On Programs and Ponies · 6:42pm Jul 14th, 2021
If you’ve been waiting for PONY Legacy to be marked complete before reading, today’s your lucky day!
Consider this something of a rambling afterword that you probably don’t want to read unless you’ve read the story or don’t care about spoilers.
I have something of a love/hate relationship with TRON Legacy.
I was never a huge fan of the original TRON. I appreciated it in the abstract, respected it for its historical significance in film, and liked the sci-fi elements of “digitizing a human into a computer” and the fantasy elements of “anthropomorphized computer programs living and working inside your computer.” But, it never really grabbed me the way other 80s movies like, say, Back to the Future or Ghostbusters or Wrath of Khan did; I’ve never felt a real need to rewatch it.
TRON Legacy really grabbed me. I should say “us” -- when it came out in theaters (remember seeing movies in theaters?), my then-girlfriend/now-wife and I saw it at least three times and maybe as many as five. (This is slightly less insane than it might sound, because we lived in a small town with a local first-run theater that only cost $5 a ticket and not much else to do.) One weekend we went and saw it Friday night after work, and then were sitting around bored on Sunday, so I jokingly said we might as well see TRON Legacy again, and we realized we did both actually want that, so we… did. I’ve never gone to see a movie over and over in theaters like that before or since.
Almost everything about TRON Legacy is, as the kids say, chef’s kiss. I don’t need to waste space here gushing over the soundtrack, which as far as I know is universally praised whether you care about the movie or not. The sound design is also excellent, all the little disc hums and lightbike self-assemblies and derezzes and so on. The visuals are gorgeous -- which is a combination of incredible effects work, production design, costume design, all of that. So it looks great and it sounds great.
I have exactly two complaints about the film:
1. They leaned too hard on the de-aging tech for Jeff Bridges in the past/flashback scenes.
I’m not saying this with the benefit of hindsight, looking back after a decade of Marvel very nearly perfecting it -- in that first scene where Flynn turns around right next to the light and we see the harsh reality of Digital Domain’s best de-wrinkling and de-sagging algorithms in 2011, we gasped in horror in the theater. I wish they had structured things so that you never saw 80s Flynn’s face, and they reserved the de-aging for CLU, who is not only a computer program but the first computer program Flynn generated on the Grid, so an (ironically) imperfect look would make sense.
2. The writing sucked.
This is the big one.
The basic story of “father gets imprisoned somewhere, son discovers him” makes sense. Everything they layered on top of it to try to make it a larger-than-life thing doesn’t. In what way was the Grid supposed to be humanity’s destiny? It wasn’t a singularity/Friendship Is Optimal situation, where you upload your brain and can live forever with no pain/illness/etc -- you can get hurt and even die in the Grid. Living in the Grid had all the same issues as living on Earth except everything looks futuristic. Why on Earth did Kevin Flynn think the ISOs would have any impact on the real world? We see Quorra’s genetic structure when he repairs her injury -- she has triple-helix DNA. Nothing about them would be compatible with us. And how the hell did the digitizing laser recreate her in reality? Where did she, in the end, come from? I guess it stole Kevin Flynn’s stored matter to build her body, but you also just got done telling me that ISOs are a brand-new thing, so how did the laser manage to build her correctly? And speaking of that, why the hell did CLU think he’d be able to take an entire army of thousands of soldiers out of the Grid and into the real world? Where would all that matter come from? (Though it’d be worth it to have CLU succeed, only to have them all pour out into Flynn’s basement lab and stuff it full.)
Apart from all that, it has the same old tired stakes of “we have to save the Entire World from an ill-defined Threat”, blah blah blah. It was very Hollywood, taking an interesting premise and drowning it in dumb bullshit they thought sounded smart. Biodigital jazz, man.
A few months after we repeatedly watched TRON Legacy in theaters and a few weeks after we got it on Blu-ray, we discovered My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Almost immediately the image of ponies in lightsuits popped into my mind. My initial notes and outline for what would become PONY Legacy date to May 2011.
This is why there’s an author’s note disclaimer at the beginning of the prologue, warning people that even though this story is being published properly in 2021, it is absolutely a product of 2011. I can’t imagine how this story is going to come across to a current member of the fandom, especially someone who joined after season 2 -- i.e. most of the people reading this. This story predates the site you’re reading it on. The Google Docs version of the story has a title page and table of contents because people were still sharing and reading fics on GDocs when I started working on it. The library tree in the System is called “Books and Branches” because the library tree didn’t have a canon name yet when I wrote it and that was my favorite of the ones floating around. Do people still ship TwiDash in the Year Of Our Lord Twenty Twenty-One? I have no idea, but I did in 2011. (I still do, but I did then too.)
