Kevin Flynn

☆ Player Information
Name: Kat
OOC Journal: tehkittykat
Are you over 18?: Y
Preferred Contact Method(s): tehkittykat
Other characters currently played here: Axl (gunholic)

☆ Character Information
Name: Kevin Flynn
Canon: Tron Legacy (AU)
OU, AU, OC?: The AU in which Flynn actually keeps his 1982 characterization
Canon point: End of Legacy, after reintegration

Setting Info: The two Tron movies take place in The Modern Day (though computers don't really work like that) with a big difference: inside the computer is a parallel universe where the programs are actual people. Kevin Flynn found this out the hard way when he was ported into a computer in 1982. His adventures there eventually led to him building an experimental system to serve as a test-bed for letting Users-- people who write and operate programs-- to be able to interact directly with the computers and programs. Then things kinda blew up, and a thousand cycles of dystopia happened.

The AU differs primarily in the history between the coup and the events of Legacy. Flynn in this version of things kept his core personality traits from the 1982 film, and so fought back against Clu. A whole bunch of people who died in canon survived thanks to this, the Resistance was actually starting to win, and the race to the Portal was a lot more about making sure Clu didn't accidentally nuke the system due to breaking the laser than any stupidity about him taking over the User world.

Basically, it takes that buried Star Wars callback in Legacy and runs with it.

History: The 3,000 word summary is here.

TLDR: Things go like canon until shortly after the coup. Instead of going on sadness errands and hiding in the Outlands, Flynn got totally drunk and then decided to both fight back and actually start listening to people. Shenanigans ensued.

Tron: Legacy itself remained remarkably unchanged, though the reasons why the characters went where they went and did what they did changed due to AU.

Personality: Flynn is old. Old as balls. He's lived a great deal longer than any human has any right to have experienced, and even on a bad day probably can expect to live for a good deal longer than that. (I mean he's what, sixty-something in human years?) The weight of all that experience gives him a simultaneous old-as-dirt serenity and wisdom and a more childlike attraction for the innocent and new. Flynn doesn't tend to act out emotional extremes at this point in his life, though that's primarily because he's been there, done that. At the same time, he's been trapped in a computer system. A lot of very simple things are barely-remembered and thus novel all over again, only this time he has the perspective of losing those experiences and sensations to make him appreciate them more. His age and the circumstances of being stuck in the computer have forced him to accept the transience of things, so he very much tries to just live in each moment as it happens. It's all very Zen.

Flynn is very into meditation and trying to practice mindfulness as a way of stepping back from the heat of the moment so that he doesn't end up doing stupid things. He's gained some awareness of the fact that he has some pretty powerful destructive emotional impulses sometimes, so being able to notice what's going on in his subconscious and deal with it before something stupid explodes to the surface helps a lot with being smarter about things. This isn't to say that he's banished feelings from his life like some Users out there in the multiverse-- he still feels his feelings, he just makes a lot more effort to channel them into something not completely idiotic.

All of this emotional growth happened as a direct result of forcing himself to confront what happened to him after Clu's coup and accepting his role in what transpired. While Flynn doesn't really see himself as being brave for doing that, he does still have the almost careless level of courage that he showed in the 1982 film, fearlessly bounding ahead when he thinks he's on the right track. While experience has taught him to slow down a bit and consider things, he's still prone to just jumping into situations and going with the flow.

Aside from all that acting like old Ben Kenobi stuff, Flynn is still Flynn. He's got a hefty streak of being the mad genius wandering the wasteland, and still tends to go off on his own in order to focus and work on things. He did learn the hard way not to hide his projects forever from having another set of eyes check on things, but he still has a bad tendency to be the kind of guy who breaks the washing machine further rather than just call the repair guy. While Flynn has more or less kept his vow to actually listen to other points of view, he's still a bit pigheaded and still sulks when it's pretty clear he's not going to get his way. It takes a while to get him to change his mind about things, even if he knows he's wrong, but at least he doesn't inflict any "my way or the highway" type crap on people like he did when he was younger. (Or if he does try to get his way, he actually takes the time to go back and do crazy things like explain his thinking or get evidence now, rather than insisting that manufacturing get transferred to Malaysia without any reason for it.) Flynn was always a bit of an affable douche, and while life has burned away most of the arrogance, it's still possible for a shadow of it to appear in his behavior.

Despite the Jedi-like trappings, Flynn is still very much a hedonist who appreciates simple things like junk food, video games, and crazy adrenaline-fueled stunts. He likes to drive very fast vehicles, and even during his long time in the system learned to fly lightjets and lightflyers because it was cool. He has a deep appreciation for chaos and chance, both because he's always looked for novelty and because it's a break from the ordered sameness of the Grid under Clu. His tolerance for strangeness has always been pretty high, but after experiencing the rich life of the programs in the system, he's got a definite streak of xenophilia that's probably a bit beyond human average. His closest friend in the system was Gibson, after all, and hanging out with Bostrumite nonconformists for that long was probably going to make him a bit odd above and beyond anyway.

