When I was still a teenager, Batman Begins was the hot movie of pop culture. As the reviews of it at the time surely noted, the movie took the old, colorful superhero comic books and helped them ‘grow up.
Ever since that phrase was introduced to me I’ve hated it, hated it so absolutely much.
Batman Begins is still, to me, a movie where someone afraid of everything fun or mysterious about a character forces it to change into a regurgitation of crime movies and neo-noir shlock.

What they mean when speaking about a work of pop-culture growing up is that it has traded in its jeans for officewear, it’s put down the toys and picked up cigarettes. We (that’s the audience) love that stuff. Ticket sales don’t lie, but they don’t exactly prove we’re any less dumb than the people next to us in line. Batman is growing up right now in the comics. Videogames are a grown-up hobby for adults, about adult stories – sometimes, we’re still working on it.

There’s about a dozen sayings about the strength of a tree that bends in the wind over the strength of an oak that breaks in the storm. The hard and strong will fall, the soft and weak will overcome. Those types of sayings remind us that to make it through the hardest parts of life, they require humility and pliability.

If you wanna make that analogy make sense to a toxic gamer brain though, I’ve got a better one:
Don’t be a goon, be Ed Boon.

Fifteen years ago, videogames were in a specific place.
I could spend a few paragraphs illuminating that Man Cave aesthetic, or I could just show you:

a dozen years later and i’m still finding things to blame bloodrayne for

This shit happened every year: every time some new game came out that featured a titty or a rumor of one, the full secret was getting told to everybody via capricious and slimy marketing involvement from magazines like Playboy. That was what we worked with, and there’s a lot that’s been said about how todays awful gamerdom really has roots more in the fraternity like videogame industry culture from the mid-2000’s than anywhere else.

Mortal Kombat embraced the wackiness and sexism as much as it could. Women fought in ridiculous outfits, dismembered eachother. The lady with the bad dental hygeine covered her chest up with a pair of stabbing implements and it was given to the player as an award.

That was the identity of Mortal Kombat. It took refuge in adolescent grossness and had more than one martial artist who practiced the mystic art of weaponized vomit. An industry staple, a fighting game that at the time wasn’t really trending in the direction of something for serious fighting game fans.

I say that now, but I’ll tell you: I enjoyed the shit out of Motor Kombat as a teenager.

this was real

Something happened in the mid 2000’s though, and the wind started blowing in a different direction.

The videogame industry started becoming more diverse, more representative of the people that played games that weren’t just white suburban kids.

Videogames had to mature, not grow up in the hollywood sense. After all, the way hollywood makes pop-culture grow up is so indicative of its own immaturity. Replace the fun and silly with the macabre and grim. File down edges for the sake of realism – a word that increasingly just means paramilitary.

What’s most surprising is that Mortal Kombat wasn’t content to stay the literally bloody elephant in the room – it was more than content to go away for a little while, even taking an early shot at a DC Comics crossover.

Mortal Kombat was released to some fanfare in 2011. Especially since the game immediately preceding it was more than content to kill everyone off, sundering the whole madcap universe of technicolor Ninja and Bruce Lee pastiche for something different.

Mortal Kombat is interesting because in every subsequent followup to the rebooted 2011 game, Netherrealm and Ed Boon have been seemingly devoted to shaping up the image of the series, and in turn finding a whole new group of people to offend.

Mortal Kombat X still had shades of that previous identity in spades – the skin-tight outfits and gore to the point that some of the gorehounds I know were adittedly turned off to seem like it was the same old same old. Peeling back the skin can tell you a little more, though.

Where X caused controversy for “putting politics into games” because a character was Gay and another one was Less Sexy (the outrage!), it’s funny if you think of the latest evolution of the series still going out if its way to shock and offend like it did in the 1990’s.

The winds continued to blow between X and 11, a number that seems so arbitrarily chosen as if to be winking right at the audience from store shelves themselves. For their part, let’s applaud Ed Boon and Netherrealm for not making a huge fucking deal about basic decency.

11 is Mature, but not Grown Up. The trick to not becoming Batman Begins for anything that’s been around too god damned long is by knowing that the best things to embrace aren’t going to be the easiest. Not knowing about the creative process at Netherrealm means I can’t directly say that this is the result of including more inclusive voices but I’m willing to bet it’s a pretty fucking huge part of it.

Is it genuine? I don’t know. Part of the identity of this series has always been to offend and cause controversy. No doubt they’ve managed to cause a small bit with certain groups of gamers for not even being willing to let monster women be sex objects.

Weird, right? Mortal Kombat is the game right now where the women are realistically proportioned, the blood and guts are still there (and ocasionally funnier than they’ve maybe ever been) and actual deep reverence is given to the same cast of technicolor Ninja’s and Bruce Lee references.

The battle over the identity of videogames continues, and right now one of the most out-of-left field champions is willing to be the soft and gentle reed blowing in the wind.

mortal men and women, defending our world.

More Mortal Kombat:
Waypoint Digital’s article about how Ronda Rousey does not belong in Mortal Kombat

you can also check our Patreon later this month for the subscriber-only review of Mortal Kombat 11.