Who is Red Dagger? We first got a glimpse of Kamala Khan’s superhero ally in a trailer for the MCU TV series, but he made his full debut in episode 4 of the Phase 4 show. Red Dagger is an important character in the Ms Marvel comics: often teaming up with the hero across Pakistan, New Jersey, and even at school, where he’s an exchange student.
The pair have a complicated relationship: sometimes they’re rivals, sometimes they’re each other’s love interest, and it certainly seems like Marvel will be continuing with that tradition after Red Dagger bursts onto the scene by attacking Kamala: insisting that he can sense the Djinn in her.
He later ends up working with her and trying to rescue her from the Clandestines, but there’s still a lot of mystery surrounding the character, whose real name is Kareem. In Ms Marvel, the character is played by Aramis Knight, who has appeared in several high-profile series like Into The Badlands, NCIS, and Lost. But who is Red Dagger? Should we trust him? Get the low-down here.
who is red dagger?
Kareem is a teenager from Pakistan who is part of the Red Daggers: a group of red-scarf-wearing vigilantes who have sworn to protect the world from the Clandestines.
The Clandestines are a group of Djinn beings banished from the Noor Dimension. Unsurprisingly this family of villains are desperate to return to the Dimension by any means possible — but this poses the risk of the Noor Dimension being unleashed into Earth-616, which can cause catastrophe. The Red Daggers’ role is to avoid that from happening.
Red Dagger, however, has a different origin in the comics. Rather than being part of a larger organisation, Kareem decides to become Red Dagger to fight crime and corruption in Pakistan. Either way, he’s not that different from Kamala: a teenager who is drawn into the world of superheroes with keen crime-fighting skills.
does red dagger have any powers?
In both the comics and the show, Kareem doesn’t have any superhuman powers (at least, not anything we’ve seen). In the comics, he decides to become a superhero just because he can, becoming highly skilled at knife-throwing and combat via YouTube tutorials. Classic Gen Z behaviour.
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It’s uncertain how Kareem learned his combat and knife-throwing skills in Ms Marvel as of yet, but we assume it’s probably a mixture of being self-taught and being trained by the rest of the Red Daggers.
is red dagger a villain?
As a vigilante, Kareem is definitely more of an anti-hero than a villain and is more willing than Kamala to venture into moral greys if it means he achieves his ends — which, in his case, is to protect the world from the Clandestines —but fundamentally, he’s on Kamala’s side.
We’ve already seen him protect her against Namja, and the pair team up several times in the comics.
what is red dagger’s connection to kamala?
In the comics, Kareem describes himself as Kamala’s “friend-in-law” — his mother was friends with her aunt. In both the comics and the series, they encounter each other for the first time in Pakistan, but the Red Daggers’ connection to the Clandestine is more overstated in the series because of the expanded role of the Djinn race and their link to Kamala’s powers in comparison to the comics.
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Kareem ends up living with Kamala’s family in the comics as an exchange student, but it remains to be seen whether he will show up in Jersey City in the last couple of episodes.
In the meantime, after her bangle is damaged during a high-stakes pursuit by the Clandestine, Kamala falls into what appears to be another dimension. It remains to be seen if Kareem will show up there, too, but we doubt we have seen the last of him.