*Spoilers.*
Things have been a bit all-or-nothing with Marvel this year. The first nine months of 2023 saw only two MCU movies and one show, but in the last month, we got The Marvels and season 2 of Loki, season 2 of What If…? is starting this week (multiversal Wenwu!), and Echo drops next month. I already have a backlog of topics to write about, and with the new stuff coming down the pipeline, there will be lots of Marvel content to discuss for the foreseeable future.
The point is, The Marvels gave me plenty to be excited about, including the relationships between our three heroines. I thought about doing a write-up for them all together, but I realized I had something to say about each duo within the trio. And in that case, the most delightful place to start is definitely with Kamala and Carol!
Kamala Khan is more than just a Captain Marvel fangirl. Arguably, she is the Captain Marvel fangirl. She’s a teen who is brimming with passion and creative daydream energy for her favorite superheroes, and Captain Marvel is far and away her most favorite. Not only is her entire bedroom basically wallpapered with memorabilia and fanart, and not only is her own secret identity, Ms. Marvel, inspired by her hero. But the moment when Kamala’s powers become entangled with Carol and Monica’s? She’s drawing a comic fanart in which she and Captain Marvel are superhero BFFs.
That’s the world that Carol crashes into when their entanglement causes them all to switch places, suddenly appearing in Kamala’s bedroom surrounded by lovingly rendered images of her own face. And that’s very much the energy Kamala brings to going on an unplanned superhero team-up. Yes, she’s amazed at being transported into space, thrilled at meeting Nick Fury, and horrified at seeing Goose unleash her tentacles. But when she switches back home and learns that Captain Marvel was there? It’s on a whole other level.
So Carol, who’s been doing the opposite of the team-up thing of late, taking calls from Nick but working on her own, is now in the position of collaborating with an excitable superfan who’s not the least bit shy about her hero worship. Kamala is a lot, and I don’t begrudge her her admiration, but I understand Carol’s wariness too. Apart from her more usual go-it-alone approach, the fight to stop Dar-Benn hits some deeply personal buttons for her, and it can’t be easy to have a starry-eyed teenage girl sighing, “You know my name,” and babbling apologies about copyright infringement re: their similar monikers.
Early in the adventure, there’s a sobering moment where the heroes are leading an evacuation of Skrulls off a planet that’s being ripped apart. As the last ships are about to leave, Carol realizes there’s no way they can get everyone off the planet, and when Kamala pushes back against that, Carol draws a line, bluntly telling her, “We save who we can.” It’s a harsh thing to hear for a teen superhero who wants nothing more than to help people, and it hurts even more coming from her idol. It’s an important exchange, because even though it doesn’t shake Kamala’s ultimate faith in Carol, it does help Kamala start to see her as more of a person and not just a hero. (Not that it’ll stop her from writing Captain Marvel fanfic, of course!)
At the same time, while Kamala’s ardor can be overpowering, it’s also good for Carol to be around someone who admires her so much at a time when she herself is getting pulled down by the weight of her past failures. As Carol presses forward, trying to right a colossal wrong, she’s affirmed by a budding superhero who believes the best in her.
And really, I just love seeing teenage superheroes interact with adult ones. The dynamic is always interesting, and for me, even though their relationship is wildly different, Kamala and Carol are up there with Miles and Peter B. Parker from Into the Spider-Verse. The mentorship is fun, and it’s cool to watch young heroes come into their own while finding commonalities with older, more experienced heroes, both making each other better through their influence.
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