TLDR:
IMHO Tony’s character has structural problems due to deliberate choices made by Tom. Similar issues are not uncommon in serial stories, but here they stand out due to the great quality of the rest of the work. A chapter like the Mind Cage feels contrived but luckily it is a rarity in GC.
Long version:
I am also a little late here but I would like to leave my 5 cents on Tony: I think his main issue is that he is the only badly written character in Gunnerkrigg Court.
Please don’t take it the wrong way: I believe Tom is one of the best storyteller around and GC is an amazing comic. In a mediocre work Tony’s issues won’t be even noticed, but well, since everything is great and Tony has problems, they stand out.
So, here is my list of issues that I see with Tony as a character:
1) He is introduced too late in the story. I read on a writing manual that you should introduce important characters latest one third in. The reason is that a character introduced so late doesn’t get enough space to develop, and when they do it feels forced since the readers don’t care too much since they did not have time to grow attached to them. Apart one phone call, one flashback and one picture, Tony’s first appearance is in chapter 50 (and I assume GK won’t last until chapter 150).
2) He is introduced as an exceptional villain, and first impressions
do stick. Tom confirms that this is a deliberate choice in his retrospective video about The Tree. The problem is: if you introduce a character in such a strong negative way, you need an equal strong good episode to make both the audience and other in-universe characters him tho change their mind. On this forum we are still debating wether Tom conveyed a believable change of Tony from villain to normal flawed person.
My opinion is no.
3) Tony makes really bad decisions but they have no long lasting consequences.
In divine he almost kills Annie. He didn’t mean it and he feels guilty about it, but it doesn’t change the facts. However no one seems bothered by it (and by no one I mean the Court, Donny and Annie. I assume Kat is not aware of this). Most importantly it doesn’t change his way to interact around Annie: it is due to his mind cage.
Again in divine, he looses one arm, just to be replaced by a robotic limb by Kat.
Stopping Annie from visiting the forest caused a full building to collapse at the hands of Coyote in Meetings and Re-meetings, but again there is no on-screen consequence for Tony from the Court, nothing even mentioned. From Tom retrospective video we know that at least there were no casualties.
(and I do not even want to start the discourse about how he abandons Annie for two years and she doesn’t feel abandoned, because I think this particular point was eviscerated enough)
4) So far everyone who spends time alone with him (without the mind cage in play) suddenly starts to like him, even if before they hated him, just because he is a “normal smart funny guy” (this is connected to point 2 for in-universe characters).
In practice, if you never speak to someone who doesn’t speak (Surma and Tony during their school years), and then after spending a month with him, figure out he is a normal smart funny guy and fall for him, it is perfectly fine.
If you hate him because of how he treated your friend (talking about Kat here), spend together a couple of days working and then you like him, it is not realistic. In the Sneak retrospective video, Tom confirms that the audience is supposed to identify with Kat and share her hate for Tony. Then in the Shadow Men when Kat suddenly likes him, Tom confirms again this was done on purpose to confuse the audience, with (I assume) the idea that it will be explored later. But then the explanation is that he is a “normal smart funny guy” when he is alone and we get the whole story on how Surma falls for him in Get Lost. Not enough, in my opinion, to make Kat change her mind in a realistic way.
Finally, also Renard goes from hating Tony for how he treats Annie to have a civil relationship with him. It happened during the 6 months time skip that F!Annie and the readers spent stuck in the forest and we only see the end results in Loup’s Trick.
Part of the problem here comes from the fact that we are mostly
told that Tony is a nice guy (except in Get Lost and few occasions here and there). This is because the comic follows Annie, and Tony is always “caged” around her except for the double Annie parenthesis. Annie knows Tony from before the comic, but the readers don’t, and they need to be shown in practice how nice Tony can be (and with nice, I do not mean normal human behavior like asking your daughter to live with you or praising her when she does a good work).
5) Plot points that should not be about him end up being about him. Again, the mind cage is the best example: why does this chapter whose premise is Jones looking after Annie ends up with more than half of the tables being about Tony? This chapter is a clear example of why Tony feels forced. There are another couple of instances, for example when Tony starts working with Kat out of nowhere or even when he comes back alltogether.
Packing everything together, I would have called Tony a Mary Sue if the original creator of
this test didn’t ask to please stop using that term. For fun, I still did the Mary Sue test for Tony, and he scores almost double compared to Annie. But, well, this is also because in my opinion the consequences for Annie's mistakes (cheating) are completely out of scale.
In Tom’s retrospective video he points out that the readers are much more willing to forgive Ysengrin and Renard for trying to kill Annie and consider them better fatherly figures than Tony. Tom points out that Tony “simply” made Annie repeat one year and the isolation was a byproduct, not as bad as trying to kill someone.
I disagree with Tom’s view here: while it is true that both Ysengrin and Renard tried to kill Annie, Ysengrin was mostly tricked by Coyote, while the stuff with Renard happened in chapter 3, when the mood of the story was not completely set. In addition, we (the readers) spend quite some time with Annie interacting with both of them, and we can see their relationship evolving (we are not
told as with Tony).
Final remark: everything here is considering only events up to the Mind Cage chapter and the Moving chapter retrospective video. The issues I listed are easy to spot now that the plot has progressed, not when the story was first conceived. This is also why am amazed at the quality of (some) serial stories: in general organizing a story so long in an organic way is nothing but easy, doing it without having the full picture in mind is amazing. A chapter like The Mind Cage that, let’s be honest, feels a little like Tom pandering on the audience, are very very rare.
In any case, I have faith in Tom’s storytelling and I hope that in the future we will have hopefully no other problematic plot points like Tony. And meanwhile I will wait for the Mind Cage retrospective to see what were Tom’s intention with this chapter.