Board Thread:Mortal Kombat X/@comment-25033529-20150505005712/@comment-9265336-20150505215207

It's the difference between being an elder god and a regu,lar guardian god. There are a lot of tiers of gods in MK and we barely touch the surface, we basically get the cop and their junior partners, with the elder gods being a sgt or major. There were some sort or previous iteration of gods, or something beyond the elder. Something that made the elder gods and lower gods to maintain the realms for some purpose (create better fighters i could assume) and those something(s) effect which magics work and which don't and onaga is a being created in the attempts to make a physical body for a god, like the did for the other teirs of gods. (shinnok and raiden don't look like they do, i'm suspicous that corrupted is closer to a true physical form of an elder god then the humanoid form. They fought millions of years before humans existed on earth and spread humans from earth to other realms to make fighters and made human-like vessels to occupy)

So as for the fates worse then death line, raiden can't fully kill shinnok, he would return to the realms if he was fully destroyed, So he chopped off his head and cut out his tongue, maybe he used magic to keep him alive in the head as well