In reply to Chuck.

I'm especially glad I pointed it out then!

I've felt rather impressed with the "4D chess" that the MCU team between Ms. Marvel and The Marvels had to play with Ms. Marvel's origin story. If you'll pardon too many paragraphs of excitement about it:

I got in some interesting debates about it back when the show was first airing and made some predictions about The Marvels that I think ultimately played out at least as well as I had hoped. Our current Ms. Marvel is still delightfully young in comics epochs and so hasn't had her origin story retold or re-sanded anywhere near as much as most other Marvel characters. Especially compared to Captain Marvel's multiple retcons (including the original useless male ones that were just around to keep Shazam from reclaiming the trademark) and Monica Rambeau going through nearly every superhero nickname under the sky for both trademark reasons and reasons that none of them particularly felt right and reasons that even her powers were constantly reset/rebuilt/recreated. (I appreciated that as a in-joke that most if not all of the nicknames Ms. Marvel throws at Captain Rambeau are indeed ones that one version or another of her in comics used at some point. The character has a weird comics legacy of "too many superhero, most didn't stick". Even today's "Photon" seems to have stuck around in comics for the longest, but there doesn't seem a guarantee about that either.)

So, of course there was a ton of criticism that Ms. Marvel's origin story changed in the MCU because it didn't have a history of ten different subtly contradictory forms in comics to argue about, she just had the one origin in recent enough people that nerds remember it to firm detail. But her origin was good for comics at the time but terrible for the MCU: she was an Inhuman from a period in comics where that mattered and seemed to be going where. That tied her easily to the Kree easily via Terrigen making the cross-over between New Jersey "street level hero" and Cosmic (Captain) Marvel Teams somewhat easily.

Meanwhile, the MCU already whiffed and failed trying to make Inhumans exciting to audiences which either mostly never came to watch the efforts (the Inhuman seasons of Agents of SHIELD) or just absolutely didn't like them (the Inhumans show) and the MCU just finally got the go ahead rights to finally use the "m-word", so recasting Ms. Marvel as a Mutant makes a ton of sense (and was the original plan for the comics character before big cross-over events made an Inhuman origin make more sense in that storytelling context), but they wanted to still capture a Kree element to give her something surprisingly tangential connection to Captain Marvel (and Captain Rambeau) and I still think the bangle was such an interesting MacGuffin to invent to do that. Ms. Marvel in the comics was always iconically wearing a similar bangle, it just wasn't a MacGuffin yet. It is exactly the sort of MacGuffin tech that the Kree would invent and then lose. It was a creative place to deepen the weird Kree interventions in human history with the Djinn that I find more inventive than Terrigen/Terrigen Mists/Inhumans especially because it was intentionally less "Western" (European/American) than most such "deep history retcons" tend to be, while also not feeling appropriative (especially with the diverse writers room and directors bench of Ms. Marvel's TV show).

I agreed at the time, and still agree, that she shouldn't need the bangle for most of her regular powers (the time travel episodes in her show being clearly irregular), and I think the TV tried to imply but wasn't great at it (other than the explicit usage of the word Mutant in its finale) that the bangle was merely "training wheels" for inherent powers. A cosmic-scale "infinity stone level" MacGuffin is a heck of a set of training wheels, and I think such a neat twist on Ms. Marvel, especially because how "quiet" it has seemed as a character arc so far. It's a bit like if Star Lord spent most of the first Guardians of the Galaxy film just wearing the Power stone, after snatching it in the opening, on a necklace as bling for a while, with just about no one realizing that it meant he probably had demi-god levels of natural powers if not lineage of some sort (as Volume 2 pointed the finger at Ego). That's a real easy comparison to make given how much The Marvels owes to GotG Volume 1 in terms of villain construction at least, with a second, lesser Accuser, but yet I think The Marvels is intentionally well crafted enough that even with the obvious parallels the lesser ones like "Ms. Marvel is just wearing one of the bangles the entire film (and most of her show) like no big deal where the villain is clearly struggling with its power the whole time and building contraptions and plotting schemes to keep from killing themselves with said power, constantly taking it off and only wearing it for necessity" is so interestingly right there. Captain Marvel is intentionally one of the most overpowered characters in all of Marvel Comics and the MCU justified it by making it very explicit she's a literal avatar of the Cosmic Cube/Cosmic Infinity Stone. It makes sense that even the "New Jersey kid" that idolized her and intends to have would have a similar power level to keep up and "uses Cosmic Cube-like bangles as training wheels and barely realizes exactly how much power is around her wrists" is such a fascinating place to go with that. I don't know anything else about what the story teams under Kevin Feige are planning for Ms. Marvel as a character, but I love that setup for Ms. Marvel.

That's also the fun thing about Ms. Marvel being such a young character both figuratively and literally in that her first origin story was within recent memory (despite having to fight the negativity and criticisms of that) and only her second edition of her origin story is just now playing out in the MCU: this is a character whose eventual future is nowhere near paved in stone. We know too much about Spider-Man marriages (and deals with a Devil divorces, for that matter), even across many of the reboots in the Spider-Verse. (Surprise: Spider-Man usually grows up and tries and fails to be a respectable adult.) We know so little about where Ms. Marvel can/will go and this version of Ms. Marvel is now relatively unique to the MCU so we especially don't know and it can be so exciting to follow a new or young character in comics grow into their own, including figuring out their powers behind the audiences that are paying attention to foreshadowing, but here's a chance to do that in the movies, one of the few chances ever, certainly a first in a leading/title role in the MCU.

I suppose I find that way too exciting that I feel a need to ramble too many paragraphs about it. Ms. Marvel probably is the character I'm most excited about in this Phase of the MCU and future ones.