"Well then, that means I must be a sacrifice for your love.
Awww~! It seems I'll be playing the buffoon! Fuhahahaha~!"



Byron "Tron" Arclight is my favourite character of all time. Out of the media I've encountered throughout my life, no one else has been able to do so much for me in such a short amount of time. This essay is about the character and my relation to him.

Byron Arclight is an intelligent, wealthy scientist and a single father of three sons. They mean the world to him, and the four of them have an incredibly happy family life. His oldest teenage son works with him as an apprentice in the laboratory, where they are helping his close friend Doctor Faker try to save his ailing son. Or find some ancient ruins. Possibly both.

Doctor Faker enlisted the help of an explorer named Kazuma Tsukumo to help find a set of ruins. Byron and Kazuma were lead into the ruins unknowingly, and Faker used them in a sacrificial ritual to obtain the powers he needed to save his own sick child. Kazuma attempted to save Byron's life, but both were lost and Byron ended up wandering an alien dimension, having his humanity ripped away. After a while, all he could think about was how hurt and betrayed he felt, and the revenge he swore. His body was warped into that of a child and severely corrupted.

Five years in the future, he ended up back in his reality. In the public eye, he takes on the name "Tron" and acts like an actual child, laughing, watching cartoons, playing games, yelling about cake. At the same time, in the shadows he was using his own biological children as pawns to help him take revenge on Doctor Faker. His children are ever loving and loyal, doing anything they can to help his goals, even nearly giving their lives for his revenge because all they want is for their family to go back to the way it was before.

His oldest son is trying to ignore the fact that he brought his 3DS to a business negotiation.



Now when I watched this show, I was simply watching it to check off a box - to add it to a list of shows I've watched. I didn't expect to get anything out of it except maybe a bit of entertainment to pass the time. I didn't specifically care for any of the characters, they were fun but not special to me.


He's just a little guy.

I did not care about Byron. I thought his backstory was compelling, but I didn't care about him. His mask freaked me out. His childish behaviours were... interesting, but I had no stakes in this show. In episode 67 of Zexal, his other friend Kazuma's son is still willing to save him after all the awful things he's done - showing the same compassion his father showed years ago. When Byron begins to realize the error of his ways and chooses not to be saved, that was when I realized... oh no. Wait, I loved him.

I spent the following episodes completely uninvested in the story, trying to digest everything about this specific character that I had mainly been ignoring up until this point. In episode 71, Doctor Faker is finally about to get his, when Byron appears before everyone. I was cheering, like "Yes! Take your revenge!" but instead...

Byron saved his friend.


And I realized how driven by my own hatred and other negative feelings I had been. Who knows how many years I'd been like that.

I quietly contemplated this for weeks. After years of carrying around feelings that had weighed me down, I finally forgave. I let go.

Even Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, my favourite show, had shown me a multifaceted story about forgiveness, my favourite character Odo ultimately in a role of eleventh-hour forgiveness similar to Byron's. I'd thought about this story and setting for years, but it resonated with me in other ways - equally as personal, but not what I specifically needed, in that time and place, for my own growth and healing.

Byron gave me the strength to forgive and let go. Under his Tron persona, he also taught me it's okay to stay silly and act childlike for fun - even though I may not be in a youthful body like his, I can still choose to be having fun.
Because I'm alive in spite of it all.

A friend had wanted me to watch Yu-Gi-Oh Zexal in 2013. I was completely disinterested, getting into the original Yu-Gi-Oh in 2014 but never exploring the spinoffs. I thought about Zexal every once in a while for years afterwards, I always loved shows about aliens and knew it had an alien main character. But I sincerely think had I not waited eleven entire years before watching it, I wouldn't have been in a mental space to have gotten what I did from the narrative - even if all that narrative was nothing but a little moral about forgiveness shoehorned into a preteen boy's anime about a collectible card game.




He loves cake.





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