Warning: Major spoilers for Blade Runner 2049 ahead. Read at your own risk.

The “robotic spouse” trope dates back to the dawn of science fiction. Historically, male writers have had a tendency to create a female bot who tends to a male character’s every need — from food to emotional encouragement to sex. Already, Blade Runner 2049 is drawing criticism for its portrayal of, Joi, the virtual live-in girlfriend to the male lead, K. Initially, Joi does exhibit the hallmark traits of the cliched fake spouse. As the film’s plot advances, so does her character, and it becomes unclear whether she’s a prime example of the trope or a subversion of it. Is she a mirage indulging a sad man or a complex being every bit as real as the people she walks the Earth with?

When we first meet Joi, she’s the embodiment of the stereotypical lonely male fantasy. K, a police officer, comes home from a particularly rough day’s work to find Joi has already prepared dinner and is eager to serve it to him. Joi always puts his happiness first, like when she offers to read aloud a book she claims to hate just because she knows it’ll cheer him up. She offers sexual stimulation too, cycling through a series of revealing outfits that bring delight to K’s eyes. In appreciation of Joi’s unconditional love, K buys her a gift, but, like everything else relating to Joi, it’s really for him: It’s a device that allows him to bring Joi outside the apartment. Now, he can take the robot girlfriend experience on the go! In the couple’s first adventure to the great outdoors, they end up making out in the rain just like in every classic romance novel. Obviously, Joi is the best fake girlfriend money can buy.

In the world of Blade Runner, however, “fake” and “real” are arbitrary. In-universe, there are both literal humans and androids. Called replicants, these machines are designed to be as close to human as possible. K, in fact, is himself a replicant. Like his fellow robots, he feels emotion and pain in the same way that any human does. For some, though, replicants are still “skinjobs.” They may look and feel human but are decidedly not. For others, replicants’ perfect mimicry of humanity proves that they are as “human” as actual humans. Realness is a social construct in future Los Angeles.

As we learn more about Joi, we realize that, like a replicant, she doesn’t neatly fit into a “fake” or “real” definition. First of all, she’s a glorified computer program, a far cry from replicants who are indistinguishable from humans. Mariette, a replicant prostitute, understands the technological gap between herself and Joi. She remarks that K must not be into “real girls” when she notices that Joi is with him. To Mariette, Joi is an unfeeling sex toy, and nothing can change that.

K views Joi more affectionately. While Joi may not feel emotions as people do, her outward expressions copy human emotion perfectly. In the aforementioned scene in the rain, she shows a visceral emotional reaction as if she’s truly experiencing the joyous wonder of the rain for the first time. It’s not genuine emotion, but it’s pretty damn convincing. From K’s perspective, Joi’s flawless imitation of human emotion might as well be one-hundred percent authentic. Hence, he remarks to his one true holographic love that, to him, she is real.

The movie’s sex scene perfectly encapsulates the opposing points of view towards Joi’s realness, both within and outside the fiction. In a visually-stunning effect, Joi projects her holographic form onto Mariette’s body in front of an eagerly-awaiting K. The merge is imperfect, so we see three bodies: K’s physical body, Mariette’s physical body, and Joi’s projection that tracks Mariette’s body. Mariette probably feels that she is pleasuring K as if he’s any other client; simultaneously, K is emotionally engaged with Joi, paying no mind to Mariette herself. There’s likely a similar dichotomy of opinions among the audience. Those who see Joi as a sexbot will follow Mariette, unable to get over the fact that K is physically with the prostitute; others will watch Joi and interpret the scene as a passionate physical connection in a relationship previously relegated to a purely emotional link. Even before the movie’s plot ramps up, Joi’s realness is wide open to interpretation.

The third act complicates the matter further. K becomes an outlaw, so Joi convinces him to delete her from his apartment, carrying her only on his portable emanator. That way, when the cops come looking for K, they can’t interrogate Joi to find him. At the same time, the act poses considerable risk to her well-being, for if anything happens to the emanator, she’ll be gone forever. Several scenes later, the nightmare comes true as one of the villain’s crushes the emanator to pieces, destroying Joi. A bloody K then wanders the downtown streets in grief before happening upon an advertisement for another Joi unit. From one perspective, the first Joi was only following her programming to serve K’s best interests. Literally every action she took in both life and death was for K; she had no self-interest and, consequently, no humanity. If K bought another Joi right now, she could replicate the first one completely.

From another perspective, Joi’s self-sacrifice has made her irreplaceable. As several characters repeat throughout the film, to give one’s life for a worthy cause is the most human of all acts. So the thinking goes, replicants like K, despite technically being machines who were never born, can earn humanity through their actions. If one interprets the mantra liberally, then Joi, despite being a less-advanced computer program, has gained humanity by giving herself up to save K. Another Joi unit would be completely hollow in spirit compared to the original. K, who saw Joi as a real woman from the start, buys into this thinking. He decides not to buy another unit, because to do so would diminish the first Joi’s ultimate sacrifice. He realizes that actions, not origins, give one’s life purpose, so he can earn humanity as Joi did. He takes this lesson to heart until the film’s closing credits, putting his life at risk to save another character in the story’s home stretch. For K, Joi died human and illuminated the path for him to do so as well.

Great science fiction poses questions and lets the reader interpret the answers. Blade Runner 2049 is no different. After the film, I overheard somebody behind me joke that a computer drove the entire plot, making it the “worst film [he has] seen in a decade.” To this man, Joi never represented anything more than a boring sexbot straight from the minds of the movie’s all-male writing tandem. Personally, Joi might be my favorite character in the whole film. She embarks on a stunning character arc of self-actualization in which she begins as a hologram and dies essentially human, driving home a core theme of the film. Both these conclusions, based on each viewer’s own perspective and values, are equally valid.