This is really interesting to me, and I kinda wish we did have twitter or message boards back when things like a character death was unexpected, final and most importantly rare.
I grew up knowing Spider-man lost a girlfriend before ever reading a Spider-man comic. It's like Vader being Luke's dad, it's just such common knowledge (within the comics community). I'd love to pour through the variety of raw opinion and thought on this when it was fresh.
I remember when Amazing Spider-man #700 dropped and the Spider-man community exploded! I imagine it would have been somewhat similar.