Generally, most of Mortal Kombat's scrappies emerged from the post-2D games. Considering that many fans could probably count the few popular characters introduced from MK4 all the way to Armageddon on their fingers and still have a few to spare, this isn't surprising. There does seem to be some hope the developers are starting to learn, as Mortal Kombat X introduced a slew of new characters with relatively little hate coming their way.
- Mortal Kombat 3: The original scrappy of Mortal Kombat is Kurtis Stryker. His lore is uninspired: a beat cop who gets caught up in something bigger is a genre staple, sure, but here it's essentially a retread of Sonya Blade. His design is even worse: generic cop gear, topped off with what appears to be a girdle, implying that he's not even in good shape. His move set was a terrible combination of boring and cheap. What's worse, due to the removal of Johnny Cage, Stryker was pushed hard as the new audience surrogate character, up to and including being the team leader in Defenders of the Realm. Later attempts to salvage the character, such as a bizarre Tron-like redesign and a backstory which mentioned singlehandedly thwarting an office building full of terrorists and stopping a bomb on a moving bus won over a few defenders, but not enough. Tellingly, despite Ed Boon liking the guy, and the Mortal Kombat 9 iteration of the character being overall positively received, Stryker is the only one of the characters killed in 9 to not make a playable appearance since then, only reappearing as a Kameo Fighter in the second reboot.
- Mortal Kombat 4: Meat is unpopular because he's essentially a Flat Joke Character. He wasn't even a character as such to begin with — his texture mapping was, as a joke, unlockable for any character you chose to play after doing something specific in MK4. He had none of his own moves - his name wasn't even in the game, he was always identified as the character onto whom his texture mapping was placed. Technically, his only real appearance was in Armageddon, but he wouldn't have shown up there at all were it not for this gag in MK4. To make matters worse, since Armageddon is also infamous for its Create-A-Fatality mechanic, Meat doesn't even have a Fatality of his own to make him stand out.
- Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance:
- Perhaps the most unanimous Scrappy in the entire series is Hsu Hao. His goofy design as well as his sloppy animations and gameplay have made him very hated at worst, and forgettable at best. Combine all of that with him being a very unflattering depiction of a Yellow Peril stereotype villain, and you have a character who is reviled to the point of even the creators disliking him and actively regarding him as a mistake of ignorance on their parts.Fan: (upon seeing Kano's MKX design) Would Hsu Hao be jealous of that chest piece?
Ed Boon: Yes, and we don't care.- He makes an appearance in the MKX comics as well... for about one or two pages, in which he is instantly and brutally killed by Scorpion, who tells him to buzz off.Scorpion: GET OUT OF HERE!
- Memetic Mutation in the lead-up to MK11 saw people sarcastically calling for his return. And he did... as a mutilated corpse stuffed into a burlap sack Erron Black carries with him in one of his fight intros. It was as if NetherRealm Studios took one look at the ironic calls for his return and simply went "HA HA HA—No". The Joker does decide to recruit him alongside Havik and Mileena in his arcade ending, though. Though considering how NetherRealm Studios seems enjoy portraying the Joker as the most vilest and despised person in any given room...
- He makes an appearance in the MKX comics as well... for about one or two pages, in which he is instantly and brutally killed by Scorpion, who tells him to buzz off.
- Mokap. His concept was ridiculous and scrutinized for being lazy, and even made Screw Attack's "Top Ten Worst Mortal Kombat Characters" list.
- Drahmin for being difficult to control (he's one of the only playable characters that had no dial-a-combos), not to mention the irritating flies that follow him around.
- Drahmin's buddy Moloch is hated for being an incredibly cheap midboss and having a flat backstory that makes him little more than stock monster. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he and Drahmin were killed in the MKX comic. The trophy room in 11's Krypt slightly alters this to say that Drahmin managed to escape the Netherrealm and tried to swear loyalty to Shao Kahn as an enforcer. Shao just murdered him on the spot without hesitation.
- Perhaps the most unanimous Scrappy in the entire series is Hsu Hao. His goofy design as well as his sloppy animations and gameplay have made him very hated at worst, and forgettable at best. Combine all of that with him being a very unflattering depiction of a Yellow Peril stereotype villain, and you have a character who is reviled to the point of even the creators disliking him and actively regarding him as a mistake of ignorance on their parts.
