For most of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, superheroes existed in a world that was only occasionally interested in showing us what ordinary people thought about them. We knew Captain America had become a public figure. We saw kids wearing Iron Man masks and heard characters reference the Avengers as celebrities. But for the most part, the MCU concentrated on the people doing the saving rather than the people buying the T-shirts. Then Kamala Khan came along, and suddenly Marvel gave us a character who experienced superheroes much more like the audience did. She doesn’t simply know the Avengers exist. She follows them, admires them, creates fan art about them, goes to conventions devoted to them, and has elevated Captain Marvel to a level of hero worship that probably deserves its own Tumblr account.

That was one of the things I enjoyed most about Ms. Marvel when the series premiered on Disney+ in 2022. Iman Vellani plays Kamala with so much genuine enthusiasm that she often feels less like a fictional teenager who has always lived in the MCU and more like an actual Marvel fan who somehow fell through the television screen and discovered that she gets to stay. I wasn’t particularly familiar with Kamala from the comics before the series. I knew she existed, but I didn’t know her story, personality, or powers. That meant I came into Ms. Marvel with very few expectations beyond whatever the trailers had shown me. What I found was a series I enjoyed far more than some of the online reaction suggested I should.

I don’t think Ms. Marvel deserved the hate it received. I also don’t think every choice the show made worked perfectly. But Kamala herself? She works.

The MCU Finally Gets an MCU Fan

There’s something wonderfully logical about introducing a superhero who grew up as a fan of superheroes. By the time Kamala reaches adolescence, the Avengers have been active publicly for years. New York has been invaded by aliens. Sokovia happened. Half the universe disappeared and then came back. Assuming civilization eventually returned to anything resembling normal, of course people would build an entire culture around these heroes. There would be documentaries, biographies, message boards, conspiracy theories, podcasts, fan fiction, collectible merchandise, and endless arguments about which Avenger could beat which other Avenger in a fight.

In other words, people in the MCU would behave exactly like people outside the MCU.

Kamala allows Marvel to acknowledge that reality in a way most earlier characters couldn’t. She makes fan videos and fills her room with superhero imagery. Her imagination constantly spills into the visual presentation of the series through doodles, animated text, and drawings that seem to come alive around her. Those stylistic flourishes are especially effective during the early episodes because they tell us something about Kamala before the plot becomes concerned with mystical bangles and interdimensional threats. Her brain is always moving. She sees the world through the filter of someone who has spent years imagining herself as part of something larger.

Then, quite suddenly, she is.

That makes her origin different from Tony Stark building armor to survive or Peter Parker trying to understand abilities he never asked for. Kamala has already spent years fantasizing about superheroes before she becomes one herself. She knows the poses. She understands the mythology. She has imagined what the moment is supposed to feel like. The joke, naturally, is that becoming a superhero turns out to involve considerably more confusion than she probably pictured while standing in front of her bedroom mirror.

Iman Vellani is what makes that work. She doesn’t play Kamala as someone who is generically “quirky” because the script says teenagers are quirky. There’s an infectious excitement to her performance that makes Kamala easy to like even when she’s making bad decisions. Knowing that Vellani herself was a Marvel fan before being cast only adds another layer to the whole thing. There are moments when Kamala looks delighted to be standing in the MCU, and Vellani looks equally delighted to be standing on a Marvel set. The line between performer and character becomes appropriately blurred.

AvengerCon Makes Way Too Much Sense

AvengerCon might be one of my favorite concepts introduced in the entire series because it feels ridiculous for about five seconds before you realize it absolutely would exist. If superheroes were real, people would turn them into brands almost immediately. Someone would sell unauthorized Captain America shirts outside a subway station. Someone else would be charging twenty dollars for parking at an Avengers-themed convention. There would probably be people arguing over whether a piece of debris from the Battle of New York was authentic while somebody nearby sold bootleg Thor hammers.

Human beings have never encountered something they couldn’t eventually monetize.

AvengerCon also helps establish just how thoroughly superhero culture has worked its way into everyday MCU life. These aren’t mysterious figures whispered about on the news anymore. They are celebrities. People cosplay as them. Kids have favorites. Vendors sell merchandise. Fans debate their exploits even though some of those exploits involved events that nearly ended civilization. It’s funny, but it’s also a natural extension of a universe Marvel had been building for more than a decade.

Kamala fits perfectly inside that culture because she isn’t embarrassed by her fandom. She loves it. She dresses as Captain Marvel because she genuinely believes Carol Danvers represents something worth aspiring to. And that brings up one of the stranger questions I’ve always had about the show.

Why Captain Marvel?

Seriously, How Famous Is Carol Danvers?

I’m not saying Kamala shouldn’t idolize Carol. Kids choose heroes for all kinds of reasons, and nobody needs my permission before buying a Captain Marvel poster. The problem is that the MCU itself has never made it especially clear why Carol Danvers would be one of the most famous Avengers on Earth.

