They aren't quite non-negotiables for me. In theory it's possible for stuff like "Every plot machination involving a corporation and cabal who have a bizarre fixation on my personal life", "The character you knew for 20 years is nullified" and even retcons where they bring characters back from the dead, and so on to work for me, provided it's done by storytellers A) Who know what they are doing, B) Who have some larger point to make. In theory it's even possible for "One More Day" to have worked for me. The bar is very high but in theory it could have worked.
When Lee and Kirby brought Captain America out of ice thereby negating every story with Cap between 1945-1964 featuring an impostor and so not the real Cap it was done with a lot of thought and care, and they were making a larger point. Cap can't be associated with the post-war right wing anti-communism of the '40s and '50s, and he should represent an ideal out of synch with the current direction of American society. There was an actual larger story and point being done there and while it was a continuity fix it was done by people who knew why it was needed.
I don't think either condition was met by the people behind the Second Saga. The guy with the main idea, Terry Kavanagh wasn't the lead writer, and it was all done by committee, with people with different motivations and interests which worked against the whole project. Likewise, Kavanagh didn't really understand the full ramifications of his own story, as evidenced by his interviews. This is also the case with Glenn Greenberg on his Life of Reilly blog (which people really need to read carefully and not take on face value). There's a real lack of self-awareness and self-criticism by most of the people behind the project.
I agree with that. I certainly don't think my views are the only valid position. It is however a position that I don't think people have made very often, and one I think it's appropriate to bring in a thread discussing the story's 25th Anniversary. It's no different than bringing in the question of fridging in a discussion about The Night Gwen Stacy Died, which I have done multiple times. The difference is that Night Gwen Stacy Died is a great story with a problematic legacy whereas Clone Saga is just problematic, with very little good and great about it.
The funny thing about "illusion of change" is that when Stan Lee said about it, off-the-record at Marvel meeting, he meant something different from what writers and others understood by it.
"[Steve] Englehart, who first came to work for Marvel in 1971, described a change in Marvel's editorial priorities "around '74," which led, in 1976, to at least three talents leaving Marvel at that time: himself, Jim Starlin, and Paul Gulacy. When Kim Thompson inquires as to what editorial restrictions were being promulgated, Englehart said: "Well, just "don't be so bizarre. try not to progress so fast." There's that famous meeting that happened before the quitting time when Stan said, "I don't want progress; I want the illusion of progress now. We don't want people dying and coming out of the strips [a reference to the death of Gwen Stacy], we don't want new girlfriends, we want to try to keep it the same."
http://zak-site.com/Great-American-N..._universe.html
The key phrase is "we don't want new girlfriends". What Lee implies is that he wants Spider-Man to more or less stick to the status-quo established in the aftermath of Gwen's death, i.e. with MJ as the female lead heroine, which explains the newspaper strip. For Lee, the idea seems to be, to keep the background fixed and just worked within that but nothing about hard rules against the characters. "Try not to progress so fast" doesn't imply "no progress ever". In fact, I think there was a Marvel editorial where during the pages the then editor said, on the question of Spidey aging, they said, "they age but very slowly". In a certain sense, Peter marrying Mary Jane was within the "illusion of change" as Stan Lee understood it. Marrying MJ doesn't solve all of Peter's problems. She's still a civilian woman who can't really help him be a superhero, or serve as an assistant, or create gadgets and so on. MJ is likewise the leading lady of the stories, a role that was conceived and set up by Ditko back in ASM#25 onwards, and in fact right from her first mention (ASM#15, where May says Peter would one day marry MJ). It brought new emotional stakes to Spider-Man that aren't fully played out the way an unmarried Spider-Man or Post-OMD Spider-Man has.
On a broader sense...the illusion of change was conceived for a Pre-Internet era, and for an audience of young kids and teenagers who were expected to outgrow the medium at a certain point. Except, thanks a great deal to Stan Lee himself (who always wanted Marvel Comics to target a sophisticated readership and college kids in particular and that inspired stuff like the progressive continuity), the comics audience isn't that young anymore. It was also conceived in a time when Marvel Comics were in a low-period of sales after Kirby left where it was basically ASM and Star Wars licensed comics keeping it afloat. It doesn't make sense today with the Internet where literally nothing is ever forgotten or forgiven, when the comics readers aren't young and to the extent they exist 616 isn't what's bringing them in.
Before Marvel was semi-independent and was shuffled from one corporate owner to another, always on the verge of being utterly shuttered and so paranoid about the fact that their owners would see no value in them making comics. So that inspired and justified a certain conservatism. That's not the case anymore. Marvel Comics now has a permanent lasting home with Disney, who see the comics as an IP farm and R&D for stories and so on, so there's no longer that uncertainty and jockeying for relevance that once drove it. Or at least not near the same extent.