'Ms. Marvel' Introduces a Scrappy New Hero
by EG
Ms. Marvel, the new superhero series coming to Disney+, is getting meta, as it introduces a new hero who is as fascinated by Marvel superheroes as real-world audiences are. The series centers around a scrappy teenager who comes to terms with her new superpowers and has to think of herself as one of the heroes she has idolized all her life. Read on for details.
Shortly after Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), the heroine of Disney+’s Ms. Marvel, gains her powers, her best friend Bruno (Matt Lintz) asks her what it feels like to wield them. She gazes with awe at her own right hand, sheathed in crystalline layers of blue light. “Like an idea come to life,” she answers.
It’s a tidy description of her gifts, which (in a departure from the comics, where she’s able to manipulate the size and shape of her body) allow her to solidify that light into shields or stepping stones or whatever else she can imagine. It’s also her tale in a nutshell. More than perhaps any other character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Kamala is the pure embodiment of fangirl wish fulfillment. That it’s all happening to a Pakistani American Muslim teenager who bucks the genre’s white-guy default makes the fantasy all the sweeter.
For a few years now, it’s been the case that new characters introduced into the MCU have been following the MCU’s major narratives much in the same way the rest of us have been following the MCU’s major narratives. They too remember watching the Avengers battle Loki over the New York City skyline or weeping over the death of Iron Man; the difference between our world and theirs is simply that for them, it’s all been real. The meta quality is an inevitable side effect of the franchise’s interconnected plotting, commercial success and longevity, and often it’s an endearing one: It really is fun to watch Ant-Man become starstruck by Captain America in Captain America: Civil War or Kate Bishop offer Hawkeye branding advice in Hawkeye.
Kamala’s fandom, however, has a fervor to rival any real-life Marvel geek’s. The first time we hear her voice, she’s narrating a video she’s made about the Avengers’ exploits, which she’s illustrated with hand-drawn paper dolls and dioramas constructed of whatever school supplies she had on hand. When she’s not breathlessly recapping the Battle of Earth or theorizing about whether Thor is secretly a gamer, she’s fine-tuning her Captain Marvel cosplay to enter a contest at the first-ever AvengerCon. (Whether it’s entirely a good thing for superheroes to be idolized to such a degree is a valid question recently explored to bloody, brilliant effect in Amazon’s The Boys; Ms. Marvel more or less takes for granted that it is.)
It is, in fact, at that very event that she comes into her powers for the first time, by way of a mysterious family heirloom she’s pulled on to complete her costume. In its basic beats, Kamala’s origin story feels as classic as they come, following the same scrappy-kid-makes-good formula that made Spider-Man so winning in his Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield eras. (Not that Tom Holland’s version isn’t beloved, but his Peter Parker entered the MCU a full-fledged superhero before going to space, arriving in the multiverse and cozying up to Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.) Vellani is all youthful verve and irresistible moxie, as believable playing the clumsy nerd slinking unnoticed through high school hallways as she is manifesting the cool, confident super-being Kamala daydreams of becoming.
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.