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The Real World is, of course, anything but real. So, the question that may arise is how real could Pedro and Me, the story of a friendship, loss, and learning emerging from that artificial MTV-space, be? Whereas no cameras or overly corporate influence dominate Judd's artistic medium (i.e., the comic book, the graphic novel, the visual memoir, whatever one might call it), certainly it has similar maneuvers of verisimilitude to achieve its narrative objectives.

To start, The Real World is entertainment in a wholly inventive sense of the word. In his essay on "show biz" entitled "Entertainment and Utopia", Richard Dyer delineates some of the more common presumptions behind such productions. "I say that entertainment is a type of performance produced for profit, performed before a generalized audience (the 'public') by a trained, paid group who do nothing else but produce performances which have the sole (conscious) aim of providing pleasure" (372). But, of course, The Real World did not feature trained professionals, or rather did not feature them in front of the camera. The entertainers that best reflect Dyer's definition are the MTV producers, casting agents, and editors who shaped both the house and the footage into compelling, episodic sequences. Dyer claims that "entertainment does not, however, present models of utopian worlds, as in the classic utopias of Sir Thomas Moore, William Morris, et al. Rather the utopianism is contained in the feelings it embodies" (373). However, some version of utopia is what the Real World house provides — an impossible-and-therefore-artificial community composed of difference instead of similarity. The Real World community is largely the opposite of Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner's heteronormative community where "community is imagined through scenes of intimacy, coupling, and kinship; a historical relation to futurity is restricted to generational narrative and reproduction" (359).

This is not to say that heteronormativity is not still at play within the Real World house, nor is white-normativity absent. MTV could be both applauded and suspected for ensuring that the "the twenty-something group is usually racially diverse," but a feeling of tokenship rather than inclusion could also be descried; as Muñoz says, "Zamora was the third season's house queer" (151). This statement implies, correctly I think, that it was his status as an Other that garnered his inclusion, just as Pam's Asian status, Judd's Jewish status, or even Rachel's right-wing status, assuming that Republican is also an Other to "young, straight, suburban Americans […] MTV's primary audience" whom could also be read as 'liberal' (Ortiz 33). To pull from Cornel West, MTV amateurishly plays in the culture of difference; its executives could easily be seen as:

Although, due to its target demographics, The Real World seems unlikely to ever feature an octogenarian, there is little doubt that this Othering, either by its executives or its audience or both, fuels the casting calls, such as the one for San Francisco.

Muñoz has still greater suspicions of MTV, emphasizing Pedro's effectiveness as a role-model and activist "despite the corporate ethos that ordered that program" (144). Further, he says, "I am arguing that the series producers were unable to let a queer coupling, especially one as radical as Sean and Pedro's, to stand as the show's actual romance," thus the inclusion — forced inclusion, Muñoz would argue — of Puck and Toni's relationship even after the former had been forced to leave the house (158). However, I personally feel that Muñoz's misgivings go a step too far, since the same argument could be made for Pam and Judd's romance blossoming alongside Pedro and Sean's in Pedro and Me — they are, I think, supposed to reflect equality, not supercede each other. MTV's can be held accountable for certain artificialities, such as hoping "for a romance to erupt on the set between cast members" (Muñoz 158). But, even producer John Murray acknowledges that "within the history of the show […] it as 'probably the deepest we've ever gotten into a relationship in our three seasons'" (Muñoz 154). Still, Muñoz holds that "[Jürgen] Habermas, following the example of Frankfurt school predecessor Theodor Adorno, would probably see MTV as the providence of monopoly capitalism, locking into a pattern of sameness that was only calibrated to reproduce the consumer," even if that sameness was its adherence to displays of Other-ness (149).

However, as easy as it may be to paint television mega-corporations as the bad guys and as rich and wonderful a story as it is, Pedro and Me sometimes fails where The Real World succeeds. Certain very compelling and 'real' moments have been excluded from Judd's book, either having been drafted and left by the wayside or simply overlooked entirely. One passage, involving Judd and two Texans at an airport, may have been cut due to its "goofy" content, but made an excellent argument for the still-pervasive herteronormativity of The Real World: San Francisco; in a moment that seems both too ironic and too fitting to be anything but real, one of the Texans who had been imploring Judd to tell about his women-conquests praises Pedro's courage by saying, "Had himself a pair on him." Another passage addresses Judd's failings as the standard-bearer of Pedro's crusade and the darker, more fearful side to growing up gay.

Judd also omits several instances from The Real World that could easily have been pertinent to the narrative of Pedro and Me. First, there are the in-house conflicts to which Judd alludes in only one panel of Pedro and Me: "It got real bad when we asked our housemate Puck to move out. To say the least, Puck was obnoxious, acted homophobic, and, in general, had a problem 'playing with others.' So we asked him to leave" (Winick 114). In truth, he was voted out unanimously by all the housemates. As Stewart Brower notes, Puck, one of The Real World's most widely know if not popular personalities, was "an aggressive overgrown adolescent who had issues with just about everyone in the cast and was ultimately thrown out of the apartment. Puck rates exactly three panels, not even a page in this 180-page tome" (Brower). One reason for his removal was for the many homophobic comments, since "these comments from Puck were a regular household occurrence that was, through editing strategies, downplayed by the producers" and, it seems, by Pedro and Me (Muñoz 155). Also overlooked by both The Real World and Pedro and Me is "the fact that Pucks' lack of hygeine was nothing short of a medical risk for a person living with a compromised immune system" (Muñoz 155).

But, Judd's perspective — or, more accurately, Pedro and Me's — also elides the influence and presence of several other housemates tied to Pedro in some way. Judd acknowledges Cory as a late addition — "Our trio became a quartet" — but she is portrayed as the first to engage Pedro: "The show begins with Cory, a college student from California who rendezvoused with Pedro on a train" (Muñoz 154). While it's true that "by the twentieth and final episode, Pedro has become very close to Cory, Pam, and Judd," her decision to go play with Puck rather than support Pedro at his school presentation is left unmentioned by Pedro and Me (Muñoz 156). Also omitted from the book is housemate Rachel's aversion to Pedro's lifestyle. "Rachel was put off by this display [of Pedro's activist scrapbook] and proceeded, during an interview in the confessional, to voice her AIDSphobic and homophobic concerns about cohabitating with Pedro" (Muñoz 155). Lastly, on the same page as Puck's brief ostracization, Judd recounts how he and Pam would lie about Pedro's health: "It was important to him that he not be viewed as sick but just like everyone else. Pedro hid a lot of it. Pam and I helped him hide it […] We'd lie" (Winick 114). However, Muñoz reports that "Zamora, in a post-Real World interview, explained that he had wanted to show it all, the good days and the bad days" (156). So, where is the distortion: Muñoz, the interview, Judd, or The Real World? Un-reality swirls all around.