At any rate, PONY Legacy was my attempt to take the premise of TRON Legacy and write a story that actually made sense with it. Now, in my mind, I get the beautiful visuals and music (and hey, don’t forget that ten years ago, a fan musician actually did a PONY Legacy soundtrack) of the original film but with a story that doesn’t make me want to groan with frustration.
The ultimate stakes do have a touch of the “undefined threat to the world” -- but they’re rooted in something very personal and immediate: the threat of Dash’s life being stolen out from under her by RBD. The knock-on effects of that could be bad for everyone else, because Dash is an important figure in her world and the Elements of Harmony are (still -- because again this is a timeline rooted in 2011) Equestria’s greatest weapon against big baddies, but that’s just extra flavor. (And there’s no question of the laser being able to pull this off, because it’s still just… bringing a Dash back to the real world.)
All this is really to say: I have absolutely no idea if anyone else will care about or enjoy PONY Legacy. (Edit: have gotten a couple nice comments on it! So there are at least a few who do.) It’s ten years late and I wrote it for myself -- I’m the target audience and I enjoy reading it. I just published it in case other people might enjoy it too. If nothing else, I like it, and it’s probably the longest piece of fiction I’ll ever write, so I’m proud to have finally sat down and finished it.
If you got through this rambling, thanks for reading.
See you in another ten years for the sequel, PONY Legacier.
Even more behind the scenes that I'll chew up like breadcrumbs, thanks :D
But seriously, I love hearing the insights and views of something like this, especially after being such a long work in the making. I've already gushed and said the story was great, so this is CLEARLY just me rambling for the sake of rambling, but do know you've hit a *slightly* larger target audience than just yourself, at the very least!
At the end of the day, I had a good time with it. I'll hold you to that word of a 10 year sequel :P
The thing about CLU thinking he could take his army out into the real world, I can sort of understand -- in the end, CLU didn't really understand "our" world. The programs and their objects and surroundings may be nothing but digital code and energy, but they all look and act like they're "real" objects with mass and substance, so possibly CLU just assumed that the only function the portal actually served was to bridge the two realities and allow objects to pass from one to the other, without realizing that he and his army weren't actually "real objects" to begin with.
Not to say that it would have actually worked, mind you, but I can see why CLU might have thought it would work.
(Why Flynn thought it would work, I have no explanation for. He certainly should have known better. Although after being trapped in the system for who knows how many decades, subjective time, with no one but Quorra to talk to, I suppose his own grasp on reality was probably getting a bit wobbly as well...)
The whole business with the ISOs was complete nonsense, though, I'll grant you that. Even the "prequel" graphic novel, TRON: Betrayal, didn't really explain them very well -- though it did at least explain why CLU turned against Flynn and set out to eradicate the ISOs as a threat to the "perfect system", which was another plot point the movie didn't bother to explain at all. (Basically, the grid was destabilizing in dangerous and destructive ways, and the destabilization coincided closely enough with the appearance of the ISOs that CLU concluded they were causing it, either intentionally or inadvertently -- and CLU lost faith in Flynn when he overheard Flynn admitting to TRON that he didn't know where the ISOs came from and that they were beyond his control. In essence, CLU overheard his God admitting that he wasn't actually the all-powerful Creator after all.)
Oh shit, I guess I better to read it. Probably not going to comment much unless you really want me to, I don't have the stamina anymore for writing that many long comments in a row.
Neat! Sipped the post because I just DL'd the story to my kindle!
I also have a love/ hate.
I got to do and finish an Alternate Reality Game based around Tron Legacy. It was the coolest thing I had ever done... ever. I loved the idea of Tron Legacy, but just like Tomorrowland The Movie, it fell short of its hype.
Yeah there's a lot broken about the world of Tron. Almost literally everything about it is technically incompatible with our universe and its laws. As one Facebook ad put it, "that's not how this works. That's not how any of this works!" Still, once you bend some critical rules it... Well it's still not great but at least it's possible.
This becomes extremely apparent in the game Tron 2.0 by the way, where they try to further adapt actual-world concepts into Tron-world mechanics. As someone who knows how computers and programs (and the hardware that runs them) actually works, it's borderline upsetting when too much thought is put into it.
And that's not even touching the stupidity of the idea that a simulation supporting true-to-life execution can be run faster than real-time. It's actually impossible to do this without losing fidelity...
But yeah, the concept is fun, the actual logistics insane. 😇
On the TwiDash subject, we're sure there are still some actively shipping. Our favorite TwiDash fic has them becoming changeling Queens (spoiler) but we forget when that one was written...
This is the best blog on the site. Have to watched Uprising? Absolutely worth your time if not