User blog:Kaihedgie/It's a strange thing.

I'm left wondering about this little bias we have here:

The first Mortal Kombat movie is often considered one of the prime examples of a good film adaptation of a video game, regarding as the best among many fans. In spite of this fact, the movie itself actually lacks what visually distinguished Mortal Kombat from the other fighting games at the time: the blood and Fatalities. The movie is rated PG-13 and features blood in only one scene in the entire movie, where Liu Kang kicks Shang Tsung in the face and his lip bleeds a little. There are Fatalities, but only three of them, two of which are pretty tame as a matter of fact and even then, no blood is spilled. It instead all focuses on story telling and good fight scenes

Now we fast forward over to the animated series, Defenders of the Realm. Similar rating and a lack of blood and gore. There's also a heavy focus on character development to make the protagonists all the better to relate to instead of just painting them as bloodthirsty savages like some fans seem to think when they first watch this. How is it that the film gets infinitely praised while the cartoon itself gets shafted when it follows the very same formula and continuity? Both are character and story driven and didn't rely on the visual perks of the games and one of them is shunned by the community.

Why? Because Defenders of the Realm is a cartoon and apparently, to "adults", all cartoons are kiddy and childish. Hypocritical criticism and ignorance of "adult cartoons" aside, people seem to have forgotten that we and many other people back in the 90s were kids when we played Mortal Kombat. It's hard to argue that a very large portion of the game's fanbase at the time consisted of children, which made sense to create a series for the younger crowd. I guess people don't like to take a shine to when a series focuses on giving characters actual personality instead of making them as ruthless and one-dimensional as possible. Kaihedgie 19:51, November 11, 2011 (UTC)