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Zachary's avatar

What kind of deal can I make with Mephisto so that I never have to hear about the Spider-marriage again?

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Ellis's avatar

Apologies in advance for the long-winded comment. I would like to address the "Nothing matters in Amazing Spider-Man" topic that was previously brought up. While I don't believe it's fair to compare the marriage to the black suit, Peter being a school teacher or Doc Ock taking over his body, I think the main point of that question was how important things do happen in current stories but then tend to be treated like they're not that important and the audience needs to just accept it.

For instance and please bear with me for a moment, the current Mary Jane situation where she left Peter for another man, right after the prior ASM run by Nick Spencer ended with calling them "unbreakable", is treated as something that shouldn't even be acknowledged. Peter fought so hard to save MJ just to get kicked to the curb. He ruined his life, sanity, relationships, burned all his bridges with the superhero community, teamed up with the man who murdered his first love, crossed over worlds to save the woman he loved, just to discover that she had forgotten and discarded him after everything they've been through together all because she was trapped with another man. For the past 3 years, MJ has never been held accountable for her actions, never expressed any form of regret for it, treated Peter with contempt and hostility for being unable to accept that she left him for Paul, treated it like this was his fault for taking too long to save her and needed to just get over it, never cared for breaking his heart and took 60 issues to so much as even thank him for saving her. Today, MJ is not a regular ASM cast member anymore, she was forced with superpowers despite showing no prior aspirations to ever become a costumed crime fighter in her entire established history, then she was written out of ASM and sent off to another title.

You may wonder where am I going with all this. My point is simply that if stories are supposed to matter, then how can you have a story that effectively destroys the No.1 hero's most important relationship after his most iconic love interest who always stood by him through thick and thin, uncharacteristically decided to leave him for another man, and yet it's treated as something unimportant that doesn't even need to be addressed, let alone potentially remedied in the future. In perspective the biggest impact that story seemed to have was to tarnish Mary Jane's reputation and make her unviable as a romantic partner to Peter going forward, not much different than how Sins Past had previously tarnished Gwen's reputation as well.

If the stories matter, then all I'm asking is for Marvel to please reconsider their handling of some of the characters and what the implications in certain stories could mean for said characters in the long run.

Have a good day, Tom.

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