Think about what we actually know of Carol’s public career. Most of Captain Marvel takes place in 1995, and after discovering the truth about herself she leaves Earth to help people elsewhere in the universe. When she returns decades later, it’s because of the crisis surrounding Thanos. Even during Avengers: Endgame, she spends a significant amount of time off-world dealing with problems on other planets. Compared with Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, or even Hulk, Carol has spent surprisingly little screen time doing highly visible superhero work on Earth.

So what does Kamala know about her?

Did somebody record the battle at the Avengers compound? Was there a documentary? Did surviving Avengers conduct interviews afterward? Did Scott Lang spend three hours talking about her on a podcast?

There are certainly plausible explanations, and I don’t need Ms. Marvel to stop for a ten-minute presentation about Captain Marvel’s public-relations history. Still, it’s one of those MCU details that becomes stranger the longer you think about it. Kamala doesn’t simply know Carol exists. She has built an enormous amount of personal mythology around her. Somewhere between Endgame and Ms. Marvel, Captain Marvel apparently became famous enough to inspire cosplay contests.

Maybe the MCU has a much better superhero press corps than we’ve been led to believe.

Representation Works Best When It Becomes Part of the World

The cultural side of Ms. Marvel interested me for a different reason. Kamala’s Pakistani-American family and Muslim community represent experiences that are different from my own, and that difference is precisely why I found them worth watching. Fiction has always been one of the easiest ways to encounter lives, beliefs, and traditions that we might never interact with directly. When that material is presented well, you can learn something without feeling like the story has suddenly stopped to deliver a lecture.

That’s largely what Ms. Marvel accomplishes.

Kamala’s identity isn’t treated like a special issue the series needs to explain before returning to the superhero story. Her faith, family expectations, community relationships, clothing, food, language, and cultural traditions simply exist as part of her life. The show doesn’t present every Muslim character as having the same relationship with religion, nor does it pretend that every Pakistani-American family functions identically. We see people expressing faith and cultural identity differently, which is exactly what you would expect from any large community.

That matters because representation becomes much less interesting when a character is expected to stand in for millions of people. There is no single way to be Muslim, just as there is no single way to belong to any other religion or cultural tradition. Kamala gets to be one teenager with one particular family. Her parents can embarrass her. Her brother can make choices she wouldn’t make. The women at the mosque can have different ideas about how things should operate. None of that requires Kamala to turn toward the audience and explain what lesson we are supposed to learn.

She simply gets to live in that world.

For someone unfamiliar with those experiences, that makes the series more interesting rather than less relatable.

The Trip to Partition Actually Adds Something

The series makes an even more dramatic cultural shift when Kamala’s story takes her to Karachi and eventually back into the history of the 1947 Partition of British India. I could understand viewers feeling that the series loses some of its breezy Jersey City momentum during this stretch, especially because the earliest episodes have such a distinct visual personality. But I didn’t have a problem with the change. For me, it deepened Kamala’s connection with her grandmother and made the bangle feel tied to something larger than a convenient superhero origin.

It also placed a historical event in front of an audience that might otherwise never encounter it.

Partition resulted in the creation of India and Pakistan and was accompanied by enormous population movement, communal violence, and lasting trauma. The series connects that history directly to Kamala’s family through the story of her great-grandmother Aisha and the experience of being separated during the chaos surrounding the trains. Director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who worked on the episodes most closely connected to this material, has spoken about growing up with her own grandparents’ stories of Partition and gathering oral histories from people who experienced it. That personal connection matters because it gives the sequence a weight that would be difficult to manufacture purely as superhero backstory.

I’m always cautious when entertainment introduces me to a history or cultural experience I don’t know well because I have no immediate way of judging what has been simplified, dramatized, or invented. Ms. Marvel obviously fictionalizes its central family story, but knowing that people involved in creating those episodes brought personal and historical knowledge to the material makes the effort feel more grounded.

And it gives Kamala something many superheroes lack: a power origin connected not merely to cosmic mythology, but to family memory.

The Powers Didn’t Bother Me. The Mutation Did.

Because I hadn’t read Kamala’s comics before watching the series, I had no attachment to her original powers. In Marvel Comics, Kamala was introduced as an Inhuman with polymorphic abilities, allowing her to stretch and alter her body and giving us her famous use of the word “embiggen.” The MCU changed that considerably by tying her abilities to the bangle and giving her hard-light constructs that can approximate some of her comic-book imagery without literally reproducing those powers.

Did that bother me?

Not particularly.

I had no previous version sitting in my head telling me what Kamala was supposed to look like. At the same time, I completely understand why comic readers might have been irritated. If a character’s abilities are part of what made you love that character, watching an adaptation replace them with something visually and conceptually different is going to feel like an unnecessary change.

The bigger eyebrow-raiser comes at the end of the series when Bruno tells Kamala there is something unusual about her genetics. He describes it as a mutation, and Marvel immediately accompanies the word with a very recognizable musical cue.

Okay, Marvel. We get it. The X-Men are coming.

That moment felt heavy-handed to me even in 2022. We already knew mutants were eventually going to become part of the MCU. Using Kamala as one of the first major breadcrumbs felt especially forced because the published comic version of the character had been established as an Inhuman. Marvel could point to ideas considered during the character’s early development, but audiences knew the Kamala who had actually existed in comics for years.

