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Eurogamer: Avengers' Kamala Khan is this year's most important hero

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Mandalorian

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Avengers' Kamala Khan is this year's most important hero

We'll have our review of Marvel's Avengers up over the next few days, but before that we wanted to get some perspective…
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We'll have our review of Marvel's Avengers up over the next few days, but before that we wanted to get some perspective on the representation the campaign brings from someone who really knows the Marvel universe.

When it comes to superheroes, for the majority of people the immediate characters that always come to mind are the classics such as Superman, Iron Man, Captain America and the like. Sadly it's rare that a superhero who isn't a straight white male will ever be mentioned. However, the team at Crystal Dynamics decided that they're going to flip the script when it comes to Marvel's Avengers. Despite this being an Avengers game, not a single one of them is truly the lead in the campaign. The hero of this story is Kamala Khan, a.k.a Ms Marvel, the first Muslim American-Pakistani hero in the Marvel universe - making this game pretty huge for Muslims around the world, including myself.

Representation is something that people of colour and folks from different faiths have been wanting in video games for as long as I can remember. It's something that we've started to slowly see an increase of in recent years with the likes of Overwatch adding Ana Amari, an Egyptian character who wears a hijab, and even Call of Duty: Modern Warfare attempted to break away from its stereotypical representation of Arabs and Muslims by letting you play an Arab soldier called Farrah in the singleplayer campaign.

However, we've never really had a triple-A game where being Muslim was a core part of a lead character, so when I started playing the campaign of Marvel Avengers, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Kamala Khan wasn't just a side character to the Avengers, in fact it was quite the opposite! The Avengers were the side characters to Kamala Khan's story. This was very much a Ms. Marvel story.
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When I go about my day-to-day life, being Algerian and Muslim isn't at the forefront of who I am. Yes, it's an important part of who I am, but I'm also a guy who grew up in Birmingham hating the brummie accent, who goes to the cinema with friends to watch the latest Marvel movie, someone who plays music in his spare time, someone who creates videos and writes about video games for a living, and someone who once won the Mr Happy award at his school prom. With Kamala Khan in Marvel's Avengers she's a Muslim girl who loves the Avengers, enjoys fast-food, is just a hugely happy and positive force and someone who just wants to do good. That's the kind of representation that makes people like myself feel seen and feel included because it feels real and authentic. It makes people like me feel like we're a part of this world rather than an outsider.

When Kamala Khan was first introduced in the comics she was a window into the American Muslim experience. She represented an entire generation of children who came from immigrant parents and who are a part of the post-9/11 generation. "Good is not a thing you are, it's a thing you do." That phrase from Kamala Khan is something that resonates with me a lot and will resonate with a lot of Muslim kids from that generation, especially after years and years of being demonised and being tarnished with the same brush. After seeing anything Arabic or Islamic again and again in films, TV, and games being equated to being bad or barbaric.

Not only is Kamala Khan out here representing us, but that window into the American Muslim experience in Marvel's Avengers is also bringing that representation to people who aren't Muslim or from immigrant families and giving them a small glimpse into that life when they take on the role of Ms. Marvel in the campaign.

Marvel's Avengers has its issues - outside of the narrative experience it's actually pretty janky, to say the least. But the campaign itself and most importantly the portrayal of Kamala Khan is what makes this title one of the most important games to represent Muslims who were brought up in Western societies.
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I wholeheartedly agree this. I am not Muslim. I am a Brazilian PoC that knows exactly what it means being poorly represented in the mainstream media, and I can't stress enough how much of a powerful character Ms. Marvel aka Kamala Khan is. And I am not talking just about power levels, although she is pretty powerful in the game. I'm talking about how precious her character arc is, how important and bold it is that they have made Kamala not just one of the Avengers, but the heart of this story and, well, this iteration of the Avengers. We can discuss power levels, Metacritic scores and GOTY lists all day, but trust me on this one: I'm happy to know that one of my favorite games of the year features a Muslim girl that reminds a lot of myself growing up, a nerd just trying to do good because that is the right thing to do, regardless how corny that is.



Representation matters.
 
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