Following the reign of Thanos and his complete alteration of reality, the Marvel Cinematic Universe needs a new Big Bad. Kang the Conqueror appears to have emerged as the frontrunner for the Avenger's primary antagonist going forward, with Gorr the God Butcher filling out the ranks of evil.
While many fans are excited to see Jonathan Majors and Christian Bale play Kang and Gorr, other fans are a little dismayed that these intense characters will appear in films they expect to be quite silly. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Thor: Love and Thunder do not look like they will be films dark enough for these terrifying forces of power. However, these villains don't need to be as terrifying as some fans want.
Fans Don't Want Any Funny Business
Many fans do not want Kang the Conqueror or Gorr the God Butcher to be silly antagonists being that the MCU has long fallen under the shadow of Thanos. The Mad Titan's conviction to his absurd, illogical plan is one of the things that made him such an intimidating villains. While his plan is ridiculous and directly criticized in the film by Gamora, the film avoids making jokes by showing how serious a threat he is.
Many of the MCU's best villains are ones that are taken seriously in the context of their films, such as Killmonger, the Vulture, Red Skull and Obadiah Stane. However, some villains, especially Ultron, have been criticized by fans for being a little too silly given their origins. While Ultron served as a compelling enough antagonist with enough dimension, it can be argued that his frequent, snarky comments undercut moments that could be potentially terrifying.
Gorr the God Butcher is a man broken by his life, left with nothing but rage and hatred toward the Gods. Kang the Conqueror, despite his absurd appearance, is a genuine conqueror hell-bent on the domination of all time and space. Both of these characters are threats of the highest order and deserve to be treated as such.
The Best MCU Villains Aren't So Serious
However, this belief by fans that a villain needs to be completely serious in order to be intimidating is a false one. While Thanos was a purely grim threat, this left him sometimes feeling less human than Killmonger. Killmonger is certainly a serious antagonist with profoundly human motivations. However, he isn't above a few sarcastic and humanizing moments of sarcasm and humor.
Mysterio and Vulture, two of the better MCU villains, both have scenes where they joke around and then moments later become deathly serious. The scene where Adrian Toomes drives Peter and Liz to homecoming, slowly piecing together Peter's identity as Spider-Man, ranks among the most genuinely tense scenes in the MCU. This is the same character who comedically disintegrates his criminal partner, the Shocker.
In regards to Thor villains, the less serious the villain is, the better they turn out, arguably. Villains like Malekith, Kurse and Laufey are very serious threats but prove far less memorable than more comedic villains like Loki, the Grandmaster and Hela. All of them (save for Grandmaster) have serious moments and establish themselves as true threats, but they are all far more memorable than Malekith. In all likelihood, Gorr will be more in line with Hela, a self-serious character with moments that offer humor to the audience but horror to the characters.
Kang the Conqueror Needs to Be Tragic, Not Scary
The matter of Kang the Conqueror first appearing in an Ant-Man film, however, is a far bigger concern for MCU fans. Though there appear to be teases of Kang in the upcoming Loki series, his first live-action appearance is expected to be in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Ant-Man is a film series centered on comedic sci-fi, so many fans fear that Kang's complicated time traveling might be the subject of jokes, not horror.
Fans afraid of this might be forgetting that Ant-Man villains tend to stand in contrast to Scott Lang's antics. Yellowjacket, while still having absurd moments, is a sociopath who turns a person into goo and flushes him down a toilet. Ghost is less a villain and more a tragic victim of circumstance. Both villains work because they stand in as foils to Scott Lang and his comedy, not as part of the comedy.
Kang will not disappear after fighting Ant-Man. With the build-up to the Young Avengers, we will see his younger self, Iron Lad. In this sense, Kang should serve as a tragic inevitability for the young hero.
Kang could be the ultimate foil. Sure, his time travel is absurd, but that does not mean he himself is absurd. While the antics surrounding him could be deeply ridiculous, he would be best presented as an intimidating, possibly even tragic, foil. Kang does not, however, need to be as deathly serious as Thanos because the threat he poses is different.