Headscratchers / Captain Marvel (Marvel Comics)

• So I've been wondering: When Carol powers down from her Ms. Marvel / Warbird / Captain Marvel form, does she still have her powers, or is she a normal human until she powers up again? I've been wondering about that for a long time. In The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, she still seemed to have her powers (when she blew up the toothpick Hawkeye threw at her), but I'm not sure if that applies for other continuities.
  • Yeah she's always got her powers. The suit is just that. A suit.
  • This was discussed in the original comic book. In the beginning, Carol Danvers thought that she turned into Ms. Marvel, a completely unrelated woman, somehow created by the Kree accident. She later discovered that she still had her super powers as Carol Danvers, and accepted that she is Ms. Marvel. The accident had left her with a temporary personality disorder as well, wich was fixed when she embraced the truth about herself.
• Rogue's attack wiped Ms. Marvel memory, and Xavier later restored it, but was unable to restore as well her emotional ties to those memories. Things have been that way for a long time. Eventually, she met the terrorist leader that she fought in her first mission for the military (before she even got powers), and she finally recovered those emotional ties. But only for a couple of minutes: she exploded and died. Karla Sofen becomes the new Ms. Marvel (during Dark Reign), there is a complicated resurrection story for Carol, and the new issues dealt with her time with the runaway Avengers. But what about this? Did she kept those emotional ties with her past, or do later writers forgot that small scene?
• The retcon of Carol's mother into being a Kree kind of falls apart when you think about it: why would Mari-Ell, a Kree champion — the youngest captain ever in the Elite Guard, in fact — fall in love with Joe Danvers, a Puny Earthling who is also well-established as a misogynistic drunk? Even if she did find humans attractive, she could have done so much better for herself that it's not funny. The Doylist explanation is obvious; it was an attempt to amp up Carol's "girl power!" elements by retconning away her origin as an In-Universe "knock-off" of Captain Marvel, emphasizing her specialness over her (now half-)brothers (who had always been depicted as less capable but more favored by their father), and associating her specialness entirely with her mother; the superpowered champion of an alien empress. But from the Watsonian perspective? It falls apart.
• Why was Genis omnipotent? Mar-Vell certainly wasn't. There's a bit of a handwave that Genis had his half-Eternal mojo in addition to Mar-Vell's cosmic awareness, but that would hardly seem to explain the power to murder cosmic beings like Eon and Eternity himself. And why did he appear to no longer be omnipotent once he regained his sanity?
  • Marvel Characters becoming more powerful when they get insane was nothing new. "Mad" is sometimes incorrectly but understandably uses as a synonym for "anger" because anger kind of is temporary insanity. Your brain literally will rebel against itself if it stays angry for an extended period of time and oh right, "You're making Hulk mad, and the madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets!" More directly, Thor has his infamous "Warrior Madness" that let him brush aside Silver Surfer, who is usually depicted as slightly more powerful than Thor, with little difficulty, even drawing a little blood from Thanos before being restrained. Ego The Living Planet became a cosmic wrecking ball the likes of which he had never before been when he went insane. Not to the same extremes as Genis-Vell, but there was precedent for it.