Favorite Characters: Steven Grant (Moon Knight)

*Spoilers.*

I often like to alternate Marvelous Wednesday posts about various MCU franchises, and while Multiverse of Madness wasn’t a winner for me, there are aspects of it, both good and not-so-good, that I want to talk about. But not right now. After posting my initial Moon Knight review a couple weeks ago, I have so many more thoughts on the show and may or may not ride this wave until it’s time to talk about Ms. Marvel and Thor: Love and Thunder. And as we settle into some Moon Knight posts, who better to start with than one Steven Grant?

Steven is our window into the wildness of Moon Knight, which I love. I’m very much a novice on the subject of DID, but I know that it’s not cool in DID circles to think of a system in terms of “the original” and “the alter(s).” Rather, everyone in the system is an alter, everyone is valid, and everyone is a whole person. And after the time we spend with Steven in the first couple of episodes before seeing Marc take the reins for more of episode 3, it’s clear that the show in no way views Steven as lesser than Marc.

Day-to-day, ordinary-life Steven has a hard time of it. He languishes in the gift shop of the National Gallery when he has the knowhow and heart of an Egyptologist. He’s excited for a date he doesn’t remember making with a coworker, but then he inadvertently stands her up when he loses time. He doesn’t realize that his “sleepwalking”-prevention measures are useless because he’s not actually sleepwalking—the body is instead being used by another identity he doesn’t know about after he goes to bed.

Realizing that he’s not the only person in his head is a rude enough awakening. Sweet, slightly-awkward, mild-mannered Steven, with a somewhat wonky but very earnest British accent, occupies the same body as a close-to-the-vest American mercenary named Marc. Steven doesn’t even eat meat; how’s he supposed to deal with the fact that his hands are the same ones Marc has used to kill people?

But that’s not all. Those freaky “hallucinations” he’s been having? That’s actually the Egyptian god Khonshu. Unbeknownst to Steven, Marc offered up their body to the god of the moon as recompense for Khonshu saving his life. As part of their service to Khonshu, they can summon a special suit that grants them enhanced abilities.

This is all a lot, and it’s understandable that Steven is freaked out by it. But even though he finds out that he’s sharing his head with a mercenary indebted to an Egyptian god who keeps calling Steven an idiot, Steven still manages to assert himself amid all that upheaval. In combatting Harrow’s plan to pass judgment across the human race by resurrecting the goddess Ammit, Steven’s knowledge of ancient Egypt is invaluable. More than once, Steven refuses to surrender the body to Marc in a dangerous situation because he’s afraid Marc will hurt someone.

I like that, on the superhero actiony side of things, Steven is just so Joe Ordinary. Marvel has had other heroes who tend more towards regular-guy personas, like Scott Lang or Xu Shang-Chi, but Steven sometimes feels more like that hero’s best friend who’s astounded/freaked by everything that’s going on. This guy doesn’t know how to belay down into a hidden tomb, and his first instinct is to hide rather than fight. And yet, he’s there. He stays in it, and when things get hairy, his immediate thought is usually to help. Steven has an enormous heart that wants things to be better for people, and he puts himself into all manner of dangerous situations to try to help Marc and Layla stop Harrow.

There’s a moment late in the series when Marc is in dire straits and Steven realizes that the way to step up and help him is channel his “inner Marc,” so to speak. At this point, he’s recently learned that he’s not the “original,” as unhelpful as that term is, and that he in fact appears to be a fictive (an alter who shares some or all traits/history with a fictional character.) But even when Steven unleashes his inner Marc and fights the unbalanced souls trying to claim them, he remains undeniably Steven, giving Marc a thumbs-up and making silly asides about cricket as he fights. When, at the end of that episode, it looks like he may be lost forever (spoiler alert: it turns out okay! Marc saves him!), I defy anyone to say that Steven isn’t “real” in the same way Marc is.