You know, "One More Day" gets a lot of grief, but there've been a few other Peter/MJ breakup stories over the years...and they've pretty much all been bad.* And I don't think this is because Peter and MJ are just meant to be. I've certainly enjoyed Spidey stories where MJ was not involved in his life at all!
I think it's because it's very, very hard to write a no-fault breakup that feels both emotionally true and compellingly interesting. Breakups rarely make most people into their best selves: we get hurt, so we lash out, or else we get extra depressed for a while. But Marvel cares way too much about you liking both characters to make either of them believably bitter. And no matter how old they should be, the genre's always going to push them to look and act like young adults, so their outgrowing the relationship never feels quite...right.
So instead of any of that, you get over-the-top madness like selling the marriage to the devil, or losing out to time dilation, or Peter being "revealed" to be not the real Peter, or MJ being made to forget Peter and him just being too self-destructive to remind her, or that bit in Ruins where MJ gets killed by Peter's theme song, or whatever.
I don't know about you, but I find I'm a happier reader when I just try to enjoy whatever the current status quo is and ignore the spider-leaps of logic taken to get to it.
*The best of them was probably that time in the 1970s when--depending on how you feel about retcons--she either didn't know Peter was Spider-Man and just got tired of his constant absences and excuses like Gwen did before her, or else she did know and got tired of his constant lying to her and disregard for his own life and safety. Both are believable breakup stories, both put MJ and Peter in understandable positions, and both stopped being viable as soon as MJ started getting built up as someone who could handle a superhero marriage. It still wasn't great...watching a hero ruin his happiness by passively clinging to old habits is not as much fun as it sounds like. But at least it was believably human.
I'm not counting "Divorced Disaster Peter Parker" from the Spider-Verse films, always a delight, because his actual breakup with Mary Jane was painted in the broadest possible strokes and they're basically back together by the end of the first film anyway.
no subject
I think it's because it's very, very hard to write a no-fault breakup that feels both emotionally true and compellingly interesting. Breakups rarely make most people into their best selves: we get hurt, so we lash out, or else we get extra depressed for a while. But Marvel cares way too much about you liking both characters to make either of them believably bitter. And no matter how old they should be, the genre's always going to push them to look and act like young adults, so their outgrowing the relationship never feels quite...right.
So instead of any of that, you get over-the-top madness like selling the marriage to the devil, or losing out to time dilation, or Peter being "revealed" to be not the real Peter, or MJ being made to forget Peter and him just being too self-destructive to remind her, or that bit in Ruins where MJ gets killed by Peter's theme song, or whatever.
I don't know about you, but I find I'm a happier reader when I just try to enjoy whatever the current status quo is and ignore the spider-leaps of logic taken to get to it.
*The best of them was probably that time in the 1970s when--depending on how you feel about retcons--she either didn't know Peter was Spider-Man and just got tired of his constant absences and excuses like Gwen did before her, or else she did know and got tired of his constant lying to her and disregard for his own life and safety. Both are believable breakup stories, both put MJ and Peter in understandable positions, and both stopped being viable as soon as MJ started getting built up as someone who could handle a superhero marriage. It still wasn't great...watching a hero ruin his happiness by passively clinging to old habits is not as much fun as it sounds like. But at least it was believably human.
I'm not counting "Divorced Disaster Peter Parker" from the Spider-Verse films, always a delight, because his actual breakup with Mary Jane was painted in the broadest possible strokes and they're basically back together by the end of the first film anyway.