Cetrion

• Affably Evil: Cetrion is unfailingly polite, and unlike her brother, her politeness is sincere. She never raises her voice tone to threaten the heroes, and even spares Jacqui when asking for Kronika's crown in Jax's and Jacqui's chapter. The only times she tosses in a mean-spirited remark in the versus matches, they're aimed at either Johnny Cage or Sindel.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: Her default skin is grayish-purple, and many of her kosmetics showcase a wide range of different skin colors.
• Ambiguous Situation: Given the frequent espousing of the sheer impossibility of the Elder Gods dying (with Shinnok being the prime example), it's unclear if Cetrion truly "died" handing over her soul to empower Kronika. It's also likely that the Elder Gods simply can't be killed by any being much lower than themselves, which would explain Cetrion being able to kill the other Elder Gods in the first place. Alternatively, even if it is possible to kill an Elder God, much like Raiden in the original timeline (releasing his godly essence to stop Onaga and reforming in Outworld), the Elder Gods are likely capable of much of the same feat, and a versus match between herself and Kitana states that she was freed from the hourglass when Kronika was taken out of comission.
• Anti-Villain: She really stretches the boundary, and as noted by the Kollector, she's Not So Above It All. With that said, a lot of her dialogue, both in Story Mode and intros, makes it clear that she doesn't inherently enjoy violence, that she knows deep down that her mother is evil and needs to be stopped, and the only thing preventing her from pulling a Heel–Face Turn is Kronika's grip on her. In fact, Fire God Liu Kang's assertion that her heart truly wasn't in fighting for Kronika's goal suggests that this was the only reason he was able to defeat her.
• Arch-Enemy: She see’s Cassie Cage as one, since she’s the one who defeated her brother Shinnok.
• Armor-Piercing Question: A good chunk of intros with other fighters have at least one where they deliver such a question to her that she weakly retorts.
• Asshole Victim: Despite her personal doubts, Cetrion still aided Kronika willingly in her insane, destructive schemes to create the so-called perfect timeline. Her death in her final effort to aid her mother is well-deserved, especially when Kronika herself dies despite the sacrifice.
• Astonishingly Appropriate Appearance: While Shinnok looks like a withered corpse and dresses in dark colors, Cetrion, as a goddess of life and nature, is a beautiful, florid woman with ornaments made of brightly colored crystals and leaves. She even has small glowing dots on her cheeks resembling constellations.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: She started off as the opposite of Shinnok, but by the current game has become little different than him. Like Shinnok, she betrayed the Elder Gods and determined to subjugate the realms to a singular god (in this case her mother's) regardless of the cost or who suffers from it. Snaps out of it only in her arcade ending.
• Blind Obedience: Well filial obedience is a virtue, and what with her being the god of virtue this inevitably comes up.
• Breast Plate: She's wearing a crystal armor with a plunging neckline.
• Breath Weapon: One of her fatalities ends with her breathing a beam of light onto her opponent… after growing to planetary proportions.
• Bright Is Not Good: Differently from Shinnok, Cetrion has vividly colored skin and clothes.
• Broken Pedestal: She is this for Raiden and Liu Kang, as an Elder God who betrayed her fellow gods and the Realms to serve Kronika.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Due to her status and devotion to her mother's plan, she reacts with baffling nonchalance when she's reminded that Shinnok is her brother. As she puts it, "even Elder Gods have kin".
• Co-Dragons: With Geras and Revenant Liu Kang to her mother Kronika.
• Color-Coded Eyes: As befitting an Elder God who rules over nature, her eyes are a bright and shining green in her default appearances. They change color based on the kosmetics picked for Cetrion.
• Daddy's Girl: Or "Mommy's Girl" in this case. Cetrion may be an Elder God, and even feels internal conflict with Kronika's plan, but her loyalty to her mother overrides her doubts. She even sacrifices herself to give Kronika the power she needs to rewind time.
• Elemental Powers: As befitting a goddess of nature, Cetrion has mastery over rocks, wind, plants, fire and water (including ice).
• Emerald Power: Is an Elder God. Wears green-leaf patterned clothes and has greenish crystals hovering around her head. Compare her brother's Red and Black and Evil All Over and her mother's Gold and White Are Divine.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: In a way, she cares about Shinnok as she recognizes his importance to Kronika's balance.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • She's just as contemptuous towards Shao Kahn and Frost as everybody else and makes it clear that she does not enjoy working with them. She's also disgusted when Erron Black expresses pride in killing his abusive dad.
  • Cetrion claims evil and good are relative terms, which makes sense given her existence with Shinnok in Kronika's ploy. But when confronted with Shang Tsung, she describes him as pure evil.
  • In an intro with Erron Black, even she is displeased by his brand of humor.
• Evil Costume Switch: Calling her "good" in the context of the story is pushing it, but her last appearance after Fire God Liu Kang defeats the remaining revenants depicts her with deathly grayed skin like Shinnok's, an red outfit that shows slightly more cleavage, ordinary rocks with molten lights at their tips in place of the gemstones previously featured on her, and her limbs are depicted as molten. This is all punctuated by her reddened eyes. It's by this point she's irrevocably on the villain's side (unless it's her klassic tower ending).
• Evil Laugh: More like a Sinister Chuckle in a couple of intros.
• Face–Heel Turn: In spite of being a goddess of life and virtue, Cetrion follows Kronika's plans to rewrite time, even wiping out her fellow Elder Gods to do so.
• Fertile Feet: Her steps cause grass to grow and butterflies to appear.
• Foil: To Shinnok. Like him, Cetrion is one of Kronika's children and an Elder God who is almost always polite, even towards her enemies. Unlike Shinnok, who represents death and decay while being a fallen Elder God whose affability is surface-deep, Cetrion represents life and fertility while being an active Elder God whose politeness is genuine. However, she ultimately proves to be no different from her brother.
• Freudian Excuse: Her mother's grip on Cetrion is airtight, to the point of where Cetrion will not hesitate to obey her even when it's clearly against her better judgment.
• Giant Woman: Her unlockable fatality "Good and Evil" first has her grow quite large to stomp her entombed opponent (similar to her height when speaking along with the other Elder Gods to Past!Raiden), and then she proceeds to grow astronomically (around as tall as the Earth's diameter) to scream out a ray of searing light down at her hapless victim.
• God of Good: Subverted in the main story mode. She is supposed to be this especially to counter Shinnok, but instead, she did nothing in the previous games whenever evil threatened all of the realms and by now has become not that different from her evil brother. This is of course due to her being The Mole of the Elder Gods for her mother Kronika and likely interfered in their attempts to stop the evil or even encouraged them to sit the conflict out.
• God of Light: Cetrion is the Elder Goddess of Life, Virtue, and Light. Despite that description, she still serves her mother who is the main villain of the story.
• Good is Not Nice: Even in her own arcade ending, wherein she decides that good must eventually win out, she deems mortals too sinful despite her best efforts to outright root evil out. Thus, she takes to extreme measures by "baptizing the realms in fire" (not helped by her appearing as her alternate appearance from the story mode during this segment) and having the forces of good battle the forces of evil for aeons until they eventually win, having them be humbled by the harrowing experiences and more than happy to embrace the light.
• Got the Whole World in My Hand: One of her possible victory animations has her conjure an image of a rejuvenating Earth, an inverse of her brother Shinnok's victory in X.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • Pulls one off in her Tower ending, where she realizes the truth of Liu Kang's words and decides to purge the timelines of evil through her agents. Averted in the Story Mode, where she remains submissive to her mother and never achieves redemption.
  • Some pre-match dialogues indicate that with Kronika defeated, Cetrion is freed from the grip Kronika and her hourglass had on her — but the character she's faced against is usually skeptical that this has reformed her.
• Hero Killer: Calling the Elder Gods "heroes" is a bit of a stretch, but after this game where they actually gave Raiden advice on saving the realms and give him some parting words of wisdom over his angsting over his grim future, Cetrion's betrayal of them given whose side they're own makes her this. Fujin was also counted among her casualties if versus matches are any indication, though Frost also implies that she was given the order to kill Fujin on Cetrion's command.
• Hypocrite: As Sub-Zero points out, she preaches a lot about virtue but does Kronika's bidding. Also, she states that all beings are deserving of compassion while dooming millions of them to die for the sake of upholding her mother's balance.
• I Gave My Word: She takes Jacqui Briggs hostage to get her father to hand Kronika's crown over to her. When he complies, Cetrion returns Jacqui to him completely unharmed and leaves.
• I Hate Past Me: All of her Mirror Matches pit a version of her whom is still loyal to Kronika against one who has pulled a Heel–Face Turn. The latter is always rather snarky towards the former. One instance of these mirror matches, worryingly enough, seems to depict an incarnation of herself against a replacement but not making it clear if this is a later incarnation of her being supplanted or the original one, but this still indicates that some past incarnations if not the original one outright defied Kronika and was killed before being replaced by a more loyal "correction".
• Ink-Suit Actor: Bears a resemblance to her voice actress, Mary Elizabeth McGlynn.
• Killed Off for Real: Given Kronika's permanent death, the only way Cetrion can ever come back is if she somehow incarnates as a different god's child instead.
• Knight Templar: She talks a big game about "virtue" in her intro dialogues, being wholly convinced that she is an absolute paragon of righteousness and goodness. Many characters call her out on that. However, her Tower ending has her realizing the evil of Kronika's deeds and reform.
• Kombat Stilettos: She wears high heeled boots made out of crystals.
• Lady of Black Magic: An unfailingly graceful, polite goddess of nature with the mastery of elements that comes with her position.
• Light 'em Up: Her Fatal Blow "Weeping Willow" and her unlockable fatality "Good and Evil" feature her firing intense rays of light at her unfortunate opponent.
• Light Is Not Good: She's described as the Light to Shinnok's Darkness. Even then, she's willingly party to her mother's plans which are arguably even more omnicidal than Shinnok's. Lampshaded by Scorpion, who claims to not be fooled by her "light".
• Mother Nature: She's styled this way.
• Ms. Fanservice: While the majority of the female characters in 11 have been toned down, Cetrion, while relatively tame compared to the female characters in 9, has the most revealing outfit with a nice bust and has shades of a dominatrix.
• My Master, Right or Wrong: "My Mother, Right or Wrong" in this case. She goes along with Kronika's plan despite knowing deep down that Liu Kang is right and it goes against what she stands for. She only opposes her mother in her own ending, using Kronika's Hourglass to root out evil—and when that didn't work rally the forces of good to eradicate the forces of evil.
• Nature Is Not Nice: A beautiful dryad-like goddess surrounded by butterflies and flowers who has demonstrated savagery on par with any other Kombatant.
• Nominal Importance: Before Cetrion, Shinnok was the only named Elder God, as they rarely operated other than as a collective. Raiden naming Cetrion during his first visit to their dimension marks that Cetrion is narratively distinct from the others — shortly proven correct after she betrays them to side with Kronika.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: She kills off all the other Elder Gods and possibly Fujin as well according to intros with Raiden.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: She exists to fight her brother, Shinnok. Thus, she expresses a personal desire to kill Sonya, Johnny, and Cassie because she feels it wasn't their place to do her job for her, despite bearing no real animosity towards them. This is likely only due to their defeat of Shinnok having thrown her mother's plan of balance out of whack.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: In an intro against Sindel, Cetrion drops all of her affability when she tells the former that she's destined to balance the realms...
