Rish Shah says it took him 'a long time growing up to kind of accept that it's cool to be Indian or Pakistani or South Asian in general'. Disney+'s new series Ms. Marvel could change that for generations to come.
In the first episode, Kamala just wants to go to Avengers-Con with her best friend Bruno , which is like Comic-Con, but the MCU version focuses on The Avengers."For us, it was just a lot of fun to show the different kinds of perspectives of the Muslim experience, just like of all of us," executive producer and co-creator of Kamala's character Sana Amanat says.
"It's a very youthful, hopeful, colourful show that not only is going to speak to all the Muslims in the world, but also just you know, have a universal appeal and everybody that's even non-Muslim can relate can feel empathy for that and love that character," El Arbi says. Ms. Marvel is significant in that it will hopefully open doors for more of these stories to be told in nuanced and meaningful ways.
"I feel like that's kind of what Marvel does really well, is sort of say that any kind of person can be a superhero, and they kind of are just like any one of us and I think we're kind of at the beginning of that and the MCU," Amanat says. The show already has one famous fan in Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai, who wrote that it's "not every day that I turn on the TV and find a character who eats the same foods, listens to the same music or uses the same Urdu phrases as me."