More how March and the other antagonists are portrayed anything less than that is guaranteed to be a minor obstacle. With anyone going against Joe getting a major power boost we have people like Bakuda making a grenade that gave her back her limbs, it might be cancer but it get them up and running. And who knows what Leet can do if he gets his megaproject working (almost a certainty).
While death might not be the end of a character, anything less than maiming is a guarantee they will cause problems later on. And can you even say those readers are wrong in their assumptions?
From how March is played if she can talk and communicate effectively she can turn any group of decent scrubs into a slaughterhouse 9 contender with a little effort so long as Joe is involved.
The thing about Worm is that threats are abundant as all hell. You would think that with March out of the picture, nothing can threaten Joe?
Not at all. Remember, S-Rank threats come as a
list, not as a bunch of exceptions. There are at least three potential S-rank threats in the Bay currently, from the Butcher, to Noelle, to Blasto if his hand is forced. And that's only counting threats to general life - to Joe specially, Dragon can be considered an S-rank threat, and so should Leet at this point.
Then there's the potential threats that we know would come at some point. The S9, the Endbringers, Cauldron - the big three groups that all fics tend to surround on in the lategame when it comes to story telling. And between the S-rank threats, you can also get the oddities - people with powers so strange and weird that in the right situation, they could be threats to Joe. You can count most Masters and Strangers here, as well as the odd Shaker or Striker.
Joe gives off the illusion of invincibility because we often compare him to the E88 or the ABB. The thing is, neither of these groups are true representatives to what could count for as threats to
him, much less the people he cares for who are by magnitudes a lot more vulnerable and squishier. It's like Alexandria in canon - seemingly undefeatable, at least until Skitter choked her with bugs. All in all, the thing is, it doesn't have to be March to challenge Joe. People have simply become too narrowly focused on her, even as they ironically say they detest her and want to see no more of her.
And in the end, it's less a matter of whether March could come back and more of a question on whether we trust LordRoustabout to know where he's going with his story. And it's not even close to over yet - it hasn't even been a
month in terms of in-story progress, with plenty of plot threads left untied. I would say that after all his efforts in writing this much, people could at least learn to be more patient and wait for the relevant interludes before making assumptions and raising complaints about them.