This isn't to say that Flynn is all sunshine and roses. He'll always carry the guilt of what he did to the Grid, his friends, and his family by being an arrogant SOB. He was a shitty friend to Tron, and hates the fact it took him so long to recognize who Rinzler was, and hates even more the fact that he was so damn useless in trying to get through to Rinzler. He was an even shittier father, and feels both guilty and pissed with himself that he was eternally dumping toddler Sam off on the kid's grandparents instead of actually doing Dad things. He doesn't feel worthy of any real father-son relationship with Sam at this point-- Alan did the job twenty times better and all the actual work. And of course he's been a shitty User, treating the Grid like his personal get-out-of-responsibility-free card and secret napping hideout rather than the vital world that it was. The Grid and his screwups as a User tie deeply into his failures in most of the other important roles in his life-- particularly since if he'd just stayed on the side of the screen where he belonged none of it would have happened. As such, he tries to actively avoid situations where he's put in absolute responsibility for something. Flynn's no good at it and knows it. He'll gladly assist or otherwise offer his expertise, but the thought of being in absolute control gives him the screaming willies. He's forever the cool uncle, but would probably have a panic attack if someone asked him to be dad.

Speaking of being a shitty User.. there's also Clu to think about. Flynn treated Clu like some kind of mirror-clone when he wasn't, leaving him to fend for himself, and Flynn does feel as acutely guilty over that as he does with his essentially abandoning Sam. Clu also exhibited all of Flynn's negative traits dialed to eleven, which made dealing with that complicated relationship even more of a minefield because attempting to do right by the program meant confronting his own dark side. Flynn didn't do too well there, and even after reintegration Clu is like a sullen lump in the back of his psyche, dormant but still carrying a freight of resentment and frankly disturbing memories that Flynn tries his damnedest not to access. If Flynn had a viable system handy, he'd probably try to re-create Clu and start over with him, but until then, he just keeps him regretfully walled off, pretty much like every parent ever who turns out to have a murderer for a kid.

Abilities/Weaknesses: Kevin Flynn is a typical human male in his early sixties. He's starting to show early signs of arthritis, particularly in his knees, but is otherwise in excellent health. He is a skilled computer programmer and hacker, and is also familiar enough with other little engineering tasks that if you put some late twentieth century gizmo in front of him, he'd be able to make it go and probably fix it if it broke. (He did maintain a motorcycle, and built and maintained a secret mainframe computer on the down-low, and that's not counting all the build projects a typical computer science person would have been up to in the eighties where half the time you had to build your own damn PC from scratch and circuit boards.) Flynn's knowledge of programming is almost savant-level, mostly because he's been doing nothing but pretty much continuously for the last twenty years give or take several hundred cycles. He'd have an obvious learning curve dealing with Outbound Flight's computers, but there's very little in terms of mundane computer problems that he couldn't deal with if he has sufficient time.

Flynn also has a pretty well-developed intuition, able to figure out a complex system quickly and make accurate predictions as to what it will do. He can't always articulate his thought process when he's having an intuitive leap, though, which means his advice isn't universally followed.. and of course his intuition is subject to the usual caveats about garbage in, garbage out. Garbage baseline assumptions will throw his ability to figure out systems completely out of whack.

As far as physical skills, Flynn knows very bare-bones fisticuffs thanks to his misspent youth and can drive most ground and air based vehicles once he's familiar with the control layout. He's absolutely demonic on anything resembling a motorcycle and he likes to go fast. He doesn't have a lot of patience for the large and slow, and thus isn't as practiced in large vehicles as he is with small one or two person vehicles.

However... he was not de-digitized prior to his transport to Outbound Flight (and frankly it's an open question if he could properly be de-digitized at this point) so he's also not entirely a baseline human.

Flynn's partial program-ness means that he has and requires an identity disk. The disk is part backup, part weapon. While he isn't subject to the kind of memory decay a program might have without the disk, he's really not used to being without the perfect recall the disk offers and will get pretty muddled without it until he adjusts back.. and that's not considering the problems inherent with someone having a backup of his code. Like a program, Flynn's code could presumably be altered through the disk, though digitized-User code isn't at all like program code and it's an open question if anyone could figure it out enough to effect changes to it. The disk would still offer anyone who stole it access to all of Flynn's memories, and if they were in a system that Flynn controlled the disk could function as a master key to that system. Like a program, Flynn can use his identity disk to upload information to himself if it's properly formatted for that kind of file transfer. Mainlining a database is pretty trippy and can incapacitate him.

Normally in-system Flynn would have fairly godlike powers since he is a User able to code on the fly. While in the "real world" Flynn can't pull most of the Matrix-level stunts that he can in a system, being a partially-digital being means Flynn has a level of machine telepathy. (And, with programs, could utilize pings and other broadcast functions.) He can use touch contact to access any kind of computerized machine and try to coax it into doing what he wants. Countermeasures against normal hacking would be less effective against Flynn since he can speak the machine language at a base level, but they would still tend to slow him down or make him less effective. Supernatural countermeasures, particularly in terms of tech that interacts with the Force/other magic in order to function, are pretty well beyond Flynn... at least, outside the system in question.

Finally, Flynn being partially a program means he can utilize energy like a program. While his emulated metabolism can still process food into energy he can use, he can act as a sort of battery for others using program-type power and share energy. Flynn can act as a conduit and push compatible power from one source to another (like he did waaay back in 1982 with the Solar Sailer line). He wouldn't be able to ki blast anyone or manage to taze someone with this ability without a compatible conductor to use, but it's something he can do.

RP sample: Dear Player Post
Test Drive Meme