to commute into the system.

Clu is more likable than in real life. He's mostly benevolent, trying to make a more perfect system but the show's writers actually picked up on the idea that making a perfect system is kind of an impossible lift and made it central to his character development. He's a little obsessed with copying the User world, and there's an arc in S3 where a lot of the conflict revolves around why can't programs be programs about it.

Tron's not a mayhem goblin, which is a crime. He's portrayed as a little bit Optimus Prime, since Jet's the primary mayhem source, and Fighting for the Users is otherwise his defining personality trait. He gets a surprisingly deep fate/free will arc in S2, since naturally several episodes revolve around attempts to reprogram him since he's the Champion and all. Afterward, he's a bit more chill.

Jet's storyline parallel's Kevin's real-life one a little bit-- a lot of the episodes focused on him as a character revolve around him trying to balance his double life.The cartoon also does not mention the time dilation jetlag. Jet, unlike Kevin, does learn how to ask for help, especially as S3 decides to diversify a little more and adds a girl intern, Paige.

S3 in general has a lot of emphasis on diversity and tolerance of others and their differences. The ISO-Basic tensions were running high in the real Grid. It was on Kevin's mind a lot. He was also starting to make thinks on introducing the ISOs to the rest of the world at the time.

Like Reboot in the 1990s, Tron has a lot of episodes devoted to video games and playing games on the Game Grid is a frequent trope. (Hardcore Tron partisans accuse Reboot of stealing this.) Unlike in Reboot, there's no derezzing the losers if the User wins. Games are sometimes the entire plot and sometimes an obstacle or diversion from solving an episode's actual problem.

Since the Grid is open in Tron, there is a recurring cast of villains in the form of viruses and hackers from other systems in addition to technical problems that have to be solved through coding and computer science know-how.

The fourth season didn't get much past a few animatics for the S4 pilot, but what was there got a release for the fancy anniversary collections as special features. Design docs indicate that some new characters were about to be introduced-- Jalen and Radia. Kevin Flynn disappeared while voice actors were being cast for these roles.

NGL I am extremely mad this wasn't a real cartoon.

[formulaes5]

Thanks for the tag @hurricane-heatt, this is my first writing tag!

Rules: in a new post, show the last line you wrote (or drew) and tag as many people as there are words (or however many you like)

☆ ☆ ☆

Mark can’t believe that he’s even having this conversation right now. How was this what his life had come to?

“Look Seb, as fetching as you look in your backless hospital gown right now, that is the worst idea I’ve ever heard in my entire life, and you’ve had some fucking shockers.”

☆ ☆ ☆

I’m basically brand new on f1blr, so I dont have that many people to tag, but I’ll tag @formulaa1d and @kaossbells, if you want to :)

[heartbreakincident]

nothing but respect for our troops (smut writers) but listen. i dont want to be the person to tell you this, but not every character is going to be a dom or a sub. some people. and i know this is hard to hear. but some people do have vanilla sex. and some of those people might even be The Character.

[cityelf]

this poem is about being nonbinary.

[so-many-ocs]

[on the verge of having a complete breakdown] i need to make some kind of list or perhaps sort things into categories

[phanerozoicfossilgardener]

As a writer I need everyone to know that whenever I write "exchanged glances" my intent is this

[ID: A screencap from The Penguins of Madagascar television series. It shows Skipper and Private in a cinderblock room with the head of a stuffed fish visible in the decor. Skipper is carrying a corked test tube of pink glowing liquid. Skipper glances at Private with a single raised eye brow. Private meets his eyes with a blanker expression of possibly raised eyebrows. End ID]

[abbielauren2024]

Reblog if you’re grateful for your commenters <3

[samuelroukin]

they need to invent a writing that is easy. and fast also

[evidently-endless]

i think we should remind musicians they can absolutely make up little stories for their songs btw. it doesn’t have to be about them at all. you can invent a guy and put him in situations to music. time honoured tradition in fact.

[vulpinesaint]

quiz enjoyers! i am now inviting you to come create something in my workshop❕

[teh-kittykat]

Ficlet - Blink

I don't think this is floating around Tumblr anymore, but I found it in my stuff when I was moving computers. It's ten years old, but what the hell, I'ma repost it.

It started with a gif and a note about how there was a lack of stuff about Sam and Rinzler getting along, and, well...

Blink

The first time it happened, Sam was pretty sure his life was over.

The transition was subtle—one moment Tron was following him while he laid out some plan or another for the Grid, making little polite I’m-listening noises that somehow still managed to sound sarcastic, and the next there was a thready rumble behind him, and Tron’s epic bitchface was replaced with Rinzler’s featureless helmet. And okay, maybe Sam freaked just a little, words cutting off mid-syllable as he froze.

