stanley

Ok maybe not story-story because I'm not a writer but still. Headcanons? Idk how to call it?

Anyway not-story-story here is Tron got dragged to the User world with Sam and Quorra (I've got 2 very different versions on how but not the point here) and he is Big Sad about it.

Main reasons being:

he is a Program and he never was supposed or wanted to be here. blasphemy! so much blasphemy

by being here he is not connected to the Grid and that's like suddenly losing most of your senses. Deeply unpleasant and alienating. Learning to run on other senses (or new ones? is there even air on grid?) is also unpleasant and inefficient

existential crisis TM of seeing his whole universe from the outside. Knowing anecdotically from Kevin that you live in a box vs actually seeing the dusty basement yourself is one hell of a trip

purpose??!! there is no fight for the users in user world, there is like 8 billion of them, protect the System??? form outside? how???

So as initial coping he refuses to leave the basement. My whole universe is this little box? Fine. I'll sit right here and guard it. Being a watchdog is his core function after all.

Side tangent

Which is dismissed with ok. Let him cope. At some point he will get like hungry or something and will have to get out.

That may be a fair assumption but doesn't account for the fact that Tron is stubborn af and also isn't human. He was build to run on electricity and he was written into existence optimized to run on off very little of it.

All of that culminates in Tron you are not Persephone you can eat something. Some water at least. We are worried here.

Which is not true. He already was fundamentally changed by being here and there is no going back. Not really.

Cue melancholy.

But as things get worse they get better.

With Tron it is so much easier (and kinda unavoidable) to explain the whole Grid thing to Alan. Quorra can pass as human unless you look way too close. There is very few plausible explanations to there is this younger glow-in-the-dark version of you that is not you, nor human actually, but is friendly and wants to be useful.

That also aligns with silly fun stories Kevin was spinning. That turns out, were not very fun at all.

All of the above without using the laser. Obviously. And nobody is going to get to use the laser till Lora personally disassembles, checks it down the smallest screw, then fixes and reassembles it in it's entirety.

But still, it would be suspicious that suddenly so many people are in and out of the arcade. Lora also has a lot of other obligations but still makes infrequent visits.

Which are like fun. At second visit she hands Tron a change of clothes and was like: young man you are doing nothing here so you will help me make this place hospitable to work. Tron finds being called young mildly hilarious and also is very relieved to find that 30 years worth of dust and grime is not the default User world state.

Though the person who spends most time at the arcade is obviously Roy. He knows his way around hardware and has an arcade cabinet fixing business. 0 suspicious activities here are happening, no 2 alien strong invasion, no nothing, business as usual xD

Going back to the picture above we have a moment of Roy explaining the idea of hardware to a Program who is about to figure out the fun part of wait, this doesn't even make sense. How am I even alive?