5
Mortal Kombat 11 Fans Were Upset About Preventing Slavery
It's tradition by this point that whenever a new edition of Mortal Kombat is released, someone somewhere finds something to get angry about -- from the series' comically gratuitous violence to its casual sexism to (more recently) its microtransactions. The controversy surrounding the recently released Mortal Kombat 11, however, took this pattern to new, stupid depths.
The main villain of MK11 is a time-meddling psychopath who, after being defeated, hands her powers off to the player character who defeated her -- which triggers one of many different endings, depending on the character. While most of these endings involve characters correcting problems in their own lives, the ending for one fighter, Jax, is a little more big-picture. How big a picture? He prevents the transatlantic slave trade from ever happening.
"I'm lucky. My family and I lived the American Dream. But most people who look like me haven't had that chance. I owe it to them to put things right. And I'm not waiting centuries for people to get woke when I've got the power to speed things up. I don't get it right the first time. Or the second. Or even the third. But eventually, I knock it out of the damn park."
As Mike Fahey for Kotaku points out, the ending is a little more nuanced than "The black guy ends slavery with time travel," but because that sort of nuance doesn't matter if you're a bigot, the ending was immediately turned into "The black guy ends slavery ... because he hates white people and wants to commit white genocide!"
Via Reddit
Smudboy/YouTube
InfiniteRetro/YouTubeIf anyone ever does try to genocide white people, this kind of thing is going to make it impossible to talk about without sounding like an entitled jackass.