Kang is such a loser

The Marvel movies were going all in on Kang for a while there - he was their next big villain, the one whose machinations would spawn the next multi-billion dollar epic run. And they dropped that idea so fast and so completely as soon as it became slightly inconvenient, and that feels apt, because Kang was always such a fucking loser.

The most interesting thing about him is that his greatest enemy was always himself, because he was always crashing into the future face of Immortus, his youthful dalliance with Egyptian fascism as Rama Tut, and whatever the hell the story was with the Scarlet Centurion guise. Literally the only time he's been likeable was as Iron Lad in the Young Avengers, when he is at his very least Kang-ish

He conquered entire eras, and has billions of people under his boot, but he's still a loser, because he's still always unfulfilled, still always wondering if he's just acting out the role that time always gave him. Just another villainous dickhead, always losing to the Earth's Mightiest Heroes, with a personal history of entitlement and arrogance.

There have been multitudes of Kangs - sometimes literally - and I always liked what Walt Simonson did with the character across multiple titles in the 80s, squeezing and twisting the concept to all sorts of extremes. But he doesn't have the genius of Doom, or the tricks of Loki, or anything like that. He's just a dork.

So now Kang is out of the Marvel films, a footnote on the way to Dr Doom, and that seems fitting. He can scratch his name across history as the ultimate temporal vandal, but he's a nothing of a person, still a long way from the dubious wisdom of his future, and far from some noble beginners. Just another loser, lost in time.