Marvel Studios' Moon Knight

Premiering on March 30th:

The series follows Steven Grant, a mild-mannered gift-shop employee, who becomes plagued with blackouts and memories of another life. Steven discovers he has dissociative identity disorder and shares a body with mercenary Marc Spector. As Steven/Marc’s enemies converge upon them, they must navigate their complex identities while thrust into a deadly mystery among the powerful gods of Egypt.

Moon Knight stars Oscar Isaac, Ethan Hawke and May Calamawy. Mohamed Diab and the team of Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead directed the episodes. Jeremy Slater is the head writer, and Kevin Feige, Louis D’Esposito, Victoria Alonso, Brad Winderbaum, Mohamed Diab, Jeremy Slater and Oscar Isaac are the executive producers. Grant Curtis, Trevor Waterson and Rebecca Kirsch serve as co-executive producers.

As someone unfamiliar with the character. Is there any who could explain his deal to me? I looked it up but that strangely only made it more confusing.

Okay so Steven Grant and Marc Spector are confirmed.

All thats left is the Jake Lockley persona.

They’ve been discussing him pretty extensively in the last few pages of the main MCU thread.

Edited by EmeraldEmperor on Jan 17th 2022 at 8:35:28 AM

Well, at least we know what that accent is supposed to be.

Dude's deal is, basically, madness. Is what's happening real? Many personalities, he might or might not be blessed by a moon god. That's the basics.

Oh I haven't been there in awhile let me check it out.

Edited by Bullman on Jan 17th 2022 at 10:39:58 AM

"I'm not real" is like his catchphrase or at least sums him up perfectly.

I wonder if we'll get, like, a scene where he rips through a bunch of monster and then we cut to outside perspective and only half of the bodies are actually monsters.

Please no. There’s little good way for this show to not be misrepresentative of people with DID, but they could at least avoid plunging all the way into “having DID makes you a violent murderer”.

It's more schizophrenia in that example, but it'll be hard to avoid some dodgy stuff since Moon Knight involves a lot of madness and violence.

He did use to be an amoral mercenary.

The easiest way to avoid that sort of thing is just to establish that Marc Spector was always a violent killer who then met an Egyptian god and developed DID.

Even if you strip all that away, Spector is the kind of guy who murdered people for the CIA and blew his brother up with a hand grenade before he ever went to the Sudan.

Edited by ArthurEld on Jan 17th 2022 at 8:52:56 AM

I suppose Moon Knight has no relation to Black Knight even if they are in the same city?

Schizophrenia is still a real life mental illness. So it would still play into the whole trope of having mental illness makes you violent trope. I'm not fond of that.

Marc Spector was already a violent man long before he encountered Khonshu and had his mind shattered.

As been said he's a military ops guy, basically around Killmonger in terms of combat experience.

It's only that the far more likely, read: common in the past, trope was revealing that none of the monster killing was real, it was just someone in the midst of a violent and delusional psychotic break murdering real people.

Whereas Moon Knight's thing is seemingly "half madness, half magic".

Moon Knight is a curious case because he was very violent before he showed clinical lack of grasp on reality. His backstory is being a ruthless gun-toting mercenary thriving in foreign wars until, at the moment he balks at something beyond the pale, he gets shot to death and comes back as the literal lunatic Moon Knight under Khonshu's will, by which point he becomes The Atoner. He's inarguably a better person now than he was "back when he was sane".

I do think they should do the bit where he beats up the monsters and it flashes to them being just regular humans, but this doesn't mean he's beating up innocent people. That specific narrative trick (MK fights monsters who are probably not monsters) was done in Jeff Lemire's run (even with design choice of them being jackal-headed monsters), but they were human orderlies abusing mental patients in the "possibly real" side of things. The fact MK saw them as anubis-esque monsters doesn't really change the morality of him beating them up. He just (might have) seen a real horror interpreted through the lenses of his vivid hallucinations, but a real horror nonetheless. I presume the same could apply here.

Of course, you could argue that any kind of brutal superhero with schizophrenia might be a bad message, but at the same pace a hero who's a righteous in spite of that is also a fairly uplifting message.

On the one hand, I kind of like the idea of a character having multiple personalities, making him hard to trust, but also making him very powerful and unique.

On the other hand, I'm also with the crowd that's nervous about this show being a shitty representation of DID, especially because of the Unfortunate Implications of tying a mental illness to superpowers.

Like, the child-like part of me wants to say "This looks awesome! This is such a neat idea, and I hope they go all the way with this!" and the adult part of me is like "Wait. This might be a bad idea. If I like this, it might be encouraging a negative stereotype for people with DID..."

DID being caused by magic and other things that can't cause DID is also a problematic trope, given that the academia says that DID is caused by childhood truama.

Having Marc's DID start in his adult life would be contentious.

I thought the thing with Marc was that when he died he saw Khonsu and his mind broke from trying to perceive something that should not be. Like the typical effects of witnessing an eldritch horror? And that was what caused his disassociation to develope.

Given that in the MCU beings like Odin and Dormammu are confirmed as real, it does mean that there's a very good possibility that Khonshu does actually exist.

How much this will play into MK and his state of mind is still up in the air of course, though the Netflix Marvel series did already have a character with some firm of multiple personality disorder (Typhoid Mary/Mary Walker) who was treated somewhat sympathetically.

That is true to the comics (inconsistently) but it's not true to life, DID isn't caused by someone's mind breaking under trauma, it comes from never being able to form a single coherent continuous consciousness in the first place during early childhood, and the brain just getting used to functioning like that.

I should probably lay my cards on the table and state that I was diagnosed with DID only this December just gone, so I'm going to be way more invested in this show's portrayal than I want to be.

I'd prefer it if dying and perceiving Khonshu just made his existing mental health issues way worse.

Edited by Whowho on Jan 18th 2022 at 10:20:57 AM

One potential plot twist I imagine is that it turns out that Steven isn't even the original personality.

Well I the comics as I understand it it's normally the Marc personality who is the legal identity and has the correct memories of their childhood.

So I expect Steve to learn that shockingly he's actually American born to a rabbi pacifist he doesn't recognize.