  Sindel: And how will I accomplish that?
  Cetrion: By dying.
• Physical God: An Elder God, just like Shinnok and Raiden (from the original timeline).
• Pillars of Moral Character: Given the Mortal Kombat franchise's basis in East Asian culture, Cetrion is a very dark perversion of this ideal. She is unfailingly devoted to both her mother and her assigned duties as Shinnok's cosmic opposite. Even when told that her heart is in conflict with this, Cetrion's loyalty is unflinchingly absolute and she even gives her life to further her mother's goals.
• Plant Hair: She has long vine-like hair.
• Price on Their Head: According to a wanted poster in Erron Black's pre-fight intro, she has the highest bounty out of all the Kombatants by a long shot, with a whopping $999,999,999 bounty. For comparison, Shao Kahn and Shang Tsung are only worth $5,000,000.
• Pure Is Not Good: Cetrion is the pure representation of life, light, and virtue, while her brother Shinnok is the pure representation of death, darkness, and vice. As shown by Kronika's grand scheme, this is not a good thing because it means that both siblings were purposefully pitting the realms against one another in Mortal Kombat, under an inherited belief that this was the only way to achieve true balance in the universe.
• Redemption Rejection: During the Story Mode climax, when Fire God Liu Kang confronts her, he appeals to Cetrion's belief in virtue triumphing over evil in an attempt to convince her to abandon Kronika. Cetrion bites her lip, obviously conflicted, but ultimately steels herself and sticks with her mother.
• Senseless Sacrifice: She sacrifices her very soul to give Kronika a power boost. It comes to nothing when Fire God Liu Kang kills Kronika, ensuring that everything that Cetrion fought for in her mother's name ultimately comes to nothing.
• Shipper on Deck: She tells Kitana that "Liu Kang is her destiny" in their Vs. intro.
• Shut Up, Kirk!: When Fire God Liu Kang tells her that her heart is in conflict with her loyalty, and tries to sway her to his side, she responds only by apologizing to her mother and then sacrificing her life when commmanded.
• Sibling Yin-Yang: Her powers over life, nature and fertility directly oppose those of her brother Shinnok, who rules over death and decay.
• Sizeshifter: As demonstrated by one of her Fatalities, she is capable of manipulating her size to the point when she becomes larger than Earth.
• Top God: Her status as an Elder Goddess makes her this. Her killing of all the other gods only cements this status.
• Treacherous Advisor: Gives a sort of vibe toward Raiden as when the Elder Gods are sought out for their advice on dealing with the temporal crisis kickstarted by Kronika, he at one point name-drops her and asks for the way to defeat Kronika in which she and the others give him the answer. Of course, her being Kronika's daughter aiding in her schemes, she'd have to keep up images until no longer necessary at which she promptly ditches the image of being on Raiden's side after murdering the other Gods in cold blood. Jax is aware of what kind of influence she can have on others in a match intro.
  Jax: Cetrion, you're straight up poison.
• Undying Loyalty: To her mother, Kronika. Subverted in her arcade ending where she sides with Liu Kang against Kronika's vision.
• Unfortunate Names: According to Johnny, her name is this.
  Johnny Cage: Sorry babe, the name ain't working.
  Cetrion: "Cetrion" embodies virtue and light.
  Johnny Cage: Sounds like a damn insurance company.
• Villain Respect: She admits that she can understand why Raiden is so fond of the Warriors of Light.
• What the Hell, Hero?: In one of her intros, she tells Sub-Zero that Noob Saibot can be redeemed, and expresses disgust when he disagrees. She's also appalled when he declares that he has no love in his heart.
• Wreathed in Flames: One of her moves has her cover herself in flames. Another has her ignite a grappled opponent.

Geras

• Actually Pretty Funny: Geras manages to chuckle when Cassie tries to order him to leave, saying she has no authority over him. He also cracks a smile when Johnny hypes himself up as the "savior of Earthrealm".
• Affably Evil: Geras is never anything but softspoken and cordial despite serving great evil. Even when at his worst issuing threats, he still doesn't raise his voice or lose his calm demeanor. And when he insults other characters, it's in a jovial manner.
• Alien Blood: Originally, his blood was blue. The more recent builds of the game have changed it to red.
• And I Must Scream:
  • His ultimate fate in the story mode. Geras' Resurrective Immortality allows him to survive whatever the heroes throw at him, from being decapitated by Kung Lao to being impaled with a forklift and blown up by Cassie. So how does Raiden finally defeat him? He chains Geras to an anchor and sends him plunging into the Sea of Blood in the Netherrealm. Drowning can't kill Geras, but the sea is bottomless. Meaning he'll keep falling forever. Based on Scorpion's quotation, however, it might not have lasted...
    Scorpion: You escaped the Sea of Blood.
    Geras: I became food for a passing leviathan.
    Scorpion: That was the end of your luck.
  • A couple of pre-fight banter conversations will have opponents who are savvy enough to leave him in this state, like Frost and Sub-Zero threatening to freeze him for ages, or Kabal saying he will leave Geras on a meat hook. Geras invites them to try.
• Anti-Villain: Geras is counted as a villain because of his allegiance and loyalty, but he's fairly polite and dutiful otherwise. His non-canon Arcade ending shows that he actually fits this trope better than Kronika, as he realizes that trying to sculpt the perfect timeline with the Sands of Time drove his master to insanity. Now knowing that mortals can shape their own destinies, he performs a Heroic Sacrifice so that the hourglass can run automatically. By MK1, this is done away as his Heel–Face Turn in Liu Kang's New Era removes what few villainous traits he had serving Kronika and makes him an earnest heroic figure instead.
• Badass Boast: When facing off with Sindel in Aftermath.
  Sindel: Your maker sends you to die, Geras.
  Geras: As she has done billions of times before. Each time, the perfection of her design grows closer.
• Become a Real Boy: Geras is certainly interested in being rid of his immortality, having lived around a billion lives. One of his intro dialogues with Shang Tsung has him express interest in becoming mortal with a Shout-Out to the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
  Shang Tsung: In seven days, I can make you a man.
  Geras: A mortal man who can be killed?
  Shang Tsung: I see you quiver with anticipation.
• Been There, Shaped History: As an immortal who does Kronika's bidding, Geras has left his mark in subtle ways throughout time. He claims to have seen the Ice Age during its thaw, was shot by Wyatt Earp in 1881, implies he met (and possibly fought) the Great Kung Lao, and makes reference to having met or studied the ancestors of several characters.
• Bring It:
  • One of his intro quotes when fighting Raiden can read like this;
    Geras: Come thunder, come lightning.
    Raiden: Do you fear nothing, Geras?
    Geras: Nothing within your power, Raiden.
  • And again with Sub-Zero.
    Geras: The coldest death cannot stop me.
    Sub-Zero: Six meters of solid ice will.
    Geras: Do your worst, Sub-Zero.
• Came Back Strong: After Kung Lao beheads him and he revives, he boasts as such to him and Liu Kang.
  Geras: I, Geras, am a fixed point in time. With every death and rebirth, I grow stronger.
• Co-Dragons: He, Cetrion and Revenant Liu Kang serve as this to Kronika.
• Complete Immortality: If there exists a way to kill Geras, no one in MK11 discovers what it is. Being shot, decapitated and blown into bits doesn't do it, and even trying to trap him forever in a bottomless ocean doesn't work, if one intro is any indication. In an intro with Fujin, Geras states that Fujin is immortal, but he is eternal, the difference being that it's possible for Fujin to die; Geras cannot.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Shao Kahn hammers his head to a pulp in Aftermath. Although it's doubtful he's dead, he makes no appearances again strangely.
• Deadpan Snarker: Yes, even the Affably Evil Geras has his moments. He chuckles when Johnny Cage refers to himself as "Earthrealm's savior" in one intro, skeptical of his victory over Shinnok.
  Johnny Cage: Earthrealm's savior has arrived!
  Geras: [chuckle] Savior? Where?
  Johnny Cage: Bullshit, you haven't heard of me.
• Death Seeker: See Become a Real Boy above and Who Wants to Live Forever? below.
• Dishing Out Dirt: His attacks revolve around his control of earth and sand.
• The Dragon: A loyal servant to Kronika. However, his arcade ending reveals he has started to become wary of his master denying him the chance of freedom or death.
• The Dog Bites Back: What he does to Kronika in his arcade ending, having witnessed how insane his master had become due to her attempts to create a perfect timeline. He achieves his goal by offering his essence to the hourglass, infusing it with his own will to run automatically and allowing mortals to create their own destinies.
• Establishing Character Moment: In Geras' first scene, he calmly confronts Liu Kang and Kung Lao before being beheaded with seeming ease by the latter, only to rise again like the injury was nothing and bluntly inform the monks that he can't be killed. Even when temporarily defeated, he expresses respect for the Shaolin monks' spirit, but nevertheless follows Kronika's will to the letter.
• Fate Worse than Death: Raiden wraps him up in giant chains attached to an anchor, then has that anchor drag him down into a bottomless sea, meaning he will fall forever with his inability to die.
• Frankenstein's Monster: While the unsettlingly artficial appearance of his default look can bring this to mind, one of his DLC skins is explicitly based upon the famous literary creature.
• From a Single Cell: Even after Geras is reduced to Ludicrous Gibs by a grenade blast, courtesy of Cassie Cage, the various chunks of unrecognizable gore scattered across the area begin to slowly slither along the ground to join back together. The protagonists are wise enough to vacate the area before Geras completely reforms.
• Golem: His earth-elemental powers, servitude to Kronika, being artificially created according to his bio, and noted similarity to a robot heavily imply that he is one. Raiden in particular wants to separate him from her so that he can define himself.
• Good Costume Switch: His appearance in 1 has a much less artificial aesthetic, with a more natural-looking face and less futuristic clothing. This reflects his new status as an ally of Liu Kang, as opposed to a servant of Kronika.
• Good Thing You Can Heal: Geras rarely takes any effort to defend himself from harm. Knowing that he's immortal, he will typically just absorb whatever damage is thrown at him and then regenerate. It's only when he's in a hurry or being incapacitated would be inconvenient that he bothers showing any signs of defense.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • In his arcade ending in 11, he sacrifices himself to let Kronika's hourglass run on autopilot, as he knows Kronika's repeated attempts to create the ideal timeline slowly reduced her to being a raving loon.
  • In Mortal Kombat 1, he's now a loyal servant and old friend of Liu Kang, and has been appointed guardian of the Hourglass while Liu Kang primarily concerns himself with defending Earthrealm.
