director's commentary on A Real Boy?
The whole thing? I mean, sure, okay.
Back when AI Tony was still canonically alive but had, after the end of Secret Empire and Bendis' IM run, been shoved aside and forgotten, I started thinking about pairing him with Steve. Throughout Secret Empire, AI Tony still kept believing in Steve, the whole way through, and I felt like that was really sweet, and then it was unfair that canon set him aside and he never got to really see the Steve he believed in except for about one page at the end of Secret Empire.
To me this seemed like part of a broader trend of underutilizing AI Tony, in a narrative way. If you're going to have Tony be an AI, it should mean something that he's an AI, I think. He should have a life experience that's different from human Tony. Making him an AI should bring something new to the character. Having Tony who has always clearly been fascinated with the idea of being a machine finally Living The Dream and maybe finding out that it wasn't what he wanted -- like, they could have done something like that. They could have made it matter. But instead it kind of felt like "Tony's in a coma but we already planned to use him here, quick, let's make him an AI" and there wasn't really much he did that regular Tony couldn't have done, to the best of my recollection. He was basically just there to... be Tony.
And at the same time he was also, essentially, an inferior Tony. Marvel routinely makes Tony start drinking -- or at least think about drinking -- during major events to up the stakes and they just... made him drunk. If he were human they might make more of a big deal about sobering him up afterwards, treating him like a character we might care about, but they just... kind of used him for cheap narrative thrills and put him away. He was there to be Tony but he wasn't treated anything like the way canon has ever treated Tony wrt his drinking. So he was Tony but at the same time it seemed like we were supposed to think he wasn't the "real" Tony. So my creative impulse here was basically "fuck that, he's Tony, and I'm gonna prove it."
So I wanted to write a story pairing AI Tony with Steve in which Steve absolutely believes AI Tony is still Tony, and he loves him just as much as he would love any other Tony, and it wouldn't ever occur to Steve not to love him or that he isn't Tony.
There's also a common theme in robot/AI stories where the robot character wants to be human, and there are various stories where they finally get a "real" body or their body already conveniently does the things they would want a body to do (as in Data from TNG; in that case, he's looking for emotions). And fandom has a, um, fairly robust interest in erotica, so really the question for the prurient-minded among us becomes, yeah, okay, how do you get it on with an AI? I could have just given AI Tony his ideal body, sure, one that did all the things he wanted, but I thought it would be more interesting if I didn't. If there were things he couldn't do with the body he had. I was interested in how he and Steve navigate that, and what it means to desire someone when you can't actually physically experience that desire the same way that other people experience it.
I think these are interesting questions, the sort of thing that you might hope to see in AI-themed stories, and I thought it would be interesting if the answer here was non-normative. I could have written a story where AI Tony immediately goes out and gets himself a body that can have Regular Human Sex, but I wanted to write a story where that wasn't the only way, and that he and Steve were still happy with that.
I wanted to show them basically having a good time even if it wasn't the same good time a lot of other people would have, and to show that Steve still wants to stay with him even when human Tony is there, because as far as he's concerned he's already with Tony. I feel like other people think the ending is sadder than I thought it was when I wrote it, but to me it's just like "yeah, Steve and Tony are together." I wasn't going to break the two of them up! Sure, human Tony is sad and in that sense this is not an extremely happy ending, but he does have someone! And Jan's great! I just didn't think I should privilege this Tony over the Tony who already ended up with Steve.
(Man, if AI Tony dies like he does in canon, Steve's gonna be so sad...)
