peter who protects johnny like one does a damsel in distress vs the four who protect johnny the way one does a child. now fight
Yeah, I always think there's something interesting to explore, there, in the way Peter's views on Johnny's history change when they cross the boundary from friendship to romance. And I think there's a really fun model to his protectiveness here, too, where if we're using his previous relationships as a baseline, then he's so, so gentle with his partner when they're hurting, and he's such an attack dog to anyone he views as infringing on their privacy.
"I wish you'd let me do something about that jerk!" (ASM #326) "(ASM #326) This is after MJ was kidnapped by a man named Jonathan Caesar who was obsessed with her, who then conspired to destroy her modeling and acting career because he couldn't have her.
"Look, "Bart" ... and try to grasp this one... she is not going to back into model --" (ASM Annual #35) And then after a different, later kidnapping, when MJ was being hounded by the press even though she said she was quitting modeling, Peter did not handle the press trying to spin it as a publicity stunt very well. So we know how he reacts in these kinds of situations, but I also think it being such a new relationship where he's kind of doing the super fast math in his head and reevaluating a bunch of stuff from his and Johnny's shared past, is going to put him on overdrive. Congratulations, Johnny, that's a boyfriend and a self-appointed bodyguard and a Belgian Malinois rolled into one.
But also with both the Lyja and Sky incidents, there's a writing thing that happens that I absolutely hate, where the rest of the Fantastic Four kind of treat this as a "two sides" situation where Johnny is as equally at fault/responsible. Which, if I'm being generous, is a failure on the writers' parts to recognize exactly what they've written. And like, that's being very generous, because a lot of this is really blatant.
From FF #357, the issue where the Lyja reveal happens -- separating someone from their family is very textbook. So it requires a lot of suspension of disbelief that nobody clued into what they were writing, or that they were writing it completely unintentionally.
But more specifically, I'm talking about the scene where Lyja reveals the egg baby was a lie and a man-eating monster that would have attempted to kill everyone in the Baxter Building and Johnny finally loses it and leaves rather than have to see Lyja anymore. After that, Sue offers Lyja a place to stay in the Baxter Building, and that's always just been such a wild writing choice to me. I can kind of write it off because Sue is going through her own (literally personality altering) stuff during this period, but it's still kind of like. Really. And it's just a terrible writing choice to me that I'm always kind of trying to work around in my mind, but then the Sky arc kind of doubles down on it. Again, I don't think anything that happens there is as bad as what happens with Lyja, but there still weren't steps taken to have Johnny's back. I would, at the very least, have had the other three try to make sure that he could get that soulmate bracelet off on his own terms, and not let him be dependent on someone else's will.
So I do think Peter, when he realizes that hasn't been happening and Johnny's been dealing with things on his own, is Not Going To Be Happy and is kind of going to make it a big deal.