Changing that mythology mostly felt like another setup for something later.

And Marvel has developed a setup problem.

Marvel Has Introduced the Kids. Now What?

Kamala is hardly the only younger hero Marvel has brought into the post-Endgame MCU. Kate Bishop arrived through Hawkeye. America Chavez appeared in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Cassie Lang became more actively superheroic in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Riri Williams entered through Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Other younger characters have continued appearing across films and Disney+ series.

The obvious assumption is that Marvel has been positioning some combination of these characters for a younger superhero team, whether that eventually carries the Young Avengers name or takes another form.

I like that idea. I just wish Marvel would do it.

One of the problems with the MCU’s massive expansion after Endgame is that characters can be introduced and then disappear for years. Earlier Marvel phases usually had enough connective tissue that you knew where the larger story was heading even when individual films stood on their own. After Endgame, Marvel started throwing so many balls into the air that eventually I stopped expecting anyone to catch them.

That’s why the ending of The Marvels should excite me more than it does. Kamala approaches Kate Bishop and begins recruiting her in a scene deliberately reminiscent of Nick Fury approaching Tony Stark at the beginning of the MCU’s Avengers initiative. On paper, that’s fun. Kamala has gone from superhero fan to the person assembling superheroes herself.

But my reaction is basically: Are we actually doing this? Because I’ve been watching Marvel tease future projects for too long to assume every tease is going somewhere soon.

The Marvels Gives Kamala Somewhere to Go

I didn’t have the intense dislike for The Marvels that seemed to dominate conversation around the movie either. It obviously struggled commercially, but box-office performance and my personal enjoyment aren’t the same measurement. I’ve only seen it once, and I’ll admit that I didn’t completely remember why Carol, Monica Rambeau, and Kamala became connected until revisiting the mechanics of the story. Their light-based powers become entangled, causing them to switch places whenever they use their abilities.

That explains the plot connection. The emotional connection is a little murkier.

Monica has genuine history with Carol through her mother, Maria. Kamala has spent years idolizing Carol from afar. Carol barely knows Kamala when all of this begins. Those are three very different relationships, and I’m not sure the movie ever completely turns them into a trio that feels inevitable.

What helps is Kamala. Again.

Her excitement gives the movie energy because she is experiencing something she has imagined for years. Meeting Carol should be the greatest moment of her life. Instead, she discovers that superheroes are actual human beings carrying guilt, making mistakes, and sometimes failing spectacularly. That is a much more interesting development for Kamala than simply being told she gets to fight alongside her idol. The fan finally meets the hero. Then she has to learn the difference between loving the idea of somebody and knowing the person.

Marvel’s Problem Isn’t Kamala

If Ms. Marvel has a larger problem within the MCU, it isn’t the character. It’s the environment Marvel introduced her into.

There was a time when Marvel Studios seemed incapable of missing. Not every movie was equally good, but even the weaker entries felt connected to something larger that audiences were excited to follow. The studio built an extraordinary amount of trust. Then the content multiplied.

Movies were arriving alongside several Disney+ series, with new characters entering from every direction and post-credit scenes constantly promising something else. Eventually, keeping up with the MCU started feeling less like following an ongoing story and more like maintaining a syllabus.

I understand how Marvel got there. After the success of Endgame, ambition probably felt like the safest possible bet. Audiences had followed the franchise through more than a decade of increasingly enormous stories. Why wouldn’t Marvel assume they wanted even more?

But there’s a difference between expanding a universe and overloading it.

Characters like Kamala suffer when Marvel introduces them without maintaining enough momentum to make their next appearance feel inevitable. If Marvel wants her to help lead a younger generation of heroes, then let her do it. Don’t tease the team and then wait until Iman Vellani is old enough to play Kamala’s exhausted guidance counselor. Commit to the bit.

Let Kamala Be the Reason We Come Back

What I ultimately remember most about Ms. Marvel isn’t the cosmic mythology or the mutant tease. It isn’t even the question of whether Kamala eventually becomes part of whatever younger superhero team Marvel has been slowly assembling. It’s Iman Vellani.

She makes Kamala work because her enthusiasm feels authentic. She brings the same energy to a family argument that she brings to meeting superheroes, and that keeps Kamala grounded even when the plot becomes increasingly complicated. The early visual style reinforces that personality by allowing her imagination to reshape the world around her, and I wish the series had held onto more of that playfulness once the larger mythology took over.

Kamala doesn’t need to be valuable because she might someday connect us to the X-Men. She doesn’t need to justify her existence by assembling the Young Avengers. Those things could be fun, but they shouldn’t be the reason Marvel keeps her around. She already brings something worthwhile to the MCU. She gives us a superhero who started as a fan. She gives us a cultural and family perspective the franchise hadn’t explored before. Most importantly, she gives us a character played by someone who looks genuinely thrilled to be part of this universe.

That enthusiasm is contagious. Marvel just needs to make sure there’s still a universe worth being excited about.