Kitana Can't Have Nice Things

So, as readers of this blog know, I did a big retrospective on Mortal Kombat’s Kitana—looking back on her debut and backstory … development into one of the franchise’s best characters and heroes … downfall into a damsel in distress and princess stereotype … hitting rock bottom with retcons and getting stuffed in the fridge … and finally capping it off with a somewhat happy ending.

As I said at the end of the retrospective, I was content to accept her MKX arcade ending as closure for the Kitana I knew and loved—the Kitana from MK2 to Armageddon, dubbed Kitana Prime. I decided to take the ending as confirmation that there are multiple parallel timelines and therefore Kitana Prime and the original MK timeline not only still existed, but that she had survived Armageddon, eventually united the realms, and finally defeated Shao Kahn once and for all.

A satisfyingly happy if bittersweet ending, leaving the Kitana introduced in MK9—dubbed Nu-Kitana—to carry on as Empress of the Netherealm in the current timeline.
I figured if she appeared in future games, it would be that version of the character, allowing me to effectively retire my fandom as it was.

But of course, as it does, news of Mortal Kombat 11 crossed my path. And wouldn't you know, they couldn't leave well enough alone.

***SPOILERS AHEAD FOR MORTAL KOMBAT 11 AND AFTERMATH FOR THOSE WHO CARE***

Let’s Do the Time-Warp Again

So yeah, pretty much from the first trailer, it was clear MK11 would revolve around more time travel tomfoolery with past versions of certain characters returning and the prospect of history being rewritten (again & even more) and alternate timelines afoot.

Was Kitana Prime getting pulled back into action? Would her ending be undone? Were we going to see a confrontation between her and Nu-Kitana? Could the original timeline be restored or further destroyed?
So I felt obliged to at least keep an eye on the storyline to see if it would contradict or validate my head-canon.

Long story short, the goddess of time, Kronika, wants to rewrite history because she doesn’t like how things are going. As part of her plan, she plucks a handful of characters from the past—circa MK2 I believe. Among them is Kitana, and she winds up involved in the war for control of Outworld and soon the fight for history itself.

So … is this Kitana Prime returned? Nu-Kitana’s past self? A new version of Kitana from yet another parallel timeline?
What is the timeline situation overall? Is it multi-verse after all, or are they still trying to push this as all one timeline?

Amusingly … I can’t say. It’s not very consistent one way or another.

On the one hand, they do the thing where if a character in the past dies, their current/future self dies—suggesting it's all one timeline.
However, characters frequently refer to multiple timelines, and frankly the only way some of the twists and turns the story takes (*cough*Sindel*cough*) can possibly make ANY kind of sense is if you indeed accept we're dealing with multiple parallel timelines.

So yeah … as far as I'm concerned, multi-verse all the way and I’m sticking to my head-canon.
Kitana Prime is alive and well in the original timeline. Nu-Kitana is a parallel version created from Raiden's time bungling.
And the Kitana we meet in MK11 is yet another version plucked from some other parallel timeline by Kronika. I’ll dub her “Kitana Kahn.”

The New Kahn

Now, all time travel nonsense and retcons aside, I was actually very happy with her portrayal in MK11. She was capable and competent, but we still saw glimpses of warmth and vulnerability.
She looks great. I don't really care that she looks more distinctly Asian now. Little jarring, I guess—it's been over twenty years, I have a pretty set image of what Kitana looks like in my head. But aside from consistency, I don't mind.

But the real breath of fresh air was the arc they gave her. She manages to unite Outworld against Shao Kahn—even Baraka and the Tarkatans—and then defeats the bastard herself one on one! Like, holy shit—I couldn't believe they gave her that!
Course they cheapened it by having her inexplicably not kill him (which makes no goddamn sense & I now see was the red flag for what was coming in Aftermath) but I never thought they'd pull the trigger on that.

After his defeat, she's declared the new Kahn and leads her armies against Kronika.
The ending was ambiguous. She might have been erased from existence, along with everyone else, leaving Liu Kang to restart time by himself. Or she might have been saved and become the goddess of time by Liu's side.
Personally, I wasn't big on the latter ending. As I implied in the retrospective, I am not a fan of the Kitana/Liu ship at all. Yeah, it sucked that she & her accomplishments were erased, but that just meant she was in the same boat as everyone else. Could be good or bad, but better than joined to Liu's hip for eternity.

When MK11 first came out, I was tempted to write something up about her portrayal as a follow-up to the retrospective. I decided not to because, aside from what I've already written, the only thing I would end up discussing was how Kitana Kahn was similar and different to the other iterations of the character, Prime and Nu. She's most similar to Prime, but there are elements of Nu-Kitana there.
I also had this out-there theory that maybe the reason Nu-Kitana was such a loser in MK9 was because of Kronika.

