Why Ms. Marvel's New Powers Were Made Purple Revealed
Canonically within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) doesn't have her trademark stretchy powers. In lieu of her hallmark look, Ms. Marvel instead gave Kamala access to a Green Lantern-esque powerset that allowed her to make hard light constructs.
The powers manifested in a bright purple huge, largely because of the powers of other heroes in the franchise. If you were hoping there was a secret reason for the purple powers, don't hold your breath—one VFX worker tells us Kamala's powers were colored purple just to set her apart from the rest.
"I think it's a little bit difficult in this day and age, with the number of heroes there are, to have something unique," Digital Domain's Dave Cunningham tells us. "And I think you've got Captain Marvel's sort of orange. Scarlet Witch has got red. The sort of bluey pink sort of purple-ly hues, I think kind of treaded that line nicely, to have something that's a little bit more distinct than any of the other heroes that we'd seen so far. And there's also, you're pulling that blue in that red from her costume and from Captain Marvel's costume, who she idolizes, so I think bringing all those in together has that nice meld of not just her influences, but the bangle as well."
As far as how the powers look, Cunningham says he and his colleagues turn to prisms and how water refracts light to land on the perfect hard light look.
"You look at a lot of different things, like refraction and caustics, how light bounces around through water and how it reflects and refracts, crystalline structures themselves," the filmmaker adds of references. "The difficult thing was finding the right balance between what is light and what is solid and crystalline in structure. So that's always an iterative process with the client to put multiple things together and try to hit that thing that makes something feel like it's made of light, but is also still tangible."
The first season of Ms. Marvel is now streaming on Disney+.
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