• Heel Realization: Realizing how Kronika's repeated attempts to sculpt the perfect timeline corrupted her and that mortals should shape their own destinies instead of someone lording them around, Geras redeems himself by performing a Heroic Sacrifice so that the hourglass can run on auto-pilot in his non-canon arcade ending. This carries over into 1, but without the sacrifice part as he instead decides to aid Liu Kang in defending the new Era.
• Immortality Inducer: Subverted; according to her intro dialogue, Skarlet thinks that Geras' blood is the key to his immortality. While noting that mortals have assumed as much before, Geras pretty handily denies the claim.
• Implacable Man: Let's just say that he can take a lot of punishment and can't be permanently killed due to being a fixed point in time.
• Ironic Name: He shares his name with the Greek god of old age yet, as a creation of Kronika, he is a fixed point in time and thus, cannot age.
• Lag Cancel: His "Stepping It Back" custom variation special costs offensive meter but returns him to a neutral state from any Basic Attack, a la an Arc System Works fighting game.
• The Lancer: In the New Era, he serves as this to Liu Kang by monitoring the timeline while he defends Earthrealm.
• Meaningful Name: Geras shares his name with the Greek god of aging, fitting a being who has lived for eons.
• Noodle Incident: According to one of his intros with Erron Black, Wyatt Earp shot him once in 1881. What Geras was doing there and why Wyatt shot him is never elaborated on.
• Not So Above It All: One of his intros with Johnny Cage has Johnny make a Blade Runner joke. Geras plays along and willingly continues the reference in his own way.
  Geras: I have...seen things you would not believe...
  Johnny: Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion?
  Geras: Time to die...
• Off with His Head!: Gets a dose of this from past Kung Lao; his head breaks down into sand and reconstitutes back on his body afterwards. Also inverted in one of his match intros, as his severed head rewinds and reattaches itself to his body.
• Pulling Themselves Together: Geras' immortality works like this. In one of his intros, we see his head rolling backwards onto his body before he rises up to confront his opponent.
• Redemption Equals Death: In his non-canon ending, Geras does a Heroic Sacrifice to let Kronika's hourglass run on its own to allow mortals to have control over their destiny instead of controlling them, having realized that Kronika's repeated attempts to create the ideal timeline slowly corrupted her mind.
• Resurrective Immortality:
  • He is presumed to have this power, pointing out to both Scorpion and Baraka that he will keep coming back until they are dead. Not that this stops either of them. One of his intros also shows his head rolling from the ground onto his neck. And according to dialogue with Cassie, he's been at it a billion times.
    Cassie Cage: Ugh, that sounds exhausting.
  • Kung Lao should've known better than simply decapitate Geras on the spot.
    Kung Lao: [to Liu Kang] That was easy.
    [cue Geras magically reattaching his head]
• Ridiculously Human Robots: He has a lot of seam lines across his skin, a pair of obviously artificial fabric patches attached perfectly to his shoulders, and a small glowing artifact attached directly to his chest, but other than that looks and acts perfectly human.
• Sand Blaster: The Sands of Time. While Geras can use them to control time, he more frequently forms them into weapons to strike his opponents with.
• Scary Black Man: Downplayed. While Geras is intimidating due to his immortality, allegiances, and powers, he is quite affable and never loses his temper even when being threatening.
• Seen It All:
  • His comment to Dark Raiden has a notion similar to this, as the Thunder God asks him if he fears anything to which Geras responds "Nothing within your power, Raiden".
  • He is unconvinced that the Tarkatans are anything better than slaves and cannon fodder; when Baraka declares that "Tarkatans do not submit!", he retorts that "it is their entire history".
  • In his intro with Nightwolf, Geras also casually mentions having fought and killed others to bear the mantle. Nightwolf attempts to boast that he'll be the one to finally take Geras down for good.... Only to be told that they all say that.
  • One of his intros with Spawn reveals he's even dealt with Hellspawn before - and has personally met Medieval Spawn (Sir John of York).
• Significant Anagram: Swap the "a" and the "r" in his name and you get Gears, as in the gears of time.
• The Soulless: In an intro dialogue he has with Jade, he mentions that he has no soul due to Kronika seeing no need to give him one.
• Stealth Pun: He has control over sand and time. Hence, the sands of time.
• Super-Strength: Kind of required when you can smack someone so hard, their face flies off and their brain comes out.
• Tempting Fate: Given Geras' immortal nature, you'd think he'd be more modest about it. Gloating about it in front of Raiden during the endgame directly leads to his literal downfall.
  Geras: Drowning cannot kill me, Raiden.
  Raiden: That is unfortunate for you. The Sea of Blood is bottomless. You will fall forever.
• This Is Gonna Suck: After being impaled on a forklift and pinned against a wall, his reaction to Cassie tossing grenades at his feet is an expression of pained resignation.
• Time Abyss: A few of his intro quotes seem to imply that he is far older than he seems; at one point he mentions Johnny's ancestors with the tone that he observed their rituals personally. Given that he's implied to be one of many Geras's with a single consciousness shared between them, it makes sense that he could last that long; when one breaks down or is killed, Kronika can just make another one.
• Time Master: Has control over time, including freezing it, rewinding it, and even removing it from the clock.
• Undeathly Pallor: His skin has a cold blue undertone to emphasize his inhuman nature.
• Undying Loyalty: Unlike with Kronika — whom he began to hold doubts over in his Arcade story and eventually betrays — Geras is genuinely 100% loyal to Liu Kang in the New Era, partially due to the fact that Liu Kang's humility gives Geras genuine respect and compassion he deserves for his eternal service helping sustain the Hourglass, as well as the fact Geras actually believes Liu Kang's vision of the New Era is actually not only a viable possibility compared to Kronika's obsession of perfecting every single detail in the timeline exactly, but allows for a much happier existence for generally everyone involved. In fact, when revealed that he safeguarded the power that allowed Liu Kang to become the Keeper of Time once more unbeknownst to him, Geras even says as much when asked by Liu Kang why and if he was tempted, affirming his loyalty to him and stating the only reason why he never told him in the first place was to ensure he could enjoy his life as the Protector of Earthrealm for as long as possible since the process of regaining his powers would doom Liu Kang to forever being the meditator of time once more.
• The Unfought: With the exception of potentially being part of the randomized fusion fights in the last chapter, Geras is not battled nor played as at any point in MK1's story mode.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Gives one to Rambo over his actions in his first film.
  Geras: Your war with Sheriff Teasle was avoidable.
  Rambo: He drew first blood, not me!
  Geras: Your response was disproportionate to his actions.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: His Arcade ending reveals that all he really wants is to finally rest in peace after having served Kronika for countless eons. Kronika's death by his own hands allows Geras to try to sculpt a timeline where everything is perfect before resting, but he finally sees just how corrupted his master had become due to her duty, so he achieves his goal of resting in peace forever by offering his essence to the hourglass, infusing it with his own will to run automatically and allowing mortals to create their own destinies. This seems to however no longer be the case come MK1 with his Ladder ending as well as Liu Kang's explicitly showing his comfort at observing and safeguarding the New Era for eternity, implying instead that his service to Kronika made him pine for the release of death due to the monotony and hopelessness of it all, and is far more grateful to continue living when given the hope that Liu Kang's New Era brings.
• Whole Costume Reference: One of his alternate suits makes him look like Darkseid.
• Worthy Opponent:
  • He met the Great Kung Lao in the past and has respect for his skills. By contrast, he regards the present Kung Lao as an inadequate heir to the name.
    Kung Lao: You met my ancestor?
    Geras: He stood a chance against me. You have none.
  • After Liu Kang or Kung Lao defeat him, he sees them as this.
    Geras: You Shaolin monks exceed your reputations. I respect your spirit, but Kronika's will must be done.
  • He commends Nightwolf as the fiercest of the many Nightwolves he's encountered.
  • He sees Rambo as this, as he wants him to give him the mother of all battles.
• You Are Already Dead: His fatal blow and other special moves involve him freezing time and battering his opponent, and waiting until time resumes for them to feel it all at once. Ouch.

Kollector

• Ax-Crazy: At first he just seems plain crazy, then you see his Fatal Blow and Fatality and realize how utterly insane and brutal he really is.
• Bag of Holding: Explicitly so - almost every weapon he uses is pulled from it, and he can also put defeated opponents into it.
• Bag of Kidnapping: As one of his victory animations show, his bag also serves to kidnap his opponents for whatever cruel things he has in mind.
• Bald of Evil: Underneath his hood is not a single strand of hair.
• Beating A Dead Player: One of his outros have him somehow stuffing his defeated opponent whole into his magic bag.
• Bilingual Bonus: "Naknada" is Croatian for "charge" (as in money).
• Bounty Hunter: One of his hobbies to make koin.
• Breeding Slave: Horrifyingly, this is what he wants to make of Cassie and possibly other Earthrealmers for some unsavory associates.
• The Cameo: Serves as a shopkeeper in 1's Invasion Mode.
• Corrupt Bureaucrat: Used his office to rob anyone he came across, with Shao Kahn's quiet approval. Intro lines imply that he embezzles, too.
• Creepy Souvenir: One of his Fatalities has him tear off chunks of his opponent’s body, including their heart and head, and stuff them in his backpack.
• Did You Just Scam Cthulhu?: An intro with Shao Kahn has him nervously mentioning missing taxes to the man, obviously implying he stole money. When Shao Kahn clearly has little idea what he's on, Kollector is relieved and drops the subject.
• The Dog Bites Back: In his Tower ending, he notes that the Naknada have spent their entire lives as slaves and decides to become Kahn himself, allowing for the Naknada to get the power they want while he continues Shao Kahn’s plans of conquest.
• Epic Flail: His main weapon. He doesn't actually swing it, but propels it into his opponents with magic.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Despite being a selfish debt collector, he is clearly enraged when confronting Erron Black in one intro after learning how he killed his brother.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Zigzagged. If there is something that the Kollector won't sink to, it's mostly for his own self-preservation rather than any morals, including stealing from his people to pay his own debts to Shao Kahn. Sheeva outright lampshades he has no scruples.
  • However, he does call out Cetrion on the fact that she's not as good as she thinks, stating she collects souls just like her brother, Shinnok.
  • He gets an interestingly big case of this against the Joker, exclaiming wanton chaos is not profitable. When the Joker retorts by claiming it's about the fun, Kollector adds nothing about chaos is fun either.
  • In one of his intros with Frost, even he chides her for betraying her former mentor.
  • Instead of using it as leverage in an intro, he just tells Jax that Shinnok owes him reparations for making him a slave. Another of his intros against Sindel has him calling her a racist shrew after she demeans him. Considering Sindel is Shao Kahn's wife, this says a lot and could mean that even he thinks racism of any kind is abhorrent.
  • When Sindel was added as DLC, one of Kollector's intros with her revealed that the tribute he sets for each race is determined by their wealth, and he thus charges higher rates for richer races such as Edenians.
  • Despite his Undying Loyalty to Shao Kahn, he shockingly has no loyalty to Mleena and views her with a degree of contempt. When Mileena makes a demand for Tanya's corpse, he even rebukes any attempts at bargaining. Which, coming from him, is incredible.