Half of it would’ve just been me babbling about head-canon, semantics and shit, and I didn't think it was really worth a full post. So I left it alone.

If MK11 was the end of Kitana as we knew her—regardless of which timeline—I thought it a good and worthy send off. After suffering her abysmal & embarrassing portrayal in MK9, and MK/DC before it, it was a fucking joy to see her finally be a proper bad-ass in the story again.

But, once again, Netherrealm Studios can't leave well enough alone.

Tried So Hard, and Got So Far

But In the End, It Doesn’t Even Matter

I'm not going to give a play-by-play summary of Aftermath, but essentially, Shang Tsung returns and is up to no good.
As pertains to Kitana … Sindel is resurrected, and SWERVE, she's actually evil and releases Shao Kahn. And from there everything goes tits up. The heroes are decimated, Kitana & Liu are defeated by Kahn & Sindel, Kitana's armies renounce her and pledge themselves to Kahn again, and I believe the last we see/hear of her, Sindel suggests chaining her up in a dungeon.

Now looking at this purely in a vacuum … in a vacuum, ignoring a lot of outside stuff, accepting it for what it is … this honestly isn’t terrible. It’s depressing as fuck, but not character assassination the way MK9 was, and well executed for what it is.

Unlike MK9 or other previous instances of Kitana getting jobbed out, her downfall in Aftermath isn’t about building up another character. She isn’t just a prop to move someone else’s story forward.
The tragedy is hers and the focus is on her, where it belongs.

As bleak as it is, this is Kitana’s story, and believe it or not, it harkens back to her storyline in the original timeline. And I dare say highlights a tragic poignancy to her.

As I explained at length in the retrospective, this woman has gone through a lot of shit. Even in the old timeline, where things went relatively better for her overall, Kitana's victories tended to be brief and fleeting.

We all know how she learned her life had been a lie and Shao Kahn used her. Except for Jade, whatever friends or allies she had did not join her. She had to contend with her mother in MK3.
No matter how hard she tries, she can't seem to get rid of Kahn for good. Every time she thinks peace has been achieved, a bigger and deadlier threat appears. Liu Kang died. She thought Goro was her friend and mourned his supposed death … just for him to betray her and join Kahn again.
Her own death, Onaga, Armageddon … it keeps going, and as we saw in Deadly Alliance and Deception, it does wear on her.

At her best, perseverance was always one of Kitana's defining and most endearing attributes.
But one of the tragedies of her character is that she seems to be fighting a losing battle. And Aftermath, for all its faults, not only affirms that, but suggests it's a battle she'll never win.

She beat Shao Kahn. She fought him herself and won. She united Outworld.
And just like that, it was all taken from her. Shao Kahn is restored. Sindel betrays and beats her. Liu Kang fails. People will focus on her reaching for Liu's hand I'm sure, but for me, the real devastating moment is when her troops renounce her and pledge themselves to Kahn—much like Goro had in the original timeline.

All her hard work … everything she's risked and done to free Outworld and its people … all for nothing. All for people who turned their backs on her.
I commend the animators and motion capture, because you see the heartbreak on her face.

And, you know, just to rub it in even more … remember, why is she even enduring all this? Why is she doomed to constant betrayal, disappointment, and pain?
Because when she discovered the truth about her past and what Shao Kahn really was, she tried to do the right thing. That’s all Kitana has been since the beginning: a woman trying to make things right and suffering for it.

There is something poignant about that. Again, it’s depressing and bleak as fuck, but there is.

And that doesn’t have to be the end of her story. In fact, if they want to or care enough, Netherrealm Studios can use this to take her in new directions for future games.
As said, Kitana is apparently still alive. Sindel wanted her thrown in a dungeon, but Kahn & her get ganked by Shang Tsung. So presumably, Kitana could still escape … as long as Tsung's ending doesn't come true I suppose.

Where does she go from Aftermath? Where could she go? Does she continue clinging to the lost cause of restoring Outworld and Edenia … despite them abandoning her at her lowest point? I mean, it kind of seems like “masks off” now. Is Outworld even worth saving? Does she finally accept her dreams are hopeless and turn her back on the world? If she did, what would she do with herself?

There are intriguing possibilities if they followed up on Kitana having to actually deal with the grief and shame and anger of her betrayals and failure.

But … this is Netherrealm Studios we're talking about.

Lack of Faith

To reiterate: Kitana’s fate in Aftermath is a hopelessly bleak and depressing turn.
It could be tragically poignant and maybe lead to new possibilities for her. But it could just as easily be more of the same and not lead to anything meaningful. It depends on one’s faith in Netherrealm Studio’s storytelling. Cue awkward silence.

