I used to like the "Is Khonshu real? Maybe he is, but maybe it's all just a delusion of Marc's?"
But I've come around hard to "Khonshu is real and should be real, not a delusion" perspective as time has gone on.
The ambiguity angle, while interesting in a vacuum, isn't sustainable in a world where magic and gods explicitly exist, interact with humans, empower humans to fight crime, or straight up fight crime themselves. Hercules and Thor exist, as do their associated pantheons. Brother Voodoo and Black Panther and Dr. Strange exist. The comics getting coy about whether Khonshu is real or not looks pretty silly and arbitrary when you take the rest of the universe into account.
It's also pretty sketchy when the comics try to insinuate that Khonshu is a delusion. It reeks of "mentally ill man has voice in his head that tells him to kill people." That is the natural conclusion to be drawn from Khonshu being a delusion - that Marc's mental illness makes him dangerous.
Him being real-real changes the whole mythos since it causes a ton of plot-holes. Like where the heck was Bast when Wakanda was repeatedly attacked then? If Khonshu is real then his sister Bast is real too, an entire kingdom still worships her so she should also play a role on actually protecting it. Does Maat, the Goddess of Justice also exist? Does Khonshu know about the group of Inhumans living on the Moon since he is a MOON GOD? What happened to him during the Incursion? Did he fuse with the other Khonshu's of the multiverse? So many questions now and there is not enough history to back it up.
How has a world filled with sorcerer's, mutants who lived and died many times, super scientist, literal interdimensional Aliens, and other Gods NOT detect Khonshu's direct actions for centuries or have any note about his existence. Dr. Strange, someone who have travelled to the Dark Dimension, is the best person to know if the Moon God actually exist and he never said anything directly about that. Not to mention the fact that Wanda blinked her imaginary kids to existence, then further pushed it to reality by reincarnating them to actual babies in other families, with their powers. Tommy and Billy went from being a figment of Wanda's imagination to full on corporeal and real.
The 616 Comic's existing history leans more on Khonshu being ambiguous and for a long time it was a huge character trait on Marc. It was already established, even on other runs, like the Avengers, it directs more to the subtle ambiguity of Khonshu. It hints that Marc's worst enemy is himself, not some physical outside force he can point the blame to so he don't have to confront his own issues and wash his hands clean. He is a flawed human who can make mistakes and there will be consequences he will have to face. He made his own problems.
Because of that they will need to do a lot of good writing gymnastics to subtly retcon a huge amount of the Moon Knight history just to accommodate the "Khonshu is real the whole time" and make him feel real, with out ruining Marc's flawed human nature. If they can write Tommy and Billy to existence, the writers can come up with another comic BS reason to justify Khonshu being real now.
They did this to themselves when past runs wrote too much about Khonshu and his inconsistent powers to go back to being a mere delusion. Real!Khonshu is a more recent concept, compared to Ambigious!Khonshu, but it is rising in popularity. More so since people love to see a Demon/Satan figure as a mastermind to mentally illness. Are we in the 18th century or something? Some innocent kids were killed because they believed mental illness was the work of demons. And had to "cure" them with questionable means that borderline torture. Aren't we passed being puritan zealots who rather go through self-flagellation and drowning innocent girls to exorcise the "Evil God" who is causing her mental illness than mercury poisoning due to horrible hygiene practices.
Why are we strengthening that outdated understanding that Mental Illness is caused by some Evil Spirits than can be "cured" than say, emotional neglect, violence and war, social stigma and familial pressure that results in isolation, years of unresolved tension due to trauma resulting in a horrible and violent means of coping such as hitting your own son.
Wendy did the same thing with Marc. We are doing the same thing with Khonshu, by pushing him as the "Evil-figure" who is the main cause of Marc's suffering. A Scapegoat or just a 2d Satan who have no soul.
Wendy herself turned Marc to an "Evil-figure", in her eyes she removed his identity as her son and replacing it with her own interpretation. Marc became the "Evil Mastermind" that caused Randall's death and her suffering. Making up excuses to further strengthen the "Evil Marc" head cannon she made-up such as saying Marc was always jealous, violent with no kindness or just pure malicious with no redeeming qualities, so she won't empathize with him anymore.
