Tag: rhetoric

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

Mortal Kombat is renown for it’s gorey fatalities and also for the snarky responses to criticisms of said fatalities:

However I can’t help but notice they can’t find but the standard issue rhetoric and cop outs to address criticisms of their female character costumes.

(Unsurprisingly, the source trailer is full of violence, gore, cruelty and all the other hallmarks of the franchise, view discretion advised).

– wincenworks

It seems that since @pointandclickbait has recently released an article that could very well be about many, many female characters from Mortal Kombat, this is the perfect time to bring this back.

We did comment on this not long ago but partially I also wanted to address that a lot of responses we got tended to focus on it as though it was mostly an issue in RPGs.

The reality is you see it in all kinds of video games, in comics (sometimes while throwing other cultures under a bus) and most forms of media (hence the cliches about the seductive student trying to corrupt her professor, remarkably similar to the author, and lure him into an affair despite his virtue).

Of course, there’s the old trick of super-ultra-hypersexualizing one female character in the hopes that it’ll make the other hypersexualized characters look practical and non-exploitative by comparison.

Ultimately mostly what this tends to boil down to is the desire to continue marketing women’s sexuality as a consumable product while claiming to be progressive and that others are just doing it wrong (yes, these people pretty much do maintain that real women are doing being a woman wrong).

So yeah, as a general rule if you need to break the fourth wall to justify why your female character is flaunting her sexuality despite the massive impracticality involved or you plan to blame women (one way or another) then our advice is: Don’t.

– wincenworks