‘Ms. Marvel’ Brings in Obscure Supervillain Family ClanDestine
Episode three of Ms. Marvel revealed a lot about the direction of the season. We learned that the side conversation about the mess left behind by the British occupation of India wasn’t just added in to sprinkle in some real-world history. The moment Kamala’s family broke up after the war, they left some secrets behind. This includes the lineage of a family that’s been mostly relegated to one-shots and were pretty obscure, until this recent introduction in Ms. Marvel on Disney+—in an episode named “Destined” might I add!
*** Spoilers for Ms. Marvel episodes 1-3 ***
The Clandestine (a.k.a. Clan Destine or Destines) is a family of supervillains. Introduced in the summer of 1994, they got their first solo issue by creator Alan Davis later that year. They’re a whole group with a rotating door depending on story need. (This is not a slight. All big families do this in comices, including found families like the X-Men.) However, there is a family hierarchy. The main two leaders of the family include the patriarch Adam and matriarch Elayth. In the show, if Najma (played by Nimra Bucha) isn’t lying, Kamala (Iman Vellani) is considered a descendant of them through her great-grandmother Aisha.
While Elayth is a very powerful djinn, she has no real origin because her story was written for Adam. Adam was born in a Saxon village in 1160s England. After Adam had a dream (which can only be described as Paul seeing Chani in Dune) about a beautiful woman, he traveled to join the crusades somewhere between the second and third waves. Then, he did some orientalist fantasy adventuring and freed her, where they fell in love. (That’s a yikes from me.) She gave him the power of immortality, and they’ve been having evil babies and traveling the world since. In 2008, Marvel released a loose ClanDestine family tree.
As the show stated, djinns are pre-Islamic beings of folklore (sometimes referred to as spirits) recognized in cultures across the Middle East and North Africa (a.k.a. MENA or Arab regions), and South Asia today. People who didn’t grow up with these stories probably recognize the other names like “marid,” “ifrit,” and “genie.” Genie became popularized by outside cultures when Antonine Galland did a French translation of (and added to) One Thousand and One Nights in the 1700s. The compilation of stories (700 BC) built on folklore from many places, similar to the way The Odyssey (700 BCE) and Brothers Grimm (1810s) did.
How does this play into Ms. Marvel’s comic changes?
In the comics, Ms. Marvel is a descendent of the Inhumans. When a Terrigen Mist is released into the atmosphere and activates the dormant Inhumans gene of some people on Earth, Kamala Khan is one of those people. To call the Inhumans’ introduction in the Marvel Cinematic Universe a disaster is an understatement. In addition to delays and reshoots, the show was universally panned. Between the Inhumans failure and the super late introduction of Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel is put in a weird place.
In the show, she has the powers in her, and an external force activates them, but the actual details are very different. In addition to how Kamala gets her powers, the powers themselves are changed. Instead of the power of “embiggening,” she has energy power that can mimic aspects of this and do much more, in theory, considering how it mirrors both Photon (Monica Rambeau) and Captain Marvel. Needless to say, these changes, and the introduction of ClanDestine, are a very big shift from the comics lore that will have major ramifications moving forward.
(featured image: Disney+)
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