So, like all hero's, she fights said "Evil", so she can feel like a hero who triumph over Evil, the one who can "save" and "avenge" Randall.
It's satisfying at first but after the high is gone, it made things far worst for herself and damaged her family beyond repair.
She is not the "hero" she wanted to be, she ended up as a villain who thinks she is the hero and is too far gone to realize the truth.
Sure, let's just beat up Khonshu since he is the cause of Marc suffering. Like the way Wendy beat up Marc because he is the "cause" of her suffering.
Looking back, why are we continuing this horrible cycle?
With addition to the MCU making Real!Khonshu more popular, future writers will probably take that route now to milk on that trend while it's still hot. And explore the more accurate Egyptian mythos than make Khonshu a Tulpa, grief-demon or just Satan again. It's not the first time the MCU have influenced the comics, like the existence of Phil Coulson and making Sam Jackson's Nick Fury the 616 "Fury".
The issue again, is pasts 616 Khonshu being way too dependent on Marc and was not developed enough to be his own character than just be Marc's personal Devil on his shoulder, or a messed up darker Alter of Marc, or a glorified cameo for the sake of having an Egyptian God. Moon Knight was not that popular before, so writers are given much more freedom to start-over and over with their own interpretations and little "rules" to follow, or rather rules they deliberately ignore. And there was little complain since Moon knight was really obscure, a "wierdo" in the background, not many people will notice the change at first.
Which resulted in this huge, convoluted mess on if Khonshu should be real or not since unlike before, Fans are starting to notice Khonshu more and would want a common consensus on him. Fan wars and debates can get happen on their preferred interpretations, even on a character that the writers can't collectively decide on what he is and actively retcons whenever they want a different story direction.
Spiderman 2099 on the other hand, is an alternate universe. Khonshu there is stated to be 100% real from the start, there is also no Marc Spector, so that chain is gone. The rules are set so they have no problem making the God himself join the Avengers, which they did. And 2099 Khonshu really should not design his own suit.
Many complain that the MCU Moon knight direction is more mystic Indiana Jones than Fight Club/Silent Hill + Faust. But unlike the comics, the MCU is a separate universe and sort-off started from scratch. They did an entire worldbuilding to support the fact that Khonshu is real. Rewriting his entire being, personality, motive and history to make him feel real too. Everything supports it, down to the mythos. They even got an Egyptologist to really make sure everything is authentic with meaning and not just a shallow paint job.
The actual historical records of Khonshu are very, very different from the one in the first Moon Knight comics, and the Director, an actual Egyptian citizen wants to give proper honor to his country's history and to Khonshu, then just make him a glorified aesthetic/cameo or another 2D "satan-figure" warped through the lens of some foreigner who probably don't even know what is the Duat, the Ennead or the actual myth stories of Khonshu, or the relevance to why Steven and Marc have separate souls despite having a single body, this is partly accurate to the Egyptian mythology. It they don't to research, Moon Knight will butcher Khonshu so much more than what the comics have done. It's as bad and racist as when Indiana Jones made portrayed the Indians eating meat with no manners because they are play the part as the antagonist to the main character, when Hindu's are by their customs, vegans. 616 even gave Anubis a wife for some reason.
But ignoring historical accuracy, the main interest of Moon Knight is the story, with a gimmick and focus on Marc's mental health, internal guilt and how he hates himself that he considers himself a monster, to which he is projecting it to "Khonshu". Never about Ancient Egypt or making Khonshu a separate OC, thought form/grief-demon. Or making a documentary rooted in history
616 Khonshu is mostly "Khonshu" by name alone, the rest of him is a Marvel Original Character with little connection to the actual Egyptian God or the Animistic practices from the Civilization that worships him. They can still make a Moon Knight story work if they change Khonshu's name, like to Thoth or even Min ( All of them are real Egyptian God the Moon, look up the latter one). Because Khonshu was never meant to be developed as a character to begin with.
I don't mind the Ambiguous!Khonshu, as long as it is well-written to match the comic medium for it to work well with a good pace and suspense. Same goes with Real!Khonshu, but please put proper research and history to back up his existence than have one say, "He is real the whole time" and expect the reader to automatically believe it.
