Fawful is Immortal

Fawful had the best run of any villain or original character, for that matter. Bringing him back would be an insult.

When he exploded, he was basically dying. He no longer had his body and was injured. '

I do believe we need a new arc villain, like Tas. Mario and Luigi seems like an arc villains series compared to Paper Mario which has new villains each time.

I just believe he can return because it's Mario.

I mean, coming back from the dead is pretty easy in this universe, and appearances in sports games and spinoffs have no real concern for any 'canon' anyway (just ask Dry Bowser and Metal Mario!)

So him appearing in say, Mario Kart or Mario Party wouldn't really need an explanation, and him appearing in an RPG could just come down to 'he got chucked in a magic potion/had a 1-Up Mushroom/came back from the Underwhere/had a retry clock/had a pick me up/was cloned/used time travel' and be done with it.

Basically, if they want to bring him back, they'll find a way to. If they don't want to bring him back, they won't.

Fawful really shouldn't return, if he had a choice to then I think it would be no for the fact that he's done with terrorizing, he had a depressing lifetime. Why continue it, even if he were to come back to life he would be caught immediately.

Err, idk if we can really call it an arc (specially that AD shelved OCs in favor of interactions for PJ, so we don't know how it would have gone if the game kept OCs)

If anything PJ seem to finish what SSS started, Bowser slowly turning into a competent villain (started as a buttmonkey in SSS, was a minor nuisance in PiT, a somewhat competent villain protagonist in BiS, became an unexpected final boss in DT then finally a full time big bad in PJ)

Fawful wasn't really a minion, he was more like a sidekick for Cackletta.