Rinzler just tilted his head—and it was Rinzler, circuits glowing vibrant orange—and then tilted the helmet around like he was looking for something. The really bizarre thing was that after a moment he just stopped, flinching back and hunching, tensed, until he had somehow managed to make himself shorter than Sam.

All right. So maybe instead of doing anything intelligent Sam just stood there and gaped for a good few minutes. Rinzler still didn’t go for his disks—and it was disks, since for whatever reason he’d had to sync in two of the damn things when they dragged Tron’s ass out of the Sea. If anything, the program seemed to shrink on himself further, helmet locked on in what Sam had to assume was a stare. Just when Sam was about to open his mouth to actually try and say something, Rinzler’s circuits winked out and re-lit blue-white, and then Tron was asking why Sam looked like he’d seen a data-ghost.

The second time it happened, things were a little more tense.

Gridbugs were a fact of life in a system under construction, Sam found out, and apparently even using legacy hardware for the Grid’s new physical home wasn’t going to change that fact anytime soon. It was pretty fun learning he could just blast through the damn things like something out of an anime—and so what if he grew up staying up way too late to watch bad dubs on Cartoon Network?—and it felt pretty good to stand back-to-back with Tron while they fought the nest of them. Only… when Sam turned around to check on Tron, it was Rinzler at his back instead, tearing through bugs with an acrobatic eagerness that was actually pretty amazing to watch if you weren’t the target of it. Rinzler didn’t blink out, either, when the bugs were done for, but rather he did the same flinch-and-hunch as before. It reminded Sam of catching Roy’s niece playing with his old action figures once.

“Hey… good job back there,” Sam said, feeling like an idiot because this was just inviting undivided killbot attention, but instead of the obvious attack, Rinzler actually stood up a little straighter and nodded, his rumble going deeper for a moment before Tron was back and asking for a status update.

It went like that, as Sam did the painstaking work of trying to heal what his dad and Clu had managed to break. Every once in a while Tron would just blink away and Rinzler would appear to fight bugs or peer suspiciously at Sam’s work or sometimes just to hang from the ceiling. The last even started to stop being freaky after Rinzler did it and scared the shit out of Shaddox.

Sam never said he was mature.

He tried to bring it up with Tron. The monitor had apologized profusely and practically shoved his disks in Sam’s hands and demanded to be bug-checked right there, something haunted and worried in his eyes. No amount of reassurance that it was okay, that Rinzler wasn’t hurting anyone, stopped the insistence until Sam actually did check the relevant code with Tron as a worried audience.

The funny thing? There was nothing out of the ordinary there.

No convenient color-coded section that said hey, here’s Rinzler. No remnants of Clu’s control coding, which felt like a personal victory because cleaning up the mess of agonizing restrictions had been a bitch and a half and it was probably a miracle Tron still talked to him with as much trial-and-error as it took. Not even a check from the outside, with Alan’s archival copy of Tron’s code to look from, showed any real deviation from his core command set aside from the evolution and customization that, as an AI project, Tron should have after twenty goddamn years.

Honestly, armchair psychology was a bit out of Sam’s area, and he really doubted that he could drag Tron to a therapist to figure out why Rinzler kept manifesting at odd moments.

When the transition came this time, Sam had sprawled across Tron’s lap because the program was repairing damage and insisting he was fine with a big crack in his torso. Sam glanced up from the reports he was skimming to see Rinzler—thankfully whole—peering down at him.

“Hey, Rinzler. Stay still a bit longer. Your alter ego did a number on you. Big-ass worm. You shoulda seen it,” Sam said, absently patting Rinzler’s knee as he went back to the datapad. For a while they just sat together in silence, Sam’s attention drifting back into the intricacies of power flows and information routing. Warm hands settled on Sam’s back, and a few moments later he heard an unearthly humming. It took a moment to realize it was Rinzler, whose utter contentment was flowing through the circuit-contact along Sam’s back.

Sam smiled to himself and scrolled the report. This was something he could live with.

[butchfalin]

the funniest meltdown ive ever had was in college when i got so overstimulated that i could Not speak, including over text. one of my friends was trying to talk me through it but i was solely using emojis because they were easier than trying to come up with words so he started using primarily emojis as well just to make things feel balanced. this was not the Most effective strategy... until. he tried to ask me "you okay?" but the way he chose to do that was by sending "👉🏼👌🏼❓" and i was so shocked by suddenly being asked if i was dtf that i was like WHAT???? WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?????????? and thus was verbal again

[beepboopappreciation]

Is this anything

[noodles-and-tea]

Icons, truly

[frankierotwinkdeath]

Y’all want Taylor Swift to be gay so bad but you won’t even write femslash about her