iStop me if you’re heard this one before: A hero, after struggling with their newfound powers, has to prove their worth in a battle against a villain who is essentially their doppelgänger. The villain is either flat and unmemorable (and dies), or is charming enough to seem like a threat to our hero (and dies).

This is Marvel’s formula, and it’s been in place for a decade.

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Black Panther, Thor: Ragnarok and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2]

It can be easy to forget that Marvel Studios’ goal is to essentially do this forever, so it’s no surprise that the company has started tackling some of the most persistent flaws in its films. With Black Panther and the upcoming Captain Marvel, Marvel has (belatedly) done the bare minimum to ensure some diversity in its title roles. By hiring unique and bold stylistic directors like James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy), Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnarok) and Ryan Coogler (Black Panther), Marvel is committing to new voices and to letting them tell stories in their own ways.

Most importantly, Marvel is finally building better villains. Starting with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and continuing through Thor: Ragnarok, the studio’s most recent movies featured enemies that challenged the long-held truism that Marvel can’t get villains right.

And then Black Panther came along and turned that trend into a mission statement with a single character.

That character, Erik “Killmonger” Stevens, is the best villain in Marvel movie history. The internet is already flooded with hot takes, think pieces and heated debates around his beliefs and motives. People are calling him the best on-screen villain since The Joker in The Dark Knight. Possibly ever.

Killmonger is engaging and charismatic, and has a worldview tinged with just enough perspective that you’re almost empathetic to the terrible things he does. Much like Marvel’s other big Erik — Erik Lehnsherr (aka Magneto from X-Men) — he’s the embodiment of a viewpoint that’s radical and extreme, yet sympathetic.

King T’Challa of Wakanda is a calming and meditative presence throughout the film. He leans on the counsel of his family, his friends, his soldiers and even his ancestors to decide what sort of king he will be. Even when he fights the leader of a rival tribe to consolidate his hold on the throne, he spares the man’s life in a move that’s kind and politically canny. He was a child born and raised to be a leader, and it shows.

We first see Killmonger as an adult, admiring African artifacts at a museum in London. His quiet intelligence and curiosity seem to mirror T’Challa’s, until suddenly he’s murdered everyone in his vicinity. He is a perpetual wave of righteous rage, marching forward where T’Challa stands still. He was a child torn between two worlds while belonging to neither, and it shows.

Despite all that, he dies at the end of the movie, making him the latest and greatest victim of the Marvel formula. But something amazing happens: The themes, ideas and struggles that he represented survive. They inform T’Challa’s actions right up until the closing credits, and could possibly set the framework for any Black Panther sequel or spinoff.

Black Panther isn’t the first Marvel movie to invoke real-world issues to deepen the motivations and rationale of its characters, but it is by far the boldest.

Killmonger’s entire motivation stems from a single train of thought: In a universe where Wakanda and the Black Panther exist, why did they allow slavery and the colonization of Africa to happen? How do they live with themselves? Do they deserve to?

The original Iron Man grappled with a big question: Can a man who made his fortune as a weapons manufacturer ever truly atone for the suffering his creations caused? The answer was: Yes, by fighting Obadiah Stane (to the death, naturally) and holding a press conference afterwards.

The movie was ultimately interested in Tony Stark’s ideological campaign against weapons manufacturing because it brought him in direct opposition with Stane, giving them a reason to fight and resolve that conflict. As soon as Stane was out of the picture, so was the franchise’s interest in actually having Tony exist as a man concerned with shutting down the military industral complex. One movie later, he was giving his battle suits to the U.S. military; by the second Avengers movie, he had built an evil robot god. Stane, and everything he represented, was all but forgotten

The fact that any movie would choose to go there with its central conflict is proof of a much newer trend from Marvel, where questions and issues raised by the villain can’t merely be solved by the hero punching them really, really hard.

When people criticize Marvel villains, it’s not just because they follow the formula, or that some of them have no personality or motivation to speak of beyond “stop the heroes.” It’s because they leave no footprint behind in the world after they’ve been dealt with. They represent no threat or ideology bigger than themselves. The central conflict of the story dies with them.

Until recently.

A new age of Marvel villains

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 wasn’t expected to deliver anything more than the same mix of action, comedy and classic rock tunes that made the original a success. But nestled perfectly alongside the expected quips was a very clear central conflict: abusive parents and the permanent damage they leave on their children. From Thanos to Ego the Living Planet, there’s a consistent theme at work.

The issues Ego embodies aren’t solved once he’s killed; in a story about abuse, trauma and building your own family, how could they be? But the movie felt bigger because the antagonists carried more with them than their desire to stop the heroes.

This approach to themes outliving their villains continued with Thor: Ragnarok, a movie about the skeletons in every powerful nation’s closet. Thor spends the movie slowly learning about Asgard’s past, when it was ruled through murder and imperialism. This legacy of death is embodied by Hela, the goddess ... of death.

But Hela isn’t the cause; she’s a symptom of a greater truth. When Thor and the Revengers (the ragtag group of old and new friends he builds throughout Ragnarok) decide to let the prophecy of Asgard’s destruction play out, they leave Hela to (presumably) die in the process. Thor loses an eye, a hammer and a nation. The character and his circumstances are changed forever.

Then there’s Black Panther. Halfway through the film, Killmonger claims the throne of Wakanda. He ingests the heart-shaped herb that will give him the powers of the panther goddess, and enters a deep sleep to communicate with his ancestors. He finds himself trapped in his childhood apartment when he opens his eyes. On a spiritual level, he is cut off from his ancestors (no one but his father appears), his homeland (the purple sky of the spirit realm can be seen only through the apartment windows) and his own identity. His father quietly weeps at what his son has become.

What does a nation owe its people?

I spent my childhood in an apartment like that, asking similar questions about where my black relatives came from. I saw myself in the foundations of Killmonger’s struggle. We tend to be drawn to characters we can see ourselves in, after all. It’s the most obvious reason why diversity and representation matter: If you can watch someone who looks like you doing the impossible on screen, it makes everyday life a little bit more possible in turn.

That sense of familiarity is the key element here: Erik isn’t an unknown force who wants to do a bad thing for bad reasons. He is driven by his desire to right a familiar and historic wrong, and that sense of fixing something truly broken doesn’t die with him.

Black Panther asks some of the biggest questions in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe: What does a nation owe its people? How can Wakanda make amends for policies and inaction that allowed the transatlantic slave trade to proliferate across Africa? How can a superpower become an ethical citizen of the world without resorting to the same colonial attitudes that define every other powerful nation?

The film doesn’t give easy answers, but the fact that it asks these questions at all around shows how much Marvel has changed its approach to villains, and by extension, storytelling. Marvel villains may still be dying at the end of each movie, but the conflicts that drive them live on and continue to affect and inform the growth of the heroes they fought.

Black Panther needs to serve as Marvel’s model for how to build an antagonist who matters. Some problems can’t be punched away; the ongoing trauma of slavery is one of them. True heroes should find a way to contend with both.