This is why I emphasized “in a vacuum” earlier.

Take it out of a vacuum, and you first have to acknowledge that just about everything that happens to Kitana in Aftermath is dependent on the blatant, ludicrous, nonsensical retcon of Sindel.
As I said earlier, they only way Sindel being revealed as evil works is if you fly with the multi-verse timeline interpretation. Because otherwise there is no fucking way it makes sense for the Sindel of the original timeline or even the MK9 timeline to have been evil all along.

Post-MK3, she was firmly established as a kind and benevolent ruler who loved her daughter. MK9 retconned it so she didn’t commit suicide, but sacrificed herself to ensure Earth’s protection from Kahn.
They buried the lede too deep. Sindel was good. There’s no way you can suddenly say: “Actually, no, she was a conniving backstabber the whole time.”

And the blatant disregard of continuity and character consistency is indicative of how Netherrealm Studios has treated the storyline for a while. Why should anyone get invested in anything that happens when it’ll be forgotten or ignored in the next game? Sindel isn’t the first character to do a blatant and inexplicable 180, and I doubt she’ll be the last.

Take it out of a vacuum, and you must acknowledge previous games and how the developers have handled Kitana and other characters.
Think about how they decided virtually everybody unceremoniously died at the end of Armageddon just to reset the timeline. Think about how midway through MK9, they abruptly had Sindel, Destroyer of Worlds, steamroll half the cast for shock value. And AGAIN in Aftermath. Think about how MK11, one way or another, ended with all of history erased so everything could start over yet again.

Regarding Kitana in particular, remember how for a long stretch, she was reduced to a two-bit damsel in distress who was only shoe-horned into games because of her popularity and name value. How she was repeatedly beaten, brainwashed, killed, and enslaved just to give Liu Kang some modicum of motivation.

It was a joy to see her be a bad-ass again in MK11, but that doesn’t make me forget the multiple games and years Netherrealm Studios was treating her like shit. Is what happened to her in Aftermath a considerate turn that will lead to something more, or is it just back to business as usual after she was thrown a bone in MK11?

If she returns in MK12, will she be back to trying to restore Edenia like nothing happened? Will she be reduced to clinging to Liu Kang’s leg because for some god forsaken reason they keep trying to push the Kitana/Liu ship as the cornerstone of their characters? If the timeline is starting over—again—was all the shit Kitana went through and suffered all for nothing?

Netherrealm Studios' history of sloppy, inconsistent storytelling does not inspire confidence. And as a result, Kitana's potentially poignant, if tragic, story could be reduced to meaningless, edge-lord misery porn.

Pizza Cutters

See, here’s the thing about bleak, downer stories: they still need to have a point.
You can have your heroes fail. You can have evil win. You can have a dark, nihilistic ending where everything is miserable. But it still has to have a point—even if the pointlessness itself is the point.

What happens to Kitana in Aftermath isn’t necessarily terrible … but that’s assuming there will be a point to it. As I said, there is something in her being tragically doomed to fighting for a lost cause.
But it has to actually pay off in some way. It doesn’t have to be a happy ending, but there needs to be something. Because there's only so many times we can see her get smacked around by Sindel before we start asking what the point of it all is.

Reseting history yet again accomplishes nothing. At least, if time was reset in MK11, the cast went out on a high. Having characters unceremoniously die over and over again for cheap shock value only for the story to start all over again means nothing. It's cheap, faux-edgy bullshit.
Everybody sucks, nothing matters … so why even bother?

This is what truly killed MK9’s story.
I focused on Kitana in the retrospective, but I said there was a lot about MK9 that broke me. For all I complained about lore and retcons, the thing that really made me give up on Mortal Kombat with MK9 was just how pointless it all was.

Characters fight, characters die, characters come back. Backstories change at random. Motivations are retconned out of nowhere. Characters are dictated by the plot and are at its mercy. Lots of effect, very little cause. No one is going anywhere, it's not leading to anything, and fuck it, time travel problems away if they become too much.

It's sound and fury … signifying nothing. Bleak, nihilistic stories can work, but they have a shelf life. Sooner or later, they need to end or change before fans finally get the message that nothing matters and they stop caring.
Darkness Induced Audience Apathy is a thing for a reason.

But now comes the question I've always been hit with: why does Mortal Kombat's story even need a point if it's just a fighting game?

Here's the thing … back in the day, the story was limited to each character getting a little paragraph for their bio and a paragraph for their ending. That was it. You could forgive the story for being little more than "This is why Character A is fighting Character B"

But if Netherrealm Studios is going to create these long, cinematic story modes with fully rendered scenes and motion captured actors giving performances and god knows what torture they're putting the animators through … well, I think Steve Martin said it best: