Quote Originally Posted by Lukmendes View Post
And honestly I already found it questionable for her to die here to begin with, Spidey and Kamala only teamed up and talked with each other only a few times (I can only think of ASM vol 4 around the time Spider-Verse started, Marvel Team-Up vol 4's first story arc, and, whatever the hell Zeb Wells did), so having her die here is just wrong, 'cause like I said before, it'd be like killing Bucky on a Fantastic Four comic, if she's going to die then do it in a comic with characters who have history with her, and by a writer who understands her, and both cases are definitely not what happened here.
This is what it boils down to to me. Kamala Khan is not a Spider-Man character. Why is she dying in Spider-Man? Like even if her death was good and not this stupid thing, why is she dying in a Spider-Man book? NOT EVEN THE RIGHT SPIDER-MAN.

Eh, there's a bunch of moments where MJ clearly doesn't know Spidey and Peter are the same person, even if she doesn't directly say it (Which she does a few times, and even thinks it), the overall attitude will only make sense if she doesn't know.

It's not too jarring, but her knowing "for years", and then it turning out she knows since before she even met Peter in ASM#42, are most definitely a noticeable retcon lol.
I didn't like the rest of 246 either, but I think it sticks out to me just because it's just so close. Like i'm sure you're right and her knowing from teh beginning creates issues, but even binging like I did, it takes a LONG time to read from like, issue 50 to Issue 246 (especially when you're reading MTU and Spectacular concurrently), lol. Not so long from 246 to 259.



Louise Simmonson (Who wrote ASM Annual#19) was definitely a Spidey/MJ shipper lol.

A while after ASM#259 we got the first three issues of Web of Spider-Man, also by her, where MJ very clearly admits to Spidey, that she loves him but is too much of a coward to be with him:



(Web of Spider-Man#3)

And then in WoS#6, by Danny Fingeroth, MJ thinks to herself that she's not exactly comfortable with him being Spidey, but him being Spider-Man is also why she admires him so much:



So yeah, DeFalco had platonic reasons for that story (Again, he doesn't really do subtle, though he obviously liked the marriage considering MC2 is a thing), but then other writers also played the romantic angle of it, which does make it look like ASM#259 itself has both Spidey and MJ lying to each other and themselves.

And honestly even if Louise Danny weren't doing that shit in Web, it can still be interpreted that way, which's why that Louise's issues don't look like they're contradicting anything.

Yet another fucking thing that works by accident lol.
Right, I can't get into their head, but I always read those issues as them being in love but MJ is trying to work through her **** and Peter is kinda just taking what comes while he's dealing with Black Cat Shenanigans.

Even before it, when we had people who kept track of continuity like Jim Shooter, there were plenty of weird hiccups, such as the different rate Kitty and Franklin aged lol.
I mean...I could go into how I do'nt like shared universes for exactly this reason....but yeah, it's hard enough for a guy like Shooter, the jokers in charge don't stand a chance.

It's honestly weird they decided to bring back Norman when Harry was the big schemer, since every fucking time Norman got his memories back he went for a direct attack, either immediately or after a while, and Harry, even before the robot parents retcon, was taking his time to torment Spidey, with Spectacular#200 taking place over days, maybe weeks, with Spidey sweating over what Harry will do next, and Harry happily tormenting him over it, though, maybe Harry being the schemer made it too obvious lol.
Again, blame Bob Harass, who doesn't know what he's doing. In BTS work they revealed that once they decided to got back to Peter and needed to pin it on someone, Harry was the first idea, but Bob thought Harry wasn't enough of a schemer and they had to bring back Norman. Like....I guess it's just evidence that even before OMD there were editors who had no idea what the characters were about.


Quote Originally Posted by Daibhidh View Post
A lot of people, including me, think it's a highlight of Spider-man in general and MJ's character in particular.
It's fairly easy to explain away MJ thinking about Peter and Spider-man as different people in that story: she's daydreaming about the film of her life, not about her life. In the film of her life of course Peter and Spider-man are going to be different people because she's not going to spill Peter's secret like that.
For that matter, what is Spider-man doing romancing Mary Jane in her daydream? We know she kind of thinks Spider-man is 'dreamy', but she's never expressed any interest in him beyond what she'd express in any man with an attractive body type. So why is she daydreaming about Spider-man in particular? We the readers know that she's Spider-man's love interest: but there's no reason for her to know that, unless of course she does know that.
I know I'm on an island on that issue, lol. I just don't like antything about it. All three of them are weird and surreal in their own way and that weirdness makes it hard for me to take any character moments away from them so we're watching stories that didn't happen that are too strange to tell us anything and so yeah. I think the only reason I remember it is that it's the first issue I read where I actively disliked it. Prior to that point, even the random MTU stories were at worst mediocre in my mind.