Portrayed by: Iman Vellani
Appearances: Ms. Marvel Season 1 (2022), Nia DaCosta’s The Marvels (2023)
Superhero stories are a dominant force in the pop culture landscape, and with that, of course, comes an abundance of different heroes. Fans find themselves relating to these beloved super-powered characters for a multitude of reasons, but perhaps no hero has ever been quite as relatable as Kamala Khan.
Also known by her superhero moniker, Ms. Marvel, Kamala is a Pakistani-American teenager living in Jersey City. She was first introduced to the world in Marvel’s comic series in 2013 and then headlined her solo series in 2014. She made the jump to the small screen in the summer of 2022 as the star of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s streaming series, Ms. Marvel. Shortly thereafter, Kamala had her feature film debut in 2023’s Captain Marvel sequel, The Marvels.
Kamala Khan and Her Relatability
I mentioned that Kamala is a relatable character, and it’s because, just like pretty much anyone who actively enjoys superhero comics, movies, and TV shows, she’s a fangirl first. (In what many consider to be the best actor-to-character synergy since Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Tony Stark/Iron Man, Iman Vellani, the Pakistani-Canadian actress/writer who plays Kamala in the MCU and has so far penned two miniseries for Ms. Marvel in the comics, is perhaps an even bigger fangirl in real life than her superhero counterpart.)
Kamala has so far only had two opportunities to leave her mark on the MCU — but what an impression she’s made.
Kamala is known for her boundless enthusiasm, her remarkable empathy, her endless creativity, her innate sense of justice — and her obsessive love of Captain Marvel. She’s supported by a loving, if a little overbearing, family, made up of her mother, Muneeba, her father, Yusuf, and her older brother, Aamir. She has strong bonds with her best friends and fellow classmates Bruno Carrelli and Nakia Bahadir, and she’s a cherished member of the Pakistani and Muslim communities in Jersey City.
From her first minute on screen in Ms. Marvel, she reenacts the events of the Avengers: Endgame final battle, using paper cutouts and voiceover commentary, set to the tune of The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights.” With this, Kamala is immediately loveable, hilarious, and real. It’s no surprise, then, that she’s already become immensely popular amongst the fan base in her short time in this franchise.
In her series, Kamala starts as a good ‘ol “regular teen” before coming across a family heirloom — an ornate bangle — that unlocks her latent superhuman trait, which is the ability to create and manipulate “Hard Light” constructs for various different practical purposes (platform jumping is a particularly fun feature in her arsenal). Over the course of the six-episode series, on the path to becoming a hero in her own right, Kamala Khan also learns to embrace her community and heritage. This comes together beautifully in a moment in the penultimate episode, where she ends up stuck in the past (don’t ask!) and has to save her own maternal grandmother during the 1947 Partition of India.
By the end of the Ms. Marvel series, Kamala Khan has learned to control her powers (a staple of the superhero origin story), successfully repaired her strained relationship with her mother, and gained a greater appreciation of her family’s history. She does all this while maintaining her innate sense of self — powers or not. She’s also still an earnest fangirl at heart and always will be.
A Thoughtful Costume and Her Name
This brings together the disparate threads of Kamala’s life, which are captured quite literally in her final superhero costume, an outfit whose components are slowly gathered during her series from different facets of her life. Her mother sews the costume together, her best friend Bruno makes her the mask, and her left wrist is adorned by the ancient bangle that first came from her great-grandmother Aisha. Her Pakistani superhero compatriots, the Red Daggers, whom she meets in Episode 4 on a trip to Karachi, supply the red scarf she wears and provide the inspiration for her costume’s teal-and-red color scheme. Her signature lightning bolt symbol on the front of her costume comes from a necklace she wears with her name written in Arabic. Even a staple of her Jersey City wardrobe, her red Converse sneakers are incorporated into her costume to complete the look.
To round it all out, her father, Yusuf, gives Kamala the idea for her superhero name. The origin of her name, “Kamal,” loosely translates to “wonder” or “marvel” in her family’s native Urdu, and Kamala adopts the Ms. Marvel moniker in perhaps the most poignant moment in the entire series, taking place at the end of the finale. “I share the same name as Carol fricking Danvers?!” Kamala asks Yusuf excitedly, to which Yusuf replies, chuckling, “I don’t know who that is.” but then tenderly assures Kamala that, “You sure are, and always have been, our own little Ms. Marvel.” In both name and attire, the superhero known as Ms. Marvel is the product of the loving community that surrounds her.
Where Her Journey Continues
In The Marvels, set shortly after the events of her series, Kamala Khan is unexpectedly thrust into working as a team with two reluctant players — her favorite superhero of all time, Captain-frickin-Danvers herself, and Carol’s estranged niece, astronaut Monica Rambeau, who’s acquired superpowers in her own right (see 2021’s WandaVision).
The trio’s light-based powers are inadvertently entangled at the film’s start, meaning they switch places whenever they use them simultaneously. This, of course, sets off a series of planet-hopping misadventures for the unlikely team, who go by the name “the Marvels” — coined by none other than Kamala herself — that ultimately ends in the defeat of Dar-Benn, the alien Kree villain with a vendetta to steal resources from planets Carol cares about in order to save her home world, Hala.
More importantly, though, this shared experience results in each of these three women learning something valuable from each other. Carol, the most powerful superhero in the galaxy, learns how to work with a team and how to relinquish the need to shoulder the burden of the entire universe herself. Monica learns to embrace her powers (up until now, she’s used them in a purely academic sense, never heroically), and she also finally reconciles with Carol after enduring a decades-long strife with the woman who abandoned her and her mother, the late Maria Rambeau, for the rest of the galaxy back in 1995.
And as for what Kamala Khan learns? Well, her arc deserves a little more attention — she is the focus of this deep-dive, after all.
At the start of this movie, of the three Marvels, Kamala is the most eager and idealistic about heroism. Carol is weary and disillusioned, and Monica has never had an interest in functioning as a typical “superhero,” preferring instead to use her powers for research and scientific advancement. Kamala, by comparison, is a somewhat newly-minted hero, and she’s still very much psyched about it. However, she’s also understandably naive about the more unsavory realities of the hero gig (she is just a teenager).
Back in Ms. Marvel Episode 3, Kamala resisted Bruno’s observation that “Maybe it’s a good thing you’re not her” when they were discussing Captain Marvel’s hypothetical hero approach to a particular situation. However, after meeting and then teaming up with both Carol and Monica, Kamala can now fully comprehend the accuracy of Bruno’s prior statement. She’s now experienced the benefits of three unique people working together to accomplish something that wouldn’t have been possible if any of them were trying to be something they weren’t, and, as a result, she ends the movie reaffirming her individuality as a hero, while also aspiring for more collaborations in the future. (The final scene is Kamala recruiting fellow “young” hero, Kate Bishop, from 2021’s Hawkeye series, to form something of a team themselves — the Young Avengers, perhaps?…)
What I find so utterly remarkable about Kamala, as shown in this movie, is how she manages to be so steadfast in her hero status, even in the face of the more powerful heroes and literal intergalactic threats, while also maintaining her boundless enthusiasm and remarkable empathy. She expertly avoids falling into the trappings of the archetypical overeager teen in a movie full of adult heroes, instead proving that while yes, being excited about being in the presence of her icons is part of who Kamala fundamentally is as a person, there’s far more to her than just being a fangirl.
She stands her ground with the literal most powerful person in the universe when she and Carol disagree about how to approach an evacuation effort on the Skrull refugee planet Tarnax, but she also still trips over her words when getting to shake Carol’s hand for the first time. She initiates a hug with Monica after learning about the loss of her mother, encouraging the closed-off Carol to then join the embrace, but she also constantly peppers her reluctant teammate with dozens of ideas for a suitable superhero moniker of her own.
She watches Dar-Benn get blown up when attempting to use two ancient artifacts together — one of which is Kamala’s great-grandmother’s bangle — but then doesn’t hesitate to wear them both herself, trusting that her heritage and her connection to an otherworldly dimension make her the best person for the job. “These bangles traveled through space and time to find me. I was born for this,” she tells Carol with a radiant, confident smile in the climax of the movie. She then whispers “Bismillah” (Arabic for “in the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful”) before confidently bringing the two bangles together, and it’s perhaps her best moment in the movie.
Kamala Khan contains multitudes, as evidenced in both her show and The Marvels, and we love her for that. It’s also what makes her someone we can understand because who among us hasn’t aspired to be known for being more than one thing, for possessing more than one defining trait? Don’t we all, just like Kamala, hope to be regarded as the beautiful, multifaceted, complex beings that we know ourselves to be?
What could be more relatable than that?
First Featured Image Credit: ©Marvel Studios