Our favorite scream queen is back! After a long wait and a lot of fan anticipation, Sindel is finally back as Mortal Kombat’s latest DLC. With Sindel’s recent addition to the roster you would hope that fans would be pleased, but alas their not. What is leaving some fans up in arms and disappointed is not how Sindel fairs with other fighters or her gameplay mechanics, but rather a recon to her story and in some cases the a rather huge change to the lore of the entire franchise. Warning, spoilers ahead. If you are interested or this doesn’t concern you or won’t deter from disliking our favorite serial siren, then grab some popcorn and go right ahead.
Sindel, even though she hasn’t been in a lot of the games, has an equal part interesting and tragic part in Mortal Kombat’s story. She was the reigning queen of a realm called Edenia until the series’s antagonist Shao Kahn invaded it and merged it with his realm Outworld. He kept Sindel and her daughter Kitana to be his bride and daughter and killed their king, and Kitana’s father, Jerrod. Sindel later claimed her own life to free herself from Shao Kahn, or that is how the story goes. The series is going through a reboot period and a lot of revisions in its original lore but Sindel’s backstory is a doozie. In an ending to Sindel’s character in Mortal Kombat 11 we’ve are met with a disturbing revelation. Not everything was what it seems and Sindel’s backstory is a lie as Sindel herself killed Jerrod and took Shao Kahn as her new husband in a scheme to eventually rule all the realms. A lot of fans are upset about how this changes Sindel, who was a good character aside from her debut in Mortal Kombat 3, but that was an evil resurrection and brainwashing (like we haven’t been through that ourselves, big whoop). Some fans, in their disgust have cried that creator of the series, Ed Boon, and the company Netherrealm Studios have reduced her to a “scheming thot.” But have they? Is there a justification for the direction Boon has placed the character?
I can understand where the people are coming from as they feel. There's an old saying that when you live long, you live long to see yourself become the villain. Well, Sindel has lived twice and I'm sure it does hurt a lot of fans to see Sindel go bad and to them it feels like it does away with a lot of the character, but they do have to keep in mind that MK 11, as well as the last two games were a part of the new reboot and certain characters had revisions and alliances changed. Good guys like the series’ protagonist Liu Kang, along with Kitana and mostly a lot of the heroes were, or at least the reboot versions of those characters, are not evil except for Sonya Blade, Jax, Johnny Cage, and Raiden to say the least. It doesn’t really make sense to complain about good characters going bad or have Sindel being a villain who backstabbed one character to form an alliance with another villain in the pursuit of power. A lot of the series’ villains have aligned and backstabbed each other to get what they wanted, especially the characters Shang Tsung and Quan Chi who both can name former alliances they betrayed like Ariana Grande can make a song about exes. Again, it doesn’t make sense to be mad at a villainous character being deceitful and is all about betrayal.
It is a case of how things are now and fans of the old has to learn to be accepting of the change and the now. We learned this from current reboots like Ghostbusters, the 2016 reboot and the new one coming out, as we as continuations of old series like Star Wars where old favorites are dying off, making way for new characters to take their places.
If anything the fans who are upset of the new Sindel and the recon can be glad about is that the current recon does give her a sort of agency in the series with her being active and a force, and in some ways an actual threat to protagonists and even some villains instead of her being a bystander in the old story with things happening to her like watching her realm be taken over, her husband dying, her dying herself, and her being brought back to life and brainwashed for an evil scheme. It’s not the character growth that we want but it’s more so the character growth that we need, which is a lot better than her growth in the original story where she didn’t do much as a hero other than be a good mother to Kitana. Also, there are probably worse versions of Sindel so we can’t really complain. What are your thoughts?