- Mortal Kombat: Deception made one out of its new main character, Shujinko. In theory, he sounds alright: a Shaolin monk like Liu Kang and Kung Lao, who was deceived by the new Big Bad. In practice... not so much. He got off on the wrong foot with almost everyone, when a cutscene shows said villain, Onaga, effortlessly walking through fan favorites Raiden, Quan Chi, and Shang Tsung, with an as-yet-unseen Shujinko introducing himself by telling the viewer this is all his fault. Select him in the game, and you'll find out that he's an unimpressive-looking old man with a dull moveset full of pieces lifted from other characters. Finish his arcade mode, and you'll be treated to him singlehanded stopping Onaga with an absurd All Your Powers Combined move, and this ending turned out to be canon. To learn any more than that, you'd have to play through Conquest Mode, the MK franchise's first attempt at a "story mode," with all the questionable decisions and bad gameplay that implies - Shujinko is shown as a Pinball Protagonist meandering through dull sidequests until he meets another fighter, who will inexplicably decide to train him... at which point, Shujinko literally gets replaced by his new teacher's game model, despite not canonically being a shapeshifter, because Midway ran out of time to map other characters' movesets to a different body. It's also strange that he's supposed to be Japanese (to the point his name is simply the Japanese word for "protagonist"), but belongs to a sect of Chinese monks and is from a village that eats Korean kimchi and ham (of which the earliest recorded instance of ham was in ancient China). Shujinko's only presence in the alternate timeline is an Alas, Poor Scrappy Death by Cameo in a single Mortal Kombat X arcade ending. That said, the second new timeline
in Mortal Kombat 1 shows him coming back as an unusual Kameo fighter, so things may change for him. - The Sindel of the second timeline starting from Mortal Kombat 9 ended up generating a LOT of unwanted heat. In her debut, she murdered all but four heroic kombatants in rapid succession, including her own daughter and attendant, and it took the Heroic Sacrifice of Nightwolf to stop her, but the damage was not undone. The game still managed to tease that this might be a case of Brainwashed and Crazy since in the Arcade Ladder ending, she showed herself to be like her original timeline self, regaining her conscience and ruling Edenia wisely. Come Mortal Kombat 11, however, it turns out that in this particular timeline, there was a Retcon of her personality and entire backstory, whereas instead of being a queen that was tragically snatched away from the love of her life and had to commit suicide to spite her captor and also protect other realms as well as a loving mother, here she's a one-note, power-hungry dominatrix who lied and cheats her way and pretty much in cahoots with Shao Kahn. Even in the Aftermath expansion pack, her personality didn't change; any notions of "good deeds" she did like saving Nightwolf or embracing Kitana like she did in Deception, turned out to be calculated Bitch in Sheep's Clothing actions. Unlike Shao Kahn and Shang Tsung, who at least warranted Love to Hate reactions, this version of Sindel is just plain despised, but unlike the likes of Hsu Hao, the new storywriter approved by Ed Boon once stated somewhere along the line of "Sindel would be much more interesting if she's Evil All Along, in the previous timeline, she's a one-note damsel and a tragic abused wife trophy." note , so there was a notion into thinking that this new incarnation of Sindel would be much more liked. The statement largely backfired, with many disgruntled fans creating the "#NotMySindel" movement in response. Fortunately, Mortal Kombat 1 took the opportunity based on another Continuity Reboot to re-rail Sindel back as being a stern, but fair and ultimately benevolent empress of Outworld, returning her to her far more respected Dark Is Not Evil shtick. However, the evil Sindel somehow makes a return (as a servant of Titan Shang Tsung) to actually kill off the good Sindel. Although reception for the death of the rerailed Sindel is considered a genuine Tear Jerker, it would seem that the evil Sindel had the last laugh (although she later gets killed off by a rightfully pissed Mileena, now the blood daughter of the new Sindel).
- Mortal Kombat X: Initially, D'Vorah ended up a Base-Breaking Character for killing MK veterans and fan-favorites Baraka and Mileena in the story, as well as her Chronic Backstabbing Disorder and the way Netherrealm seemed to shoehorn her into past story events she had definitely not been a part of before. In Mortal Kombat 11, however, she soon upgraded to this after killing a much beloved legacy character in Story Mode (the older, genuinely heroic Scorpion, who was well-liked in X due to his Character Development), plus subverting Karma Houdini Warranty when she gets away with it all scot-free in the end after a pissed off revenant Scorpion, having pulled off a Heel–Face Turn thanks to Hanzo, fails to kill her. It doesn't help that many of her pre-battle dialogues showcase a much more hypocritical side of hers and she brags about her former attacks, betrayals and murders, which comes off as boring and repetitive. Though it's clear that she was written into the narrative as a Hate Sink, this backfired and instead earned some genuine hate from the fanbase, with the only saving grace to her Karma Houdini status being the inevitable timeline reset.
