“So what’s with the header image?”

You may have noticed that I recently added a capture from the film TRON: Legacy to my header. There is a reason for this. Like all of my reasons, it has to be explained in stages.

Like pretty much all of my peers, I had a VCR in my house as I was growing up. And one of the first things I “saw” (note, this is different to actually saw, something I will explain in more detail another time) on it was a highly experimental film called TRON. TRON was many things, including so far ahead of its time that commercial failure was almost to be expected. One thing nobody who saw it in the comfort of their home expected was to see a sequel twenty-eight years after it was originally released.

Let me tell you a little story about that sequel. When I remembered it would be showing in the cinema, as in released that very day, I decided to go and see it. When the first TRON film was released, my younger sister was somewhere on either side of two years old. Mere days after I saw TRON: Legacy for the first time, she gave birth to twins.

The point I am getting at is that the people who saw TRON as children generally fit into two categories. Either they are old enough to have children of their own now, or they have since died. There are no in-betweens here. The makers of TRON: Legacy not only respected this fact, they made it a central point of the fukking plot! That is one reason why, when I came out of the theatre and started heading home, I was shedding tears. Of joy, not sorrow, to quote the song.

The other reason I was shedding tears is because TRON: Legacy is the best film to unintentionally represent the autistic since Blade Runner.

If you are still wondering when I am going to get to the point, then please stop reading and go kill yourself, because that was it.

Whilst it does not really ruin any surprises, I will ask you to stop reading if you have not seen the film yet unless you do not mind knowing things about it in advance. One subplot in the film concerns itself with the character that best represents me in the story: Quorra (Olivia Wilde). If you made Quorra slightly taller, much heavier, and overdubbed her voice with Michael Ironside‘s, you would have me. Pure and simple. During one bonding scene, the implication is made that Quorra seriously wants to see the world that Kevin (Jeff Bridges earning his belated Oscar again for the umpteenth time) and Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) are from. Most specifically, she wants to see the sun that Sam describes to her. The final shot of the film shows Quorra getting her wish. And that is where the image in my header is from.

I will be blunt about this. The world around me, the world that people like John Howard and George Bush (the one who does not come across as mildly retarded) made for me, sucks donkey shit through a straw. One plot I have in mind for a future writing has my ultimate proxy character, in a fit of rage at seeing the one person he cares enough about to save dead, ending Terra’s days as a living planet forever. Whilst I am not sure Quorra would have similar feelings about The Grid, the view imparted by being marked for death for something she can help no more than looking like something I would bend reality in order to keep in my bed cannot be a positive one. So her look of joy and wonder at getting to see a world and an element thereof where she can simply be herself and impact upon the new world in a positive way was the perfect note to close the film on.

I make no secret of the fact that I would like to depart this world and find one more to my liking. My fictions go over this fact at great length. A world where the Dwarrow of my novels are the dominant power in a broader society would, upon first comprehension, bring the same look to my face as you see Olivia Wilde put on in that final shot.

And that, friends, is why I chose the image for my header. Any questions?

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