• Evil Sounds Raspy: He has a distinct rasp to his voice that makes him even more depraved and creepy.
• Extreme Doormat: He feels so indebted to Shao Kahn that he feels he can't leave his side, even though numerous characters express he could easily be fine without him. Subverted in his tower ending where he takes charge with the power of the hourglass and makes sure everything is his. Kollector just serves Shao Kahn because he gets to collect tributes no other leaders would promise.
• Eye Scream: One of his Fatalities includes him cutting his opponent in half, then swinging a flail into their head from behind, knocking out their eyes.
• Foil: To Baraka. Both are lower-rung minions of Shao Kahn who mainly serve him because he offered them a chance for a better life. They are each fiercely loyal to Shao Kahn in return for this. Both also have a sadistic streak and a penchant for bladed weapons. The difference is that Baraka, while barbaric, is ultimately just trying to look out for his people and do right by them, which is what ultimately leads to his Heel–Face Turn once Kitana promises him better treatment for the Tarkatans than what Shao Kahn gave. Kollector, on the other hand, cares only for himself and in spite of his Undying Loyalty to Shao Kahn, versus intro dialogues strongly suggest that he is embezzling money from Kahn. This even extends to their respective races: while both are seen as expendable, the Tarkatans at least have the reputation of being fearsome warriors while the Naknadans are on the lowest rung of Outworld society.
• Freudian Excuse: His race is said to fare worse than even Tarkatans as Outworld slave labor, and he himself was a starving wreck before Shao Kahn gave him everything he has now. This explains his thirst for higher living and unfaltering loyalty to Shao Kahn when the Shokan and Tarkatans turn against him.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: While many characters suffer from this with pre-match banter, Kollector gets it particularly bad. All but one of his interactions with Shao Kahn is highly amicable, with no reasons given as to why they are even fighting after their conversations.
• Greed: His character is largely defined by his insatiable greed. This is especially highlighted in an intro and victory animation, where he hoards his treasure jealously.
• His Name Really Is "Barkeep": This is actually a characteristic of his species, the Naknada. They don't have names in the traditional sense, but are all named after their profession.
• Hypocrite: His many expressions of loyalty and gratitude to Shao Kahn (and the criticism he throws at others for lacking them) ring a bit hollow when an intro with Shao himself heavily implies that Kollector embezzles from the tribute he collects on his master's behalf.
• I Am Not Weasel: Jax initially mistakes him for a Shokan as two of his six arms are kept behind his back, holding his bag.
• Impossible Thief: Though he had a proper job as a debt collector under Shao Kahn, he became infamous throughout Outworld as a thief following his master's demise. It took decades but by the opening of 11, Kotal caught and planned to execute him.
• Improbable Weapon User: Uses some sort of lamp in his moveset.
• Intrepid Merchant: He serves as a shopkeeper in both 11's Krypt mode and 1's Invasion mode, and he seems able to set up shop wherever he needs to, be it on Shang Tsung's island, Johnny Cage's mansion, or any other realm visitable.
• In the Hood: His default costume has him wearing a cloak over his head.
• Intimidating Revenue Service: Even Shao Kahn's taxman is one nasty piece of work. Regardless of who it is, he asserts all those under the Kahn must pay up or face the death penalty.
• It's All About Me: Kollector's defining character trait is caring only for himself. Shao Kahn, for all his numerous faults, rescued him from dying miserably on the streets. How does Kollector repay this? By stealing him blind. His arcade tower ending isn’t much better. When he uses Kronika's crown to seize power for himself, it is suggested that Naknadans are treated better under him, but they are very clearly still subservient, and all he can think of is using his newfound power to make everything his.
• Kollector of the Strange: His penchant for collecting leads to him having some strange trinkets, a few of which he employs as magical weapons during kombat.
• Kombat Pragmatist: His fighting style is all about using every weapon he has in his backpack.
• Kukris Are Kool: Two of his knives are modelled on kukris.
• Lean and Mean: Compared to Shao Kahn's normal muscular Dragons, Goro and Baraka - and Shao Kahn himself - he's considerably slimmer. He's still pretty powerful, though.
• Manipulative Bastard: This trait practically helped Kollector to get his privileged position in Outworld empire.
  Jade: All these years, you've been exploiting others to rise above your station.
  Kollector: I have risen to my station, Jade.
• Meaningful Name: He's a debt collector for Shao Kahn and the Naknada enforce this by utilizing names chosen for their professions.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Has four regular-sized arms and two smaller arms on his back that hold his bag.
• Multi-Armed Multitasking: While he fights with his four normal arms, he uses his two smaller arms on his back to hold onto his bag. In one of his fatalities, he uses one set of arms to brutalize the opponent while he uses a second set to search through their organs for trophies, even taking his eyes off the carnage to appraise his finds without missing a beat.
• One-Man Band: He puts his multiple arms to good use during his Friendship, playing a guitar, pan flute and drum set all at once!
• Organ Theft: If a subject has nothing else of value, he takes body parts as their tribute. He'll give you a demonstration in his Fatality.
  Sonya: State your purpose.
  Kollector: Merely taking stock of your body parts.
  Sonya: Guess every realm has perverts...
• Pragmatic Villainy: Kollector does morally despicable things because he wants money, not because he enjoys evil for the sake of it, and chides everything about the Joker in one interaction with him.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: An Ax-Crazy debt collector for one of the Big Bads of the Mortal Kombat universe, he has a pair of red eyes to support the image.
• Remember the New Guy?: Given his status as an important minion of Shao Kahn, this makes him a case of this. Justified since as he pointed out in an intro dialogue against Jade, his job gives him little reason to be involved with Shao Kahn's military affairs. His absence in X is also explained in interaction with Mileena: Apart from being a fugitive and personally disliking Kotal, Kollector explains he did not aid Mileena's rebellion because he implies he knew she would fail and wouldn't squander assets on her.
• Self-Made Man: Fancies himself as this. Naknadans are starving slaves in Outworld - yet he climbed the ranks until he became the tax collector of Outworld. He even insults Kitana for being spoon-fed as a princess.
  Kollector: Ungrateful shrew! Born to privilege which you throw away.
  Kitana: Who are you to judge me?
  Kollector: You have not known cold nor hunger. If you had, you would value the gifts Shao Kahn gave you.
• Servile Snarker: As Shao Kahn's queen, he's bound to serve Sindel too. That doesn't mean he's happy about it, and he calls her a "racist shrew" in one of his intros.
• Sinister Scythe: More like Sickle, and he uses one of these as a weapon.
• Slasher Smile: He gives a particularly unsettling one in his Fatal Blow, while slitting his opponent's throat.
• Stealing from the Till: Implied. In spite of his Undying Loyalty to Shao Kahn, one intro banter suggests he is stealing from his boss. When Shao has no idea what he's on, Kollector is relieved and drops the subject.
• Steven Ulysses Perhero: His name is Kollector and he is a debt and tribute collector for Shao Kahn. According to the developers, all Naknada names follow this pattern.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: His Fatal Blow. It starts with smacking his opponent over the head with a heavy lamp, then stabbing them multiple times in the chest with four knifes, then finally he impales his opponent through the head with a knife before slitting their throat.
• Unexplained Accent: Despite not being native to Earthrealm, Kollector speaks with a distinct Hispanic accent.
• Villain Respect: Towards Raiden. He admires how he beheaded Shinnok and presented them to Emperor Liu Kang and Empress Kitana.
• Villainous Valour: Kollector is proud of being a Self-Made Man for climbing the ranks in Shao Kahn's service, and when captured by Kotal Kahn and facing execution, Kollector doesn't take it lying down, defending his actions and successfully lashing out at his captors amidst the chaos of the time merger.
• Xtreme Kool Letterz: As usual with the series, Kollector is spelled with a "K".

Kronika

Voiced by: Jennifer Hale (English), Breck Gambill (Face Model), Irina Indigo (Latin American Spanish)

• Abusive Parents: Kronika combines the worst attributes of emotional manipulation (Cetrion) and neglect (Shinnok).
• Accidental Hero: The past characters she plucked into the Koliseum during the time merger was taken from a time just after Kung Lao had beaten Shang Tsung and Quan Chi, meaning that she indirectly saved Kung Lao's life as Shao Kahn snapped his neck right after his next victory against Kintaro.
• Achilles' Heel: Kronika is surprisingly vulnerable to being zoned due to the quirks of her moveset. For one, she can't crouch, so characters who can spam projectiles repeatedly can cheese her to death this way even on Very Hard. For two, she has no combo breaks, so the most she can do when pushed into a corner is to hold block until you inevitably break it, rinse and repeat. For three, her recovery frames are long enough to make her vulnerable to stun-locking. All of this combined made Kronika out to be possibly the easiest series boss to date, despite being its Big Bad.
• The Ageless: She is immune to the ravages of time, but can be killed through violent means unlike her son, Shinnok.
• All According to Plan: Her armies are turned against her, her forces are bested, her enemies find her keep, yet she continues to claim that this is all part of her plan. It's only when Liu Kang and Raiden fuse that she starts to panic.
• Alpha Bitch: She outranks The Protector Gods, The Elder Gods, and even the One Being. Yet she's far crueler than them all.
• And Then What?: During Aftermath, Kronika gives the Armor Piercing Quesion to aftermath-placed Raiden and Fujin: "Even if you defeat me, what then?" Kronika asks them even more questions, knowing that Shang Tsung will betray them and place the realms in a much worse fate. Raiden is unaware of the future events since he has not lived those events yet, while Fujin has already seen those events, but was too gullible for Shang Tsung's true intentions.
• The Announcer: Shares round announcement duties with Shao Kahn this time around, her voice occasionally replacing the latter's. She can be selected permanently if you link your console account to the Mortal Kombat mobile game, which unlocks her in the announcer options on the console side.
• Antagonist Abilities: Her command over time itself renders mortals completely helpless to her power whenever she appears. The only reasons why Kronika hasn't instantly killed her enemies when she could is because A) she considers them to be mere pests unworthy of her attention and B) most of her enemies are past versions of current allies, and killing the former would erase the latter.
• Anti-Role Model: After he becomes Keeper of Time, Liu Kang looks to Kronika as a shining example of how not to fulfill the role, even giving up his power as a Titan so that he won't be tempted to begin an endless cycle of starting and restarting time to the point of madness, as Kronika did.
• Anti-Villain: Subverted. While her goal of Balance Between Good and Evil isn't inherently evil, Kronika's idea of balance is about having her two children Cetrion and Shinnok pitting the realms against one another endlessly. Furthermore, she has already wiped out countless timelines trying to put her plan into motion.
• Balance Between Good and Evil: Her goal is this literally. In her mind, a balanced universe means that both her children exist and endlessly fight each other. Deconstructed by Raiden, who points out that good and evil being equally powerful is literally the worst possible thing. In Geras's MK11 arcade ending, he realizes her quest to create the perfect timeline drove her to insanity.
• Bald of Evil: Not a single strand of hair on her head, and not a single trace of good in her soul.
• Been There, Shaped History: Even back in the original timeline, she was controlling everything, and everything was going according to her whim, including Armageddon, until Raiden sent his message to the past.
• Benevolent Boss: Subverted. There is a definitive contrast between her more affable and reasonable behavior to her underlings and the more obvious cruelty of past villains like Shao Kahn. Despite not killing her minions when they fail, she is just as uncaring towards her own like the others, seeing them as nothing but pawns in her scheme to build her New Era.
• Big Bad:
  • Of MK11. The first female main antagonist of the franchise, Kronika decides to join the fray due to Raiden's repeated attempts to tamper with the timeline.
  • On a bigger note, she is the true villain of the entire franchise, as she was behind the events of the original and rebooted timelines.
  • Subverted in MK1; despite appearing to be the benefactor for Shang Tsung and Quan Chi, Kronika is still dead, and her appearance is being used by Titan Shang Tsung to obscure his role in trying to conquer Liu Kang's timeline.
• Big Bad Ensemble: She forms this with Shang Tsung in the Aftermath DLC storyline.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Of the Aftermath DLC story. Despite her best efforts, she is outplayed and ultimately defeated by Shang Tsung.
• Blatant Lies: She promises absolute power and dominion over realms to almost all her followers and has no real intentions to uphold it even if it were possible. A few catch on to this during their arcade endings.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Her own death at the end of Arcade Mode, compared to previous games since MK9. She gets kicked into her own hourglass, shattering it. It eventually breaks and cuts off three of her limbs, as she desperately tries to get the crown. One of the shards slices her head off vertically, and Kronika is finally sucked into the hourglass, restoring it back to normal.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Zigzagged and apparently justified. Once Raiden and the other heroes figure out that her machinations were pitting him against Liu Kang throughout countless timelines, she appears before them and admits that the reason is to keep them from combining her power against her. According to her, the reason she's telling them this is because it's not the first time they've made this discovery, and still ended up failing to stop her to the point where she stopped keeping count of how many times this has happened. In the case of the current timeline, she kidnaps Liu Kang to have his revenant steal his soul, so that Raiden would have to face her without him. The only reason this backfires is that Raiden finally figures out a way around their current situation.
• Boring, but Practical: In the Bad Ending of the story mode, she kills Fire God Liu Kang simply by drawing a blade from her arm and beheading him, which is quite simplistic considering her vast displays of power through the game and her own Fatality.
• Bright Is Not Good: Her aesthetic is sleek metallic white with gold and silver accents everywhere, in contrast to previous antagonists, but her intentions are no less omnicidal. Many of Kronika's allies even receive equipment upgrades with this trademark design as a symbol of their allegiance to the Titaness of Time.
• Brought Down to Normal: In Kano's Mortal Kombat 11 arcade ending, Kronika willingly relinquished her power over time to him in exchange for her life.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: She's the first primary female antagonist in the series - and unlike Shinnok and Shao Kahn, who are both warlords, Kronika just wants to course-correct the timeline, which she considers as the right thing to do. This becomes a subversion as it's revealed that she's every bit as ruthless and uncaring as the other two, if not more so.
• Control Freak: There's not a single character on her side that she doesn't treat like an underling to be ordered or a pawn to be duped. And that "balance" she pays so much lip service to isn't about stability or peace or any higher purpose; it's just her own preference for arbitrary symmetry.
• Confusion Fu: Part of the challenge she poses as a boss is that some of her attacks have extremely similar, if not outright identical, startup animations. For example, whenever she summons a large blue orb, it may either split into 4 projectiles in a downward spread, or it may fire an unblockable laser that sweeps across the floor and freezes you if you get hit.
• Cool Crown: Later in the story mode, she is shown to have a magical crown which is a powerful artifact on its own, used to gather souls at Shang Tsung's island to further her schemes. It seems also able to strengthen in kombat whoever wears it.
• Crown of Power: Kronika makes use of a crown that has been placed inside the Well of Souls used by the sorceror Shang Tsung so that the crown will amplify her power. Through her abilities and influence, she specifically arranged for the Well of Souls to exist for this purpose. During their playable chapter, Jax and Jacqui Briggs try to confiscate the crown before Kronika can get it, and one of them will even use it against Kronika's daughter, Cetrion. They gain enough power from the crown to defeat even the Elder Goddess until Cetrion forces them to surrender it by threatening the life of their loved one.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: She's the only Mortal Kombat Final Boss who doesn't explode (Shinnok in Mortal Kombat 4 and the Deadly Alliance being exceptions) in Tower Mode. Rather, she gets cut to shreds by the hourglass shards, before one slices her head in half before it repairs itself while dragging her mutilated corpse into it. She got off easier in story mode where Liu Kang turns her into organic glass and destroying her body. It's actually just as bad for her in Aftermath which ends with her soul being stolen by Shang Tsung.
• Cutting Off the Branches: And she's the one holding the shears. The original timeline through Armageddon, the timeline in MK9, and every single Arcade ladder ending for every character in the entire series is revealed to have been alternate timelines that she allowed to exist in an effort to create a perfect, balanced history, and when none of them measured up she simply erased them and started again. This game is simply the first time we've actually seen her doing the pruning.
• Dark Action Girl: One who is notable for being the first female main antagonist in the franchise.
• Dead All Along: Despite her apparent return as Shang Tsung and Quan Chi's benefactor in MK1, it's eventually revealed that Kronika is still dead, and her form is being used by Titan Shang Tsung for his own ends.
• Deader than Dead: According to Geras in MK1, once a Titan has been killed, they cannot be resurrected. Although Kronika seems to have returned in Liu Kang's New Era, it's revealed that her appearance has been appropriated by Titan Shang Tsung to manipulate his counterpart in the New Era; Kronika is still gone and has no apparent way to return.
• Determinator: Kronika displays the more negative side of the trope. She has spent countless eons trying to build her perfect timeline without ever giving up, but it has taken more than a toll on her sanity, as implied by Geras' Tower ending. Even when her plans get derailed, she is quick to fight with everything to win.
• Detrimental Determination: Kronika's obsession with crafting the "perfect" timeline has long since driven her insane, to the point that she's started and restarted timelines over and over again despite coming up short each time. Her final attempt spells her doom twice over, as she is defeated and killed by both Fire God Liu Kang and her old pawn Shang Tsung.
• Defiant to the End: In "Aftermath", after Shang Tsung beats her and leaves her feebly crawling on the ground, he offers her the chance to serve him. She refuses, claiming she's a Titan and likely finding the idea of working under a mortal laughable even in her battered state. Shang absorbs her soul as a result and her body turns to dust.
• Destroy the Villain's Weapon: In her arcade boss, after the Player destroys the Hourglass, the shards of glass hurl towards Kronika. Mutilating, and killing her.
• Devour the Dragon: Before facing off with Liu Kang (in the main story)/Shang Tsung (in Aftermath), Kronika commands Cetrion to sacrifice herself so that Kronika can absorb her Elder God soul for a boost. Cetrion reluctantly consents.
• Didn't See That Coming:
  • When she senses the merger of Raiden and Liu Kang, resulting in the birth of Fire God Liu Kang, Kronika is forced to admit that Raiden surprised her for the first time ever in all the timelines she's known him and to acknowledge that her defeat has become a distinct possibility.
    Kronika: Out of desperation comes invention. I had not thought it possible for Raiden to surprise me. Our success is no longer certain. We must make haste.
  • She certainly did not foresee Shang Tsung, Nightwolf and Fujin escaping the Void at all in Aftermath, which allows her cotton on to the fact that things will go Off the Rails.
• Disc-One Final Boss: While she is the Main Antagonist for Mortal Kombat 11's main story, in the DLC story Aftermath, she is quickly replaced with Shao & Sindel, and then killed by Shang Tsung.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: In many ways, Kronika acts like a video game player obsessed with getting the best scores or results for her game. Her habit of rewinding or stopping time is akin to a player reverting to the latest saved game, restarting a game or cheating when things don't go exactly the way they want. An obsessed gamer is also obsessed with finding the so-called "perfect" game while being unconcerned with everything else, much like how Kronika sees everyone else in the story as little more than disposable playthings. Kronika is basically a cosmic example of an unhealthy obsession with a game.
• Driven to Madness: Kronika's role as Keeper of Time, combined with her obsessive belief in the Balance Between Good and Evil has turned her into a Mad God who starts and restarts time in a vicious cycle, struggling in vain to achieve her ideal timeline, making pawns of everyone, even her own children, to do so. In MK1, a desire to avoid a similar fate led Liu Kang to forsake his role as Keeper of Time, downgrading himself to Earthrealm's demigod protector and leaving the Hourglass in Geras' care.
• Early-Bird Cameo: She appears to Jade in her Mortal Kombat 9 ending (albeit with a different appearance) and is implied to be the one giving Kitana a vision in Mortal Kombat X. She now makes her debut in 11. One of the giant busts in the Jinsei Chamber in X also resembles her.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Subverted; Kronika is the mother of Cetrion and Shinnok, and seems to care about them, but she treats her children as pawns and a microcosm of her insane belief in the Balance Between Good and Evil. Even when she expresses something close to pity for Shinnok's unenviable state, her true concern is that her own design has gone awry, and in Cetrion's case, Kronika has her daughter sacrifice herself so that she can get a power boost (one that does her no good, not that that bothers Kronika).
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Just to prove that nobody likes the entitled, arrogant Frost, not even Kronika thinks highly of her, if the latter's non-canon ending is anything to go by. Even if Kronika herself has arrogance as a Fatal Flaw.
  • She makes it a point to note just how treacherous Shang Tsung really is when she sees him rapidly backstab so many of his allies, culminating in the deaths of Shao Kahn and Sindel.
    Kronika: You have no one left to betray.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: She was smugly confident that she had played out every scenario with Raiden that she had nothing to lose by telling him that she intentionally pitted him against Liu Kang to ensure their combined might can never be brought to bear against her in every timeline she's destroyed. It backfires on her when Raiden states she unintentionally offered him a third option by fusing with Liu Kang, resulting in the birth of Fire God Liu Kang.
• Evil Counterpart: She is one to Raiden throughout the Story Mode when it comes to gathering followers. Kronika favors lying and manipulating and sees her allies as nothing but pawns and minions whereas Raiden treats his followers with respect and sees them as worthy friends and warriors. She is also the Big Bad to Raiden's Big Good status.
• Evil Genius: She spends most of 11's main story scheming and observing. Using her underlings to hold the heroes back long enough for her Hourglass to gain enough energy to rewind time.
• Fatal Flaw: Her weakness is pride, as she only truly cares for her selfish idea of cosmic balance and considered the lives of everyone else, including her own children, who happened to be Elder Gods, to be beneath her concern. She was so utterly confident that she had played out every scenario with Raiden that she had nothing to lose by telling him that she intentionally pitted him against Liu Kang to ensure their combined might can never be brought to bear against her. It should have been no surprise that he would pine for an effective third option that she fed him on a silver platter, as when she senses the merger of Raiden and Liu Kang, resulting in the birth of Fire God Liu Kang, she is forced to admit that Raiden surprised her for the first time ever in all the time she's known him and to acknowledge that her defeat has become a distinct possibility.
• Fate Worse than Death: Spawn's ladder ending is one of the two endings where she isn't killed (the first being the bad ending) though she probably wishes she was. For her crimes against the Realms and the Kombatants, Spawn throws her into Hell to suffer alongside Malebolgia for all eternity. Couldn't have happened to a nicer lady.
  • Her fatality has her killing, then reviving, then killing, reviving, killing... and so on...her opponent, painfully rearranging their body each time. Given that she's a Time God, she could literally do this nonstop for all eternity. Or stop to do something else more important and pick up right back where she left off once that's been taken care of.
• Flunky Boss: At 66% and 33% health, respectively (or only once at half health in Story Mode against Liu Kang), Kronika will retreat away from the stage and summon a random kombatant to fight the player in her stead. These summoned minions have reduced HP compared to their usual selves, and cannot use Fatal Blows. Defeating them will bring Kronika back into the fight.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Kano's Tower ending creates one for her, since she dies with the shards of her Hourglass but appears alive later to relinquish her artifact's powers to him.
• Gold and White Are Divine: Has this motif going on in both her outfit and on parts of outfits of Kombatants under her protection. This gets lampshaded by Jacqui when they first lay eyes on Jax's Evil Costume Switch. It's also worth noting that in Ladder Mode endings most Kombatants have their clothes altered to carry the motif after defeating her.
  Jacqui: Those look like Kronika's design...!
• Greater-Scope Villain:
  • Of the entire franchise, as she serves this role in both the original and rebooted timelines.
  • In Scorpion, Shang Tsung and Sonya's arcade endings, they discover that Kronika was only the tip of the iceberg, as there are other Titans, some of which may be more powerful and worse than her. It's hinted that they are behind the various bad things that happened throughout the timelines. Sonya even forms her own god-squad to actively hunt down these Eldritch Abominations.
  • Even after her demise, Kronika continues to fill this role in Mortal Kombat 1, as the New Era in which the game takes place exists in the first place the result of her battles with Liu Kang and Shang Tsung, who are revealed to have both become Keepers of Time after Kronika's death, along with countless other Titans, all of whom defeated Kronika to take control of the Hourglass in their own respective timelines.
• Hated by All: Downplayed but still applicable. While she curries favor with a lot of allies, none of them actually trust Kronika to keep her promises to them of giving them exactly what they want in her "New Era". In their Arcade endings all of them betray her and kill her to take control of the Hourglass for themselves, or make her create their ideal timeline in exchange for mercy. This also goes for Geras and Cetrion, who in their endings realize her ideology is madness and she must die for the safety of the realms.
• Hoist by Her Own Petard: In the Klassic Tower mode, she is killed by her own hourglass, which explodes into glass shards that slice her into pieces.
• Humanoid Abomination: She doesn't look that much different from Geras at first, but she's ancient and strong enough for her daughter to be an Elder God. Notably, she's the most human looking Titan out of all them thus far shown, implying she may be far more alien than she already seems.
• Hypocrite: Her claim that Raiden's actions post-MKX have wrecked her precious balance between good and evil and forced her hand rings hollow when it turns out that she has already erased the timeline countless times and in every single one of them, she has manipulated events to pit Raiden and Liu Kang against one another, resulting in both their Face Heel Turns; meaning that she is responsible for the very things she blames Raiden for.
• Icy Blue Eyes: She's a ruthless sociopath with shiny blue eyes.
• I Die Free: Someone who stood as a Titan will never live as a slave, especially to one of her old slaves, Shang Tsung.
• Immune to Flinching: Kronika doesn't react to hits like the other kombatants, meaning attacks that force an opponent into a secondary hit state (such as being tackled) won't work on her and will whiff. This also means you can't use a Fatal Blow against her.
• Impersonation-Exclusive Character: Her 'appearances' during Mortal Kombat 1's Story Mode are courtesy of Aftermath Shang Tsung posing as her.
• It's All About Me: Despite her claims, her goals are ultimately pretty selfish since it's not so much about balance as having things play out as she sees fit and getting antsy whenever things don't go as planned. The fact that she ends up having the Elder Gods killed more or less proves this point. Keep in mind that she was mostly the guiding hand behind both the original timeline and the start of the new one. And both times were meant to keep Liu Kang and Raiden from stopping her.
• It Runs in the Family: She's the mother of Shinnok. Let that sink in for a moment. This may have been invoked by Kronika, who shaped her son into being evil in order to fulfill her goal of a balance between light and darkness.
• Jerkass God: All she cares about is her goal of a "balanced" universe (read: one where the realms are locked in a Forever War). She is willing to kill, lie, and manipulate anyone (including her own children, Shinnok and Cetrion) to reach that goal, which benefits no-one but herself.
• Just Between You and Me: In Chapter 11, she has Raiden's warriors frozen in time so she can gloat to him alone about how Raiden and Liu Kang's combined strength is the key to defeat her. Between her chuckles and confidence of victory, she unwittingly gave the Thunder God an idea of how to thwart her.
• Karmic Death: She engineered and manipulated Shang Tsung's entire destiny as a soul-stealing sorcerer for her own personal use. Unfortunately, much like Liu Kang, she completely underestimated Shang Tsung's capabilities, and is thus taken aback even further than in the main story when he, of all people, kills her and steals her soul after he becomes the new Keeper of Time.
• Killed Off for Real: In Mortal Kombat 1, Geras tells Liu Kang that Titans cannot come back to life if they die. It serves as Foreshadowing that the Kronika that had been aiding Shang Tsung and Quan Chi is not who she appears to be.
  • However, a Mirror Match intro between two Geras' reveals that Kronika is still alive in one alternate timeline and is still Keeper of Time there, possibly opening the door for her return.
• Lack of Empathy: Kronika only truly cares for her selfish idea of cosmic balance and considered the lives of everyone else, including gods, to be beneath her concern. Throughout Mortal Kombat 11's story mode, she treated everyone else around her as either useful but expendable pawns (her allies) or laughably ineffective pests (her enemies). Kronika even seemed to treat her son Shinnok (representing death, darkness and vice) and her daughter Cetrion (representing life, light and virtue) as little more than tools to perpetuate the violent eternal struggle for Balance Between Good and Evil she deemed necessary to maintain her precious balance.
• Legion of Doom: Forms one out of existing villains and groups across time, which includes Shao Kahn's Outworld empire, the Cyber Lin-Kuei, the Black Dragon, the Netherrealm revenants, D'Vorah, Frost, Noob Saibot, Scorpion's past self, and the elder Jackson Briggs.
• Let's You and Him Fight:
  • This is almost her entire MO across a universal scale: Her idea of balance is constant conflict between the realms, forcing them into an eternal give-and-take where no side truly turns the tide and defeats the other, and when peace seems too close, she instigates conflict anew.
  • Exploited liberally by forcing Liu Kang and Raiden into conflict in every timeline, to avoid their combined might disrupting her vision. She even keeps Revenant Liu Kang in reserve to fight Raiden as a safety precaution.
  • This is also her objective throughout Story Mode; when Revenant Liu Kang grows impatient at her inaction, she assures him that the heroes going through her pawns has left her to work on her hourglass unimpeded; better for them to fight Shao Kahn or Frost than her.
  • Also does this in Aftermath. With the forces of Earthrealm flanked between the newly arrived forces of Outworld serving under Shao Kahn, Sindel and Shang Tsung as well as her own, she hopes to weaken everyone so that she can make her bid on getting her Crown back.
• Light Is Not Good: Despite the golds and whites on her outfit and status as a Time God, she is actually a deranged, Mad God. If anything, she is an outright Omnicidal Maniac.
• Literally Shattered Lives: Liu Kang as a Thunder and Fire God turns her into organic glass before breaking her arms, head, and body into pieces. The frozen look of disbelief on Kronika's face makes this even more satisfying.
• Loose Lips: She was so utterly confident that she had played out every scenario with Raiden that she had nothing to lose by telling him that she intentionally pitted him against Liu Kang to ensure their combined might can never be brought to bear against her. It should have been no surprise that he would pine for an effective third option that she fed him on a silver platter.
• Mad God: She hides it better than most, but Kronika is certainly not of sound mind. As her own servant Geras surmises in his non-canon Arcade ending, as well as in Mortal Kombat 1, it's likely because of all her failed attempts at creating her own perfect timeline. Considering that she's erased countless timelines already and had to have been at it since the very beginning of time itself (to where she states that she lost count of how many times she had the conversation with Raiden)…
• Magitek: Everything related to Kronika (from the outfits and armors her underlings wear to the aesthetic of her keep) looks less like magic and more like highly advanced technology, although it seems to be a mixture of both.
• Manipulative Bitch: She deliberately chose potential allies who were fed up with their lot in life (or death) in the current timeline, making them all desperate to make things better by any means necessary. By offering these people a chance to do just that, Kronika is able to gather a vast, loyal army in a frighteningly short amount of time. Unfortunately for them, they don't realize that Kronika is under no obligation to fulfill their wishes once the so-called New Era begins.
  • For the revenants of the Netherrealm, she offered a timeline with Raiden erased from existence.
  • For Shao Kahn and his followers, she offered a timeline in which they lead a multiverse-spanning empire, free from the watchful eyes of the Elder Gods.
  • For Kano, his younger self and the Black Dragon clan, she offered the chance to transform Earth into a Villain World where they can run rampant, unhindered by the law.
  • For Sektor, Noob Saibot and Frost, she offered each of them leadership of their own versions of the Lin Kuei, shaped to their personal ideals.
  • For the revenant Scorpion from the past, she promised to restore his family and the old Shirai Ryu clan to life.
  • For the present Jackson Briggs, who had recently lost his wife, she promised a timeline in which he remains a proud soldier while his beloved daughter never enlisted in the army.
• Make Way for the New Villains: Although she doesn't do the deed herself, she shows up after Raiden has incapacitated Shinnok's head to address the fallen Elder God. She is the first antagonist of the new timeline who is a completely new character and not an existing antagonist from the original course of events.
• Meaningful Name: The name Kronika is a feminization of Kronos, which means time.
• Meaningless Villain Victory: She succeeds resetting the timeline during her confrontation with Fire God Liu Kang, only to be beaten by the latter. In Aftermath, she is defeated by Shang Tsung upon making way into her Keep, only for Tsung to be foiled by Liu Kang, who would proceed to create the New Era. Either way, Kronika's desire for a perfect timeline is now rendered moot.
• Moral Sociopathy: She truly believes she is doing the right thing. However, the way she does everything is so sociopathic that it ends up making her look even worse. She says that it is important to maintain the Balance Between Good and Evil, but what she wants is Forever War which will result in so much suffering for many people. She attempts to remove free will from the people of the timeline so she can have what she believes is the perfect timeline for everyone involved. Her arrogance prevents her from allowing any result that doesn't have her desired outcome.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Trying to pit Raiden and Liu Kang against each other for the umpteenth time backfired on her spectacularly. As of Mortal Kombat 1 it also paved the way for them and their allies to become Titans across separate timelines.
• No Body Left Behind: When Shang Tsung drains her soul in Aftermath, her body dissolves into sand and vanishes, as opposed to everyone else, who leave corpses behind.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: If nothing else, she's efficient; she is actively working on her scheme to reset existence, even conjuring sand duplicates of other characters to buy her more time, in the final boss battle. In story mode, losing a round to her gives her enough time to succeed, resetting enough of the world to erase everything and everyone Liu Kang knows; beating her at that point just gives him an opportunity to ensure the next world is a free and happy one.
  • Her reasoning for putting Shang Tsung into the void outside of time is entirely out of the justified belief that he'd manipulate events to come out on top one way or another. As seen in Aftermath, a free Shang Tsung, especially one who is fully aware of Kronika's worries of him, manages to come out on top of literally everyone imaginable through pure guile and manipulation, ultimately resulting in her soul being stolen before she even had a chance to turn back time. Even if he was stopped by Fire God Liu Kang, she still effectively lost even worse than in the base game, where she at least managed to go the beginning of time canonically.
• No-Sell: Kronika is immune to many aspects of the player's repertoire.
  • She is completely immune to juggles, whether by way of abilities or combos. While she can still be knocked down by hitting her enough, none of the juggles will do anything beyond their damage values.
  • She's also immune to Fatal Blows, only taking damage from the initial hit, while the rest of the combo will not commence. Krushing Blow combos, on the other hand, can still be performed, but Kronika will not take the increased damage and the cinematics will not play.
  • Much like Shao Khan in MK9, throw attacks are unusable on her and attempts to do so will leave you vulnerable to a good ass-kicking, possibly a fatal one in certain conditions.
• Non-Standard Game Over: Entirely unique to herself, if you lose the final fight against her in story mode, she forms a blade to cut off Fire God Liu Kang's head, then announce that the New Era will begin.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: She wants to rewind time back to the beginning and restart it so she can restore what she sees as balance to the universe. Although her idea of a Balance Between Good and Evil entails her two children being locked in an eternal conflict that would result in pointlessly fighting just so that she can dictate how everyone's destiny unfolds.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: Issues one to Shao Kahn by offering him a new empire to rule.
  Kronika: My Hourglass requires protection while I work. Will your Outworld armies defend it?
  Shao Kahn: [nodding] They shall.
• Offscreen Inertia: Similar to Quan Chi's leg beating fatality, Kronika never stops tearing and reattaching her victim apart onscreen.
• Oh, Crap!: In the final chapter, she reacts with relative panic when the Liu Kang she has imprisoned disappears, having merged with Raiden and his revenant self. She even admits that she’s been caught off guard, and hurries to finish her plan before anything else can go wrong.
  Kronika: Our success is no longer certain. We must make haste.
• The Old Gods: She is the first known Titan of the Mortal Kombat universe, making her ancient and powerful by even the Elder Gods' reckoning. In Scorpion's and Sonya's Mortal Kombat 11 arcade endings, Kronika was just the tip of the iceberg, with entire pantheons of hostile, ancient deities inhabiting the multiverse, some of whom may be worse than her.
• Orcus on His Throne: With a few exceptions, she spends most of the game in her Keep. While this is justified as her preparing her Hourglass to reset time, whenever she decides to get involved directly, she can stop time and everyone but gods are frozen. It's only due to Pride and Bond Villain Stupidity that she allows the heroes to take out her allies one by one, when if she cared to take a more personal role in her own plan, she could have probably pulled it off on her own.
• Order Is Not Good: Considering her obsession with balance, she ironically comes hard on the end of Order, with the caveat of being her specific, selfish vision of an orderly universe.
• Our Titans Are Different: Explicitly calls herself a Titan in one of the variant scenes in her Story Mode, and she fits as a creature older than even the Elder Gods. Scorpion, Sonya and Shang Tsung discover in their endings that she's hardly the Last of Her Kind.
• Peggy Sue: A negative version who uses her time manipulation abilities to constantly reset the timeline when her efforts to balance things don't play out as she wants. Then she tries again with new knowledge of what went wrong last go around. The events of 11 happen when she is about to figure things out for good and eliminate any variables that might disrupt her plan. Then Raiden gives Liu Kang an 11th-Hour Superpower and things go completely off the rails for her, although she still technically succeeds in her goal of at least resetting things.
• The Perfectionist: Arguably her defining trait, along with her pride; Kronika is obsessed with crafting the "perfect" timeline, and whenever one fails to live up to her expectations, she scrubs it and starts over. This fixation has long since driven Kronika insane, and the fact that even she has lost count of how many attempts she's made suggests that the perfect balance she seeks is impossible, not that that stops Kronika from continuing to try. After Kronika's death, Liu Kang notably refuses to allow such an obsession to take root in himself, which is why he forsook his Titan powers after creating the New Era, not allowing the pursuit of perfection to destroy him as it did Kronika.
• Pet the Dog: Slightly. In Aftermath when Cetrion blames herself for allowing Shang Tsung to obtain the Crown, Kronika claims it was her own fault for underestimating Shang Tsung's cunning.
  • In Kabal's ending, she does apparently keep her word in giving what he wants in exchange for control of the Hour-Glass, probably because she now knows he can beat her, but still.
• Power Floats: Appears in some cutscenes floating, with her legs vanishing.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Unlike Shao Kahn and Shinnok, she does not particularly enjoy the suffering of others and would not jeopardize her own plans for such. As a patient Manipulative Bastard, Kronika prefers a tactful approach. When working with allies, she discusses her plans with them and aids them however she could, such as providing aid and resources, usually through temporal manipulation. Despite this, Kronika had every intention of ending them all once they were no longer useful to her. In her own way, Kronika is even more ruthless and uncaring than either Shao Kahn or Shinnok.
• Pride: This is Kronika's most defining character flaw and it is understandable given that she is more powerful and far older than the Elder Gods themselves.
• Properly Paranoid: Learning of Shang Tsung's escape from the Void shows that Kronika fears Shang Tsung is too dangerous to be kept alive, lest he grows even more powerful. Her assumptions of Tsung are proven right after witnessing his betrayal of Shao Kahn and Sindel.
• Psychotic Smirk: Wears one in her Arcade Boss fights as she speaks to her opponent.
  Kronika: Come, it is time... to die.
• Red Herring: The player is led to believe, in Mortal Kombat 1, that the instigator of the conflict behind the story mode is Kronika, seemingly having survived the events of 11 and Aftermath despite all odds. It turns out, however, that "Kronika" was actually an alternate version of Aftermath Shang Tsung, and that the Titan herself is Killed Off for Real.
• Resurrection/Death Loop: Her Fatality. She tears you apart telekinetically, and then rewinds time so she can do it again in a different way. She keeps doing this forever until you choose something from the Game Over menu.
• Sanity Slippage: In Mortal Kombat 1, Geras implies that Kronika was once much more stable and benevolent before her obsession with balance and perfection drove her to madness as she fixated on creating a perfect timeline, only to face endless disappointment.
• Satanic Archetype: And how! Kronika is very clearly the true devil figure in the franchise, even topping Shinnok in that regard. To elaborate, Kronika has a lot of incredibly Satanic elements surrounding her character, which include her being a God of Evil with a fetish-level obsession of supposedly keeping Balance Between Good and Evil, and yet her plan is to actually destroy the universe countless times to satisfy her ego and remake the universe in her own image, is an exceptional manipulator, she regularly tempts and corrupts different people into becoming her allies (all presented like a Deal with the Devil scenario) in order to further her deeds and kills them once their work is done, lies to her own allies and treats them horribly, enjoys the suffering of others and commits unspeakable atrocities for fun, and further enhancing her Satanic qualities are her personality embodying each of the Seven Deadly Sins and the brutal, enigmatic and unpredictable nature of her actions that evoke a Nothing Is Scarier feel to them. What ultimately seals the deal, though, is her appearance, with a color-scheme that evokes that of light and brightness typically associated with angels, something very commonly used to describe Satan taking the form of an angel of light to disguise himself and trick humans, literally making her Lucifer.
• Shadow Archetype:
  • She represents what Raiden could become if he started micromanaging mortals instead of guiding and respecting their free will, corrupting his mind over time. Also, when it comes to gathering followers, Kronika favors lying and manipulation, and sees her allies as nothing but pawns, whereas Raiden treats his followers with respect, and sees them as worthy friends and warriors. She is also the Big Bad to Raiden's Big Good status. Geras's arcade ending even shows that her repeated attempts to create the ideal timeline have taken a toll on her sanity.
  • Kronika also becomes one to Fire God Liu Kang at the end of the story. Once Liu Kang gains access to the Hourglass, he chooses to let mortals control their destiny rather than controlling all aspects of their lives like Kronika did.
• Smug Super: Through most of her appearances in the story, she's brimming with utmost confidence, assured that this time there's no way her plan can fail even when the Earthrealm warriors start taking down her forces over the course of the story and get closer to stopping her. After all, she's a Goddess of time and can easily just freeze or rewind things if she feels she has to. Plus she's done this before in countless timelines. Even when Raiden does catch on to her, she erases that timeline entirely and starts anew. The difference this time is that she has stockpiled enough power to really control things to the point she can erase undesirables as she sees fit. However, once Raiden gives up his powers to Liu Kang and makes him a God who, you know, is also the Champion of Mortal Kombat, this begins to drop as it's one of the few moments she notes something hasn't gone according to her will and is in jeopardy of completely derailing her plans.
• Smug Snake: She gloats to Raiden about how his and Liu Kang's combined strength is the key to defeat her. Between her chuckles and confidence of victory, she unwittingly gave the Thunder God an idea of how to thwart her for good.
• SNK Boss: Her fights only last one round, but she throws everything, the kitchen sink and a few things that aren't even hers at the player. She is completely immune to grapples, fatal blows, and even certain specials, severely hampering the effectiveness of many characters. On top of that, she summons random fighters in her place (who have severely gimped health, but the damage they can inflict remains unchanged) at two thirds and one-third health, changes the stage once you kill them and gains a new ability with each shift. Her normal specials are actually even worse, such as summoning multiple homing projectiles, surrounding herself with a barrier of three sand balls, and her most annoying ability, an unblockable, extraordinarily fast laser that, should it connect, heavily damages your fighter, rewinds time for them (resulting in you being unable to attack), and leaves you frozen in the air for a few additional seconds just for good measure. And while you're being put through the wringer, Kronika can take all the time in the world to warp around, pulling off combos while you're completely helpless to do anything.
• The Sociopath: Despite her claims of doing what is right for everyone, Kronika carries many classic hallmarks of the trope. She has no empathy for those who are affected by her tampering beyond any superficial reasons that help further her plan, and she has wiped out countless timelines to get her desired outcome. Even within those timelines, she willingly destroys the bonds between allies to make them turn on each other whenever there is a threat to her plans. She manipulates people both by removing their free will in tampering with the timeline and in personal ways by (usually falsely) promising to give people what they want. She's incredibly prideful to the point that she won't allow any result that isn't her perfect Balance Between Good and Evil (read: her Forever War). Because of this, she has low tolerance for frustration whenever she doesn't have the upper hand in some way. And this pride removes any remorse she has for doing any of this, since she sees all of it as necessary to keep things in order (or, at least, her vision of what that order should be).
