Improving Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan)


 This character was created solely to push Islam as a religion of peace even though it isn't. I haven't read these yet and I will review the second book later, but check out these books by Robert Spencer, who is an expert on Islam; The Truth about Muhammad and The Complete Infidel's guide to the Koran. All of these contain truths about Islam and the hateful ideology that it actually is. With that out of the way, we'll obviously take the Muslim part of this character as a defining trait or at least start her out as religiously neutral. We'll take both of these premises to try to make an interesting character that most people can like.

Religious origin 1 - Muslim Family
Kamala is a girl caught between Western values and Islamic ones. Her family pushes their faith onto her for "her own good", but because of the things she hears happening in the Middle East, she researches deeper into her faith, filters through the misinformation and facts and finds that her faith is rooted in a pedophile and warlord. Once she gets her powers, she goes over to the Islamic states and see's that she's correct as she witnesses the oppression and killing of non-Muslims such as Christians who are always under attack. She shows her family this and they either lose their faith or become one of her villains she has to face. From here, her faith switches to; Christian, Jew, or just spiritually neutral and later learns how to bridge gaps between the faiths while filtering out the bad ones.

Religious origin 2 - Neutral
Being brought up in a world where religion is being confused, misrepresented, and thought to be the source of violence and logical stagnation, Kamala get interested in faith. She does her own research, but she's still somewhat confused so when she gets her powers, so once she gets her power, she observes the actions of the people of every faith to see which is correct. She'll even get to talk to heroes who have faith like Captain America, Daredevil, and Ghost Rider and other heroes who have lost faith, but still have some sort of it like the Punisher. After doing all this, she does the same thing as the previous state in the end.

How she got her powers is the same and one of the reasons why she looks for a faith to believe in since the reason she got her powers is unexplained and is like a miracle to her. Her fan girl personality can stay the same and so can her outfit, however, she thinks about morality differently. Morality to her is objective since it has to be grounded in a solid foundation so that it can never change and because morals are discovered not made up. This would also be a reason for her to believe in a God.

As far as her heroics go, she tries to team up with her favorite heroes in at least her first arc while imitating them with her disguise power. This gets her into trouble with each heroes biggest villain(s) and she gets beaten every time. She later learns the value of being your own person and fighting her own unique villains to help in places that her favorite heroes cannot help in. This would be at least a little more than half of the series' content despite the religious themes that re integral to her character.

The reason she is a faith based character is to talk about real world religions (as was the original intention) while also delivering a fun and thoughtful comic book experience. Her series could do both and become a great comic book series because of it.

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