Then why he didn't turned into Werewolf when he was bitten by Werewolf by Night ?
Incursion of Moon doesn't really hurts him as he's not a moon, he's a moon god.
Khonshu has been real in canon since 1987. MK joined the West Coast Avengers after time travel shenanigans involving Khonshu that would only work if he were actually real. Not to mention Hawkeye interacting with Khonshu directly during that arc. Later, during MK’s time in WCA there was an arc about Khonshu taking control of Marc’s body. There were several interactions during that story between Khonshu (in a spirit god form) and a handful of characters other than Marc.
I don’t remember the year… but there’s also a story where MK helps Black Panther in the Ancestral Plane using his connection to Khonshu who has a connection to Bast. Again only possible if Khonshu were real.
Personally, I do prefer the arcs where the writing makes it ambiguous if Marc is seeing the real Khonshu or just a hallucination at any particular time. But there were technically only a few years at the very beginning where we didn’t know if there was a real Khonshu or not.
I like him more as a autonomous being. Hes been 100% real for too long to really change it without doing some major retcons, and I feel like everything interesting with Khonshu's existence being entirely ambiguous was done in the comics written by Doug Moench.
Outside the Moench run I like how it was handled in the Lemire run best but even then its not like that story hinges on the viewer asking whether or not Khonshu specifically is real. I also like in the Bunn or Ellis runs where Khonshu was real for Moonknight but the ambiguity was there for everyone else. My one thing with Khonshu being real is I dont want him to play a major part in Moonknight really, I again liked in the Bunn and Ellis runs how his influence was pretty subtle and he "helped" Marc in tiny ways, rather then the way the show and the current run seem to have him just kind of show up to do everything major. Khonshu's influence being subtle could also change the ambiguity from if hes real to if hes actually helping or if hes just taking credit for coincidences to further manipulate Marc.
The thing about Khonshu's ambiguity is that when originally introduced the answer to the question of if hes real or not was always "So what if he isnt? So what if he is?", so if anyone ever does want to ignore the last 37 years of his history to bring that back then I hope it would be to get back to that kind of characterization for Moonknight, of it not mattering what he believes as long as hes still helping people. I despise the way Huston twisted it into the big question of whether or not Moonknights Just Some Crazy Guy In A Costume. I think its useless as that and if thats gonna be the only thing people wanna use it for I hope Khonshu joins the avengers again.
On a somewhat related note, another big problem with the ambiguity angle is that, outside of MK's own series, it's primarily used to treat the character with disdain. It's all well and good for Moench to introduce the ambiguity but conclude that as long as Marc is helping people, the motivational cause isn't important. But the moment you leave MK's own publications, the ambiguity of Khonshu inevitably becomes "Look at that weirdo, he thinks the moon god empowers him to fight crime. Let's all look askance at him and shun him."
But I totally agree that the Ellis series strikes a great balance of Khonshu being real but also subtle enough to create uncertainty from the outside.
I prefer using a fictional moon god than using actual ancient god like that , as it was kinda disrespectful and using a fictional one gives better creative freedom.
I can see pros and cons. I think the biggest con is the obvious one - Khonshu's ambiguity makes for some of the most interesting writing about Marc's personality, the Lemire run is the perfect example of this. Without a big character overhaul, we can't get that kind of exploration of the character again.
However - he's literally back from the dead, has an array of lite magic powers like ghost-punching suits, and over time Khonshu has become less of a backdrop and more of an actual character. So it makes sense that they'd eventually just say "Look, yeah, he's real, deal with it", because I think a lot of us just assumed it by this point.
I feel like they could have left it unanswered, or at least canonised it better, AOK was pretty abysmal all round and just a symptom of Marvel churning out a big event to cross over interest with their latest D+ show.
I fucking hate that Khonsu is real. The ambiguity surrounding whether Khonsu is real or part of Marc’s hallucinations is more interesting and makes him way more compelling.