• Teleport Spam: One of many reasons why fighting Kronika can be insanely annoying on harder difficulties. Kronika will teleport around the stage when fighting the player, giving her both great zoning and getaway capabilities.
• Tempting Fate: As the forces arrayed against her approach her fortress, she tells her allies that their enemies will lose. Shortly afterwards, Fire God Liu Kang is born from an unexpected merger of Raiden and Liu Kang, the two heroes she kept at each others' throats over countless timelines.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: In both giving and receiving varieties:
  • Lose to her in Arcade, and she grabs your character telekinetically to rip them apart. Then uses her Time Master ability to put them back together. Then rip them apart again. Then reconstruct. Then rip...
  • Because this is Mortal Kombat, Kronika gets as good as she gives. Defeating her in a traditional arcade ladder results in the most gruesome death of an arcade boss for the series. The Hourglass explodes and Kronika is quickly acquainted with a hail of broken glass, and every moment of it looks mighty unpleasant.
• Time Abyss: To the point that her son and daughter are Elder Gods. Considering that the Elder Gods themselves are timeless beings who observe the realms from the moment of their creation...
• Time Master: Kronika is a goddess who can control the flow of time itself. She can stop time, create a "Groundhog Day" Loop (subjecting the player to an endless loop of gruesome deaths in her Fatality), and pull people and objects from the past into the present. With the proper preparations, Kronika can use the Hourglass at her Keep to enhance her power to the point that she can literally rewind the timeline to beyond the dawn of time itself. Other gods such as Raiden and Fire God Liu Kang are immune to Kronika's control over time to a degree, since gods exist outside the normal laws of time.
• Time Traveler's Dinosaur: The second phase of her boss fight takes place in the Prehistoric Age arena, where dinosaurs roam, and she is able to control one to make it attack your character.
• Vicious Cycle: Kronika can control circumstances so that certain disastrous events are repeated again and again across different timelines in some form. In fact, this is the reason why Liu Kang and Raiden eventually turn against each other in every timeline so far. All this was so that both of them would never join forces and become a true threat to Kronika's plans.
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • Slightly, as Fire God Liu Kang starts adjusting to his powers and beating down all her revenant guards one by one, she begins to realize that her earlier fears are beginning to come to light and for once, her voice actually has alarm to it, starting to show cracks of her celestial facade.
  • A more prominent one in Aftermath when Shang Tsung manages to work around her influence and invade her Keep while wearing her Crown, forcing her to fight him while at the same level of power as he is, if not weaker. In this case, she outright yells at her subordinates to kill the person who incensed her.
• Villainous Mother-Son Duo: Kronika is just as evil and scummy as her son, Shinnok.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Justified in her case. In chapter 3, upon freezing Liu Kang and Kung Lao in time, Geras brings up the possibility of finishing them right there, though Kronika retorts that she needs them alive otherwise their Revenant counterparts would cease to exist as well.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: She has the power to rewind time, but whenever a timeline doesn't go in her favor whether the heroes win or the villains, she resorts to restarting time to the point that she had gone mad. As a result, the events of Mortal Kombat 11 happened because she wants to stop the heroes from having too much favor, and forcing Liu Kang and Raiden from coming into blows with each other. All of her actions until Mortal Kombat 1 is the main reason why Liu Kang avoided abusing his power and go mad if he even thought of perfecting his timeline, and gave up his Titan powers as a result.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: At the end of the story mode, Kronika successfully restarts the Mortal Kombat timeline. The only consolation is that Liu Kang ends Kronika's life afterwards, ensuring that, for the first time, the timeline is truly free of her meddling, and beating her without losing a round means she hasn't gone so far back that he can't save Kitana or anyone else.
• You Kill It, You Bought It: Any character who defeats her in the arcade ladder will gain all her time powers for themselves. In the Story Mode, Liu Kang becomes the new master of time after slaying Kronika.

Spawn (Albert Francis "Al" Simmons)

• '90s Anti-Hero: One of the most iconic and long-lasting examples in comics. He even has alternate costumes that cover him in random pouches!
• Adaptational Wimp: In his source material, only necro-magic and holy weapons could kill Spawn^note other means could hurt him, but couldn't keep him down. Here, he's just as mortal as the other kombatants.
• Alien Blood: Spawn's blood is green in color due to actually being liquid Necroplasm.
• Anti-Hero: Shows shades of both this and Anti-Villain. On the one hand, he's fighting to destroy evil in the world to protect his former wife and her family. On the other hand, he works for a Demon-Lord and sold his soul for the power he has now. On the other other hand, he also works against said demon lord on the regular, and even killed him and usurped his place in Hell at one point.
• Arch-Enemy: While Violator isn't Spawn's only major enemy, he takes a significant role in his Rogues Gallery and is his most recurring foe. He is frequently mentioned in passing and one Mirror Match will have Violator in a Spawn get-up back for another rematch, causing Spawn to grumble about how many times he has to kill him. One match intro animation has Spawn walk up holding the Violator's head on a pike, which he plants into the ground. Violator and his siblings also show up in Spawn's arcade ending, being hunted by his squad of demon-slayers.
• Badass Bandolier: One of his customisation options gives him one of these, and a few more practically cover him in pouches.
• Badass Cape: Sports his signature tattered red cape as part of his Necroplasm suit. He can use it to attack his enemies and as a shield to block attacks. In one of Spawn's Fatalities, he uses it to engulf his opponent and completely deflesh them, and in his other Fatality he wraps it around his opponent's head and lifts them off the ground with it. Oh, and he uses it as a hammock for his Friendship. It's been said that the developers put a lot of work and care into getting the cape animations and physics just right.
• Berserk Button: To put it bluntly... he "fucking hate[s] clowns." Even Johnny Cage isn't exempt from it.
• Beyond Redemption: He believes this about himself and outright uses this exact expression in his ending when talking about the things he had done.
• Bring It: Outright challenges Cetrion - an Elder Goddess - in this fashion.
• The Cameo:
  • Malebolgia makes a physical appearance in one of Spawn's outros, illustrating Spawn is still his slave in his appearance here. He also appears in Spawn's arcade ending cutscene.
  • Violator also makes an appearance in one of Spawn's intros... or rather, his severed head on a piece of rebar does. Furthermore, one Mirror Match will have Violator actually playable in a way, as he is impersonating Spawn and not making it much of a secret. Spawn also initially thinks this mirror-match is Medieval Spawn — aka Sir John of York.
• Canon Welding: Interestingly, Spawn is the only guest in 11 who is never referenced as coming from another universe, and is in fact implied to have lived in Earthrealm itself, and the Netherrealm is actually stated to be a part of his franchise's own Hell. Additionally, Malebolgia is stated to be related to Shinnok, Cetrion, and Kronika, thus possibly making him equivalent to an Elder God. Sonya and Jax are familiar with Jason Wynn (the man who ordered Al Simmons's death), and D'vorah mentions the Phlebiacs (Violator's race) in one of her intros with Spawn. He also makes reference to his guest appearance in Soul Calibur II, welding it to this game's continuity.
• Cape Wings: He can do this with his "(Air) Leetha Glide" ability.
• Carry a Big Stick: One of the weapons he can conjure is a large, spiked club.
• Chain Pain: His demonic symbiote-costume can form chains, which he uses as Combat Tentacles.
• Cold Ham: He doesn't show a lot, but with such a deep, creepy sounding voice, glowing eyes, and a tattered floating cape, Spawn doesn't need to.
• Cool Chair: One of Spawn's ending animations has him conjure his demonic throne and sit on it with his head cast in shadows.
• Cool Sword: One of Spawn's combos has him conjure a black-and-white demonic sword with the Hellspawn emblem on its hilt, called the Spawn Sword in his official tie-in toy, and impale his opponent with it.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Many characters in the MK universe are quick to bring up his unsavory past as a CIA operative.
  Spawn: You massacred entire tribes!
  Kotal Kahn: And how did you end up in Hell?
• Deadpan Snarker: Pretty much the pre-requisite for a character who went through Hell and back.
  Spawn: How is it you've got no soul?
  Terminator: I am a cybernetic organism.
  Spawn: That a fancy way of saying "murder machine"?
• Decapitation Presentation: One of his intros features him entering the battlefield carrying the Violator's head on a rebar. Which becomes confusing when his opponent is apparently the Violator disguised as him.
• Demon of Human Origin: After making a pact with the demon-lord Malebolgia, Al Simmons was infused with Necroplasm and bonded to a Hellspawn symbiote called K7-Leetha, turning him into the demonic warrior "Spawn".
• Dragged Off to Hell: The ending of his reveal trailer shows him being dragged through a portal to Hell and being made to kneel before Malebolgia. Spawn also does it to Kronika after defeating her in his Arcade ending, ensuring she lives to be banished to the same void as Malebolgia to suffer eternal damnation for her crimes after forcibly taking away her control of the Hourglass.
• Dramatic Thunder: Present in one of his intro variations, coupled with Lightning Reveal.
• The Dreaded: Most of the characters are noticeably apprehensive when interacting with Spawn. Kitana in particular tries to talk him out of the fight, declaring that killing her won't fix his problems with Outworld's empire, and the Joker, an insane sociopath, attempts to appeal to Spawn's presumed hero code, only to find out he's not dealing with Batman. Not that their fear is misplaced, as Spawn is not known for being merciful.
  • Noticeably whether a character snarks at Spawn or not is not a sign that they think they stand a chance against him, as is often the case in 11, but rather it shows how much or how little they know about him. Characters like Raiden, Liu Kang, Scorpion and Sub Zero all treat him as this trope because they know of his power, whereas characters like Kung Lao, Cassie and Jacqui just think he is a regular demon that they can take on.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Spawn is noticeably laid back or casual in his interactions with a large range of Mortal Kombat's minor villains such as Baraka, Skarlet, Frost, Kano, and even Noob Saibot. But when he is confronted with Shao Kahn and Shang Tsung, he notes just how evil they are by comparison and is determined to send them to eternal damnation. He also takes negative note of Kotal Kahn's conning people into worshipping him, the empire allowing people to suffer, even D'vorah's comsumption of people.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Given that it's Keith David, it's no surprise.
• Eviler than Thou: When Noob Saibot asks Spawn which hell he resides in, Spawn claims to come from one worse than the one Bi-Han is from. Which is perfectly believable considering Bi-Han was only sentenced to the fifth plane of the Netherrealm. Al, on the other hand, was sentenced to the plane of one of the evilest beings in fiction.
• Evil Laugh: More like Sinister Chuckle in a couple of his intros. He lets out one in his ending that is officially subtitled as a "brief, creepy, satisfied laughter".
• The Faceless: A variation. While his skeletal hellspawn face is visible in one outro, Spawn is the only masked character whose headgear is not removed for certain Fatalities and Fatal Blows targeting the head