But while Kaling and I are thrilled by the prospect of the film, it seems the thought of a brown, Muslim superhero is a little too much for some people.

When Marvel first hinted, back in 2018, that we could be seeing Ms Marvel on screen, I of course tweeted my excitement about the adaptation. The next day I woke up to a flood of racist messages that had been fired off in response. These tweets covered everything from saying Ms Marvel would support female genital mutilation and stand for the oppression of women, to implying she was a suicide bomber, and more. A number of the same insults were repeatedly tweeted by different trolls, proving that not only are they ignorant, but they’re unoriginal, too.

Every single one of those vile tweets came from people who have nothing better to do with their time than seek out topics to make stupid comments on, and to spread their incorrect, ill-informed views. It was an unpleasant start to my day, but I knew I didn’t want to engage with them. Instead, I liberally employed the block button, after reporting the tweets to Twitter. Most of the tweets were found to have violated Twitter’s rules (the tweet about FGM was found not to have broken the platform’s guidelines though) and it’s essential that Twitter start taking a stronger stand against racist abuse on its platform. It’s all very well providing block buttons, but it puts the onus back on the victims to take action, adding to the emotional burden they’re already being subjected to. Twitter needs to start being more proactive: hate speech of all kinds should be taken seriously and banned, and persistent abusers must be permanently removed from the platform.

“Why Mindy Kaling’s Ms Marvel news is such a big deal”