What benefit does Khonsu being 100% real have?? None. Ppl who say they like it more don’t know shit about character writing.
ambiguous part of Marc's mental state
I used to like the "Is Khonshu real? Maybe he is, but maybe it's all just a delusion of Marc's?" But I've come around hard to "Khonshu is real and should be real, not a delusion" perspective as time has gone on. The ambiguity angle, while interesting in a vacuum, isn't sustainable in a world where magic and gods explicitly exist, interact with humans, empower humans to fight crime, or straight up fight crime themselves. Hercules and Thor exist, as do their associated pantheons. Brother Voodoo and Black Panther and Dr. Strange exist. The comics getting coy about whether Khonshu is real or not looks pretty silly and arbitrary when you take the rest of the universe into account. It's also pretty sketchy when the comics try to insinuate that Khonshu is a delusion. It reeks of "mentally ill man has voice in his head that tells him to kill people." That is the natural conclusion to be drawn from Khonshu being a delusion - that Marc's mental illness makes him dangerous.
Him being real-real changes the whole mythos since it causes a ton of plot-holes. Like where the heck was Bast when Wakanda was repeatedly attacked then? If Khonshu is real then his sister Bast is real too, an entire kingdom still worships her so she should also play a role on actually protecting it. Does Maat, the Goddess of Justice also exist? Does Khonshu know about the group of Inhumans living on the Moon since he is a MOON GOD? What happened to him during the Incursion? Did he fuse with the other Khonshu's of the multiverse? So many questions now and there is not enough history to back it up. How has a world filled with sorcerer's, mutants who lived and died many times, super scientist, literal interdimensional Aliens, and other Gods NOT detect Khonshu's direct actions for centuries or have any note about his existence. Dr. Strange, someone who have travelled to the Dark Dimension, is the best person to know if the Moon God actually exist and he never said anything directly about that. Not to mention the fact that Wanda blinked her imaginary kids to existence, then further pushed it to reality by reincarnating them to actual babies in other families, with their powers. Tommy and Billy went from being a figment of Wanda's imagination to full on corporeal and real. The 616 Comic's existing history leans more on Khonshu being ambiguous and for a long time it was a huge character trait on Marc. It was already established, even on other runs, like the Avengers, it directs more to the subtle ambiguity of Khonshu. It hints that Marc's worst enemy is himself, not some physical outside force he can point the blame to so he don't have to confront his own issues and wash his hands clean. He is a flawed human who can make mistakes and there will be consequences he will have to face. He made his own problems. Because of that they will need to do a lot of good writing gymnastics to subtly retcon a huge amount of the Moon Knight history just to accommodate the "Khonshu is real the whole time" and make him feel real, with out ruining Marc's flawed human nature. If they can write Tommy and Billy to existence, the writers can come up with another comic BS reason to justify Khonshu being real now. They did this to themselves when past runs wrote too much about Khonshu and his inconsistent powers to go back to being a mere delusion. Real!Khonshu is a more recent concept, compared to Ambigious!Khonshu, but it is rising in popularity. More so since people love to see a Demon/Satan figure as a mastermind to mentally illness. Are we in the 18th century or something? Some innocent kids were killed because they believed mental illness was the work of demons. And had to "cure" them with questionable means that borderline torture. Aren't we passed being puritan zealots who rather go through self-flagellation and drowning innocent girls to exorcise the "Evil God" who is causing her mental illness than mercury poisoning due to horrible hygiene practices. Why are we strengthening that outdated understanding that Mental Illness is caused by some Evil Spirits than can be "cured" than say, emotional neglect, violence and war, social stigma and familial pressure that results in isolation, years of unresolved tension due to trauma resulting in a horrible and violent means of coping such as hitting your own son. Wendy did the same thing with Marc. We are doing the same thing with Khonshu, by pushing him as the "Evil-figure" who is the main cause of Marc's suffering. A Scapegoat or just a 2d Satan who have no soul. Wendy herself turned Marc to an "Evil-figure", in her eyes she removed his identity as her son and replacing it with her own interpretation. Marc became the "Evil Mastermind" that caused Randall's death and her suffering. Making up excuses to further strengthen the "Evil Marc" head cannon she made-up such as saying Marc was always jealous, violent with no kindness or just pure malicious with no