A hero is only as good as its villain, right? Well, not necessarily. We’re now 23 films and one TV series deep into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and while it’s true that the MCU is the most consistently successful franchise maybe in history, it’s definitely not true that every villain is equal. There are those who stick with us long after the credits have rolled like Thanos and Killmonger and Loki, and those we forget like Laufey and Kaecilius and Aldrich Killian. But there’s a method to which villains are memorable and which aren’t, one that Kevin Feige and the folks at Marvel Studios hit upon with their very first feature: it’s better when it’s personal.

When Iron Man was released in 2008, it laid the foundation for what an MCU movie would become. Fun, colorful, charming, and not overly self-serious but serious enough that you’re invested. But it also set the stage for memorable baddies with Jeff Bridges’ Obadiah Stane. Indeed, I can remember watching Iron Man for the first time in the theater and really digging what Robert Downey Jr. was doing, but finding the villain plot – which appeared to center on a character named Raza (Faran Tahir) — a bit rote. And then you hit that mid-movie twist where it’s revealed that Stane is the one who tried to have Tony Stark killed in the first place, leading to their double-suit showdown in the finale.

The Iron Man twist adds emotional stakes to the story because, up until that reveal, the film is telling you how important Obadiah has been to Tony all his life. In the absence of his father, Obadiah has been a mentor and father-figure to the uber-rich playboy. Aside from Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow) and maybe Rhodey (Terrance Howard in this one), Obadiah feels like the only other person Tony can be himself around. So when it turns out that Stane tried to have him killed, it’s an incredibly personal betrayal that cuts deep.

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Image via Marvel Studio

The same is true of Loki, one of the MCU’s most iconic characters. Tom Hiddleston turned heads as Thor’s (Chris Hemsworth) brother in the first Thor film, but that storyline set into motion events that made Loki the Big Bad of 2012’s The Avengers. Finding a formidable foe that brought the Avengers together for the first time was no small task, but the brilliance there was making Loki not only a force to be reckoned with, but a personal one. Through it all, Thor made clear that he didn’t want Loki killed, and Loki’s betrayal once again cut deep because it was so personal. Complexity = drama.

But personal doesn’t always mean friend, and 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming made the genius decision to peg Michael Keaton’s villain Vulture as the father of the girl that Peter Parker (Tom Holland) was dating. Not only did this make things incredibly uncomfortable, but it also tied the villain’s story thematically to the hero’s – Spider-Man: Homecoming is all about Peter struggling to balance his personal life as a high school student and his professional life as a masked superhero. And making the villain the father of his crush put those two worlds on a collision course.

The most personal villain in MCU history thus far, and I’d argue the most successful one, is Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger in Ryan Coogler’s brilliant 2018 film Black Panther. With that Best Picture-nominated feature, Coogler was telling a story about what it means to be African-American, and considered the morality of Wakanda – an African nation – keeping its scientific and technological advances secret while Black people around the world suffer injustices. Chadwick Boseman’s character T’Challa has ascended to the throne at the beginning of the story and must decide what the future holds for Wakanda, while Jordan’s Killmonger is revealed to be the Wakandan-born cousin of T’Challa who was left to grow up in America when T’Challa’s father King T’Chaka murdered Killmonger’s father N’Jobu.

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Image via Marvel Studios

The brilliance of Black Panther is that it stops to consider Killmonger’s point of view, and when he confronts T’Challa in Wakanda and challenges his throne, Killmonger is not met with complete opposition from the Wakandan people. He advocates using Wakanda’s resources to ship weapons to African descendants and operatives around the world, instead of maintaining the country’s isolationist stance thus far.

When Killmonger is finally defeated by T’Challa, his final words hit like a punch to the gut:

“Bury me in the ocean, with my ancestors that jumped from the ships, because they knew death was better than bondage.”

Here Coogler and Jordan bring Black Panther to a dramatic, emotional conclusion with a villain’s defeat that’s just as heartbreaking as any hero’s, thanks to its deeply personal nature. Of course it also works incredibly well because it’s so intimately tied to the thematic DNA of the film, which is a testament to Coogler’s storytelling capabilities.

Of course, just because a villain’s connection to the hero is personal doesn’t mean it’s necessarily memorable. Technically Thor introduced us to Loki’s biological father in Laufey (Colm Feore), but the character failed to make a lasting impact. And Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) in Ant-Man and the Wasp has a personal connection to Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) but similarly doesn’t leave a tremendous impact. The story around the villain and hero must also connect in a meaningful way for this to work, and there are certainly notable exceptions. Zemo (Daniel Bruhl) in Captain America: Civil War isn’t related to the heroes (yet has a tragic connection) but leaves a tremendous impact on audiences, and Hugo Weaving’s Red Skull in Captain America: The First Avenger is a formidable and compelling foe. And of course there’s also Thanos (Josh Brolin), the biggest bad of them all, who has no specific beef with the Avengers. He’s just really, really passionate about population control.

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This is basically a long way of saying not every great MCU villain has a personal connection to the hero, but by and large the best and most memorable baddies do have a story that is somewhat intimately tied to the hero’s journey. Getting audiences to emotionally invest in the villain’s storyline has varied in terms of its priority in certain Marvel movies, but as the MCU has become more refined and filmmakers have been allowed to take bigger swings (see: Thor: Ragnarok), the villains are getting more interesting too.

And yet, while we’ve come a long way since Iron Man, the blueprint was always right there.