Relationship Spotlight: Monica Rambeau & Kamala Khan (The Marvels)

It’s been a little while since I last talked about The Marvels, but I wanted to swing back around and look at the Kamala-Monica relationship. While not as intense as Carol-Kamala or Monica-Carol, this third major relationship within the central trio is important as well.

Carol looms large in the film, for obvious reasons. On a meta level, this film is a team sequel of her initial solo movie. Undoubtedly, she’s the most powerful of the three, the most experienced (with both superheroing and space travel,) and she’s the one who fought against Thanos. And on a personal level, she has an important, painful history with Monica and is voraciously hero-worshipped by Kamala. She takes up a lot of space in the movie, and that includes her relationships with the other two.

For better or worse, both Monica and Kamala are kind of orbiting Carol, and with the baggage that they bring, they both spend a good chunk of the movie not getting everything they want out of their interactions with her. You have Monica, who straight-up doesn’t want to deal with Carol at all, meanwhile Kamala’s sky-high fangirl expectations could never be met by an actual person, no matter how great they are. And when Carol doesn’t or can’t live up to what they want her to be, that’s where they have each other.

If Monica views Carol as a family member who let her down, and Kamala views Carol as an unattainable hero, they’re able to view one another in a more measured light. They aren’t bringing the same expectations, and so they’re better able to relate to one another as people. Their relationship has a bit more of an older/younger sister flavor. Monica sees how passionate Kamala is and how badly she wants to help, and she gives the younger hero space to do that while also looking out for her. And Kamala sees Monica for the kickass hero she is, but without the same starry-eyed adoration she has for Carol, she doesn’t get as giddy and tongue-tied. Their relationship is born, at least in part, out of needing someone to turn to when they have difficult moments with Carol.

It’s always interesting like this, when you have relationships between three characters and one of them is the bigger focal point. In these cases, the interactions between the other two will always be somewhat in reaction to their feelings about the first character, but even though the presence of that first character will inevitably inform their relationship, the other two characters still ultimately decide what to make of it.

And as the movie goes on, Monica and Kamala become friends and allies. Monica digs deep to use her powers in a brand-new way to save Kamala when an untimely switch puts her in grave danger. They learn to work and fight together in cool, inventive ways. They take in the wildness around them together—especially on Aladna, where Monica teases Kamala about writing Captain Marvel fanfic. And through their growing bond with each other, they’re both able to get to a place where they’re able to connect with Carol without all the baggage that was getting in the way before.

Neurodivergent (Headcanon) Alley: Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel)

*Kamala-related spoilers.*

As I said with my post on Peter Parker, to some extent this characterization could just be chalked up to the portrayal of a teenage superhero trying to juggle everything they have to deal with; it’s tough having to make life-or-death decisions when your brain isn’t fully developed yet. And that’s fair. But on the other hand, Kamala Khan just radiates ADHD.

At the start of her series, Kamala is such a “daydreamer” that she’s sent to the school counselor for a let’s-get-serious-about-your-future talk. It’s hard for her to focus on her schoolwork, or on what she’s supposed to do at home, or on her driving test, because she’s wildly imaginative. When it comes to something she really loves—namely, superheroes—she can hyperfocus almost indefinitely. Captain Marvel is her biggest love, and she’ll run out of wall space long before her well of fanart runs dry. But she also maintains a YouTube channel, consumes whatever Avengers-related news she can find, and obsesses over finding the perfect finishing touch for her Captain Marvel cosplay. I love how the show makes her thoughts visible at times, drawing her flights of fancy in the air around her.

When it comes to neurodivergent coding, there’s an important distinction between Kamala and MCU Peter: we meet her before she becomes a superhero, and these traits are already firmly in place. She doesn’t seem easily distracted and flaky because she’s hiding a double life. Rather, she’s already having a hard time regulating her focus and easily gets lost in her imagination, and when the superpowers kick in, that just makes it even harder.

(Side note: Not that I don’t think Peter is ADHD, of course. I’m just pointing out how their introductions play out differently.)

Naturally, Kamala is thrilled when the bangle activates her powers—to quote Rebecca Bunch, I think it’s fair to say she feels “like glitter is exploding inside [her].” But being a superhero is a lot of work, and it takes her a while to find her footing. She bungles one of her earliest saves, rescuing a boy from falling out the window of the mosque but accidentally dropping him before they reach the ground. Her attempts to stay on top of both superheroics and her home life are tricky, and she gets in trouble more than once because she doesn’t turn up when she says she will.

Kamala frequently thinks she can handle everything and then scrambles when that doesn’t turn out to be the case. A great early example of this is her ambitious, multi-pronged plan to sneak out to AvengerCon. She has details galore and has worked out how everything is supposed to go, timing each phase down to the minute (which is important, since they have a bus to catch.) But she underestimates how long basically everything will take—hello, ADHD time blindness!—she overlooks important factors, and she and Bruno’s trip to the con is far more touch-and-go than she anticipates.

All that said, Kamala’s creativity remains a force to be reckoned with, especially as she learns to pair it with her work as a hero. She makes mistakes and is hard on herself for them, but she’s also pretty indomitable and keeps popping back up, figuring out new ways to make it work. She has an incredibly caring heart, loves to explore, and wants nothing more than to do well and help people.

Relationship Spotlight: Carol Danvers & Kamala Khan (The Marvels)

*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.