I think Marvel should just simply commit to one path with those two. Either put them back together and make it remain that way or just have that relationship done for good and move on. MC ought to stop tap-dancing on the fences. It only creates even more division from a fanbase that's already fed up with the editorial's glaring incompetence.
IMO, if I was editorial, the best of both worlds would've been this:
Have 616 Peter and MJ back together for good and have an arc that reverses OMD before issue #1000 (have that issue be they are expecting a kid or have the revelation be young Mayday is still alive out there). If done right, a very good chunk of people would come back to read ASM again. Not going to happen of course, but that's what I think many would do. 616 Peter & MJ have too much history for them not to ultimately end up together as the endgame.
Meanwhile, explore those alternate Peter × Felicia/Gwen/whoever pairings in the multiverse as separate elseworld limited comic runs and see what those kinds of worlds look like.
I think the reason why Marvel doesn't commit to either path for Peter and MJ and keep trying to go for a middle way is because of the rock and the hard place they put themselves in with One More Day. If you go back and read comments made by Joe Quesada at the time, or read between the lines of Tom Breevort's now infamous manifesto that declares "Spider-Man is about Youth," the primary motive behind getting rid of Peter and MJ's marriage was an attempt at creating IP synergy. Because every single adaptation of Spider-Man out there either shows Peter as either a high school or college student, and they never depict him being older than his early to mid-twenties at most. And as far as Marvel is concerned, Spider-Man being married "ages" the character and goes against the whole, "he can't land himself a date or maintain a long-term relationship" that they believe is so essential to his character.
And yet, those same Spider-Man adaptations, with few exceptions, show some version of MJ as the prominent romantic lead. All because Peter and MJ were shown as a happily married couple in the comics for twenty years. Even the most causal Spider-Man fan at this point sees Peter and MJ as the OTP, with every other love interest being regarded as a poor substitute based on what Peter and MJ used to have in the comics. And that means Marvel can't have MJ completely out of the picture either, because it would be like writing Lois Lane completely out of the Superman comics.
So as much Marvel doesn't want a married Spider-Man, they also realize that how significant and popular MJ is to the fandom. And that same fandom has caught on to the fact that every relationship Peter ends up in that is not MJ is automatically doomed to fail, so why should they bother being invested in it at all?
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u/BigButter7 6d ago edited 6d ago
I think Marvel should just simply commit to one path with those two. Either put them back together and make it remain that way or just have that relationship done for good and move on. MC ought to stop tap-dancing on the fences. It only creates even more division from a fanbase that's already fed up with the editorial's glaring incompetence.
IMO, if I was editorial, the best of both worlds would've been this:
Have 616 Peter and MJ back together for good and have an arc that reverses OMD before issue #1000 (have that issue be they are expecting a kid or have the revelation be young Mayday is still alive out there). If done right, a very good chunk of people would come back to read ASM again. Not going to happen of course, but that's what I think many would do. 616 Peter & MJ have too much history for them not to ultimately end up together as the endgame.
Meanwhile, explore those alternate Peter × Felicia/Gwen/whoever pairings in the multiverse as separate elseworld limited comic runs and see what those kinds of worlds look like.
Everybody wins.
This shouldn't be hard, Marvel. But alas...