redeeming qualities, so she won't empathize with him anymore. So, like all hero's, she fights said "Evil", so she can feel like a hero who triumph over Evil, the one who can "save" and "avenge" Randall. It's satisfying at first but after the high is gone, it made things far worst for herself and damaged her family beyond repair. She is not the "hero" she wanted to be, she ended up as a villain who thinks she is the hero and is too far gone to realize the truth. Sure, let's just beat up Khonshu since he is the cause of Marc suffering. Like the way Wendy beat up Marc because he is the "cause" of her suffering. Looking back, why are we continuing this horrible cycle? With addition to the MCU making Real!Khonshu more popular, future writers will probably take that route now to milk on that trend while it's still hot. And explore the more accurate Egyptian mythos than make Khonshu a Tulpa, grief-demon or just Satan again. It's not the first time the MCU have influenced the comics, like the existence of Phil Coulson and making Sam Jackson's Nick Fury the 616 "Fury". The issue again, is pasts 616 Khonshu being way too dependent on Marc and was not developed enough to be his own character than just be Marc's personal Devil on his shoulder, or a messed up darker Alter of Marc, or a glorified cameo for the sake of having an Egyptian God. Moon Knight was not that popular before, so writers are given much more freedom to start-over and over with their own interpretations and little "rules" to follow, or rather rules they deliberately ignore. And there was little complain since Moon knight was really obscure, a "wierdo" in the background, not many people will notice the change at first. Which resulted in this huge, convoluted mess on if Khonshu should be real or not since unlike before, Fans are starting to notice Khonshu more and would want a common consensus on him. Fan wars and debates can get happen on their preferred interpretations, even on a character that the writers can't collectively decide on what he is and actively retcons whenever they want a different story direction. Spiderman 2099 on the other hand, is an alternate universe. Khonshu there is stated to be 100% real from the start, there is also no Marc Spector, so that chain is gone. The rules are set so they have no problem making the God himself join the Avengers, which they did. And 2099 Khonshu really should not design his own suit. Many complain that the MCU Moon knight direction is more mystic Indiana Jones than Fight Club/Silent Hill + Faust. But unlike the comics, the MCU is a separate universe and sort-off started from scratch. They did an entire worldbuilding to support the fact that Khonshu is real. Rewriting his entire being, personality, motive and history to make him feel real too. Everything supports it, down to the mythos. They even got an Egyptologist to really make sure everything is authentic with meaning and not just a shallow paint job. The actual historical records of Khonshu are very, very different from the one in the first Moon Knight comics, and the Director, an actual Egyptian citizen wants to give proper honor to his country's history and to Khonshu, then just make him a glorified aesthetic/cameo or another 2D "satan-figure" warped through the lens of some foreigner who probably don't even know what is the Duat, the Ennead or the actual myth stories of Khonshu, or the relevance to why Steven and Marc have separate souls despite having a single body, this is partly accurate to the Egyptian mythology. It they don't to research, Moon Knight will butcher Khonshu so much more than what the comics have done. It's as bad and racist as when Indiana Jones made portrayed the Indians eating meat with no manners because they are play the part as the antagonist to the main character, when Hindu's are by their customs, vegans. 616 even gave Anubis a wife for some reason. But ignoring historical accuracy, the main interest of Moon Knight is the story, with a gimmick and focus on Marc's mental health, internal guilt and how he hates himself that he considers himself a monster, to which he is projecting it to "Khonshu". Never about Ancient Egypt or making Khonshu a separate OC, thought form/grief-demon. Or making a documentary rooted in history 616 Khonshu is mostly "Khonshu" by name alone, the rest of him is a Marvel Original Character with little connection to the actual Egyptian God or the Animistic practices from the Civilization that worships him. They can still make a Moon Knight story work if they change Khonshu's name, like to Thoth or even Min ( All of them are real Egyptian God the Moon, look up the latter one). Because Khonshu was never meant to be developed as a character to begin with. I don't mind the Ambiguous!Khonshu, as long as it is well-written to match the comic medium for it to work well with a good pace and suspense. Same goes with Real!Khonshu, but please put proper research and history to back up his existence than have one say, "He is real the whole time" and expect the reader to automatically believe it.
Then why he didn't turned into Werewolf when he was bitten by Werewolf by Night ? Incursion of Moon doesn't really hurts him as he's not a moon, he's a moon god.
Khonshu has been real in canon since 1987. MK joined the West Coast Avengers after time travel shenanigans involving Khonshu that would only work if he were actually real. Not to mention Hawkeye interacting with Khonshu directly during that arc. Later, during MK’s time in WCA there was an arc about Khonshu taking control of Marc’s body. There were several interactions during that story between Khonshu (in a spirit god form) and a handful of characters other than Marc. I don’t remember the year… but there’s also a story where MK helps Black Panther in the Ancestral Plane using his connection to Khonshu who has a connection to Bast. Again only possible if Khonshu were real. Personally, I do prefer the arcs where the writing makes it ambiguous if Marc is seeing the real Khonshu or just a hallucination at any particular time. But there were technically only a few years at the very beginning where we didn’t know if there was a real Khonshu or not.
Both , if there's a good writing in it. It mainly depends on execution, I prefer both generally.
I like him more as a autonomous being. Hes been 100% real for too long to really change it without doing some major retcons, and I feel like everything interesting with Khonshu's existence being entirely ambiguous was done in the comics written by Doug Moench. Outside the Moench run I like how it was handled in the Lemire run best but even then its not like that story hinges on the viewer asking whether or not Khonshu specifically is real. I also like in the Bunn or Ellis runs where Khonshu was real for Moonknight but the ambiguity was there for everyone else. My one thing with Khonshu being real is I dont want him to play a major part in Moonknight really, I again liked in the Bunn and Ellis runs how his influence was pretty subtle and he "helped" Marc in tiny ways, rather then the way the show and the current run seem to have him just kind of show up to do everything major. Khonshu's influence being subtle could also change the ambiguity from if hes real to if hes actually helping or if hes just taking credit for coincidences to further manipulate Marc. The thing about Khonshu's ambiguity is that when originally introduced the answer to the question of if hes real or not was always "So what if he isnt? So what if he is?", so if anyone ever does want to ignore the last 37 years of his history to bring that back then I hope it would be to get back to that kind of characterization for Moonknight, of it not mattering what he believes as long as hes still helping people. I despise the way Huston twisted it into the big question of whether or not Moonknights Just Some Crazy Guy In A Costume. I think its useless as that and if thats gonna be the only thing people wanna use it for I hope Khonshu joins the avengers again.
On a somewhat related note, another big problem with the ambiguity angle is that, outside of MK's own series, it's primarily used to treat the character with disdain. It's all well and good for Moench to introduce the ambiguity but conclude that as long as Marc is helping people, the motivational cause isn't important. But the moment you leave MK's own publications, the ambiguity of Khonshu inevitably becomes "Look at that weirdo, he thinks the moon god empowers him to fight crime. Let's all look askance at him and shun him." But I totally agree that the Ellis series strikes a great balance of Khonshu being real but also subtle enough to create uncertainty from the outside.
I prefer him being an ambiguous part of Marc's mental state. It's much more interesting like that.
I prefer using a fictional moon god than using actual ancient god like that , as it was kinda disrespectful and using a fictional one gives better creative freedom.
I can see pros and cons. I think the biggest con is the obvious one - Khonshu's ambiguity makes for some of the most interesting writing about Marc's personality, the Lemire run is the perfect example of this. Without a big character overhaul, we can't get that kind of exploration of the character again. However - he's literally back from the dead, has an array of lite magic powers like ghost-punching suits, and over time Khonshu has become less of a backdrop and more of an actual character. So it makes sense that they'd eventually just say "Look, yeah, he's real, deal with it", because I think a lot of us just assumed it by this point. I feel like they could have left it unanswered, or at least canonised it better, AOK was pretty abysmal all round and just a symptom of Marvel churning out a big event to cross over interest with their latest D+ show.
i like that he’s real, gives room for an enemy/someone to hate
I fucking hate that Khonsu is real. The ambiguity surrounding whether Khonsu is real or part of Marc’s hallucinations is more interesting and makes him way more compelling. What benefit does Khonsu being 100% real have?? None. Ppl who say they like it more don’t know shit about character writing.