‘Ms. Marvel’: The Character, The Person

Disney+’s Ms. Marvel has two episodes left and things are heating up. Kamala Khan seeks info on her Djinn heritage and the truth about her great grandmother. Finding comfort in new allies, she’s once again thrown into fire. Iman Vellani must be given all the credit; she really captures both the wide-eyed wonder and the crushing weight of the world coming down on the shoulders of a teenager. Acting aside, there’s another reason why this scene really works, and it’s far more important to the direction Marvel has been going in as of late. It’s because there’s actually very little superheroness in this superhero show. Instead, they’ve focused so much on the character of Kamala Khan that it elevates the story and the show. And with this seemingly being the direction Marvel has chosen to go, will this be the future of the superhero genre as a whole? The Power of World Building I want to start out with a dive into the story telling of Ms. Marvel so far. With the very first episode, it felt like the least superhero property that the MCU has put out so far. That sentence on it own would seem like a negative for the genre, but I’m here to tell you, good reader, that it was the smartest move they could make. We’ve been in Earth-199999, according to Vellani, for 10 plus years now. Ten plus years of futuristic technology, gods, magic, and monsters. A whole generation of people grew up with this as common place so of course kids see them more as celebrities than anything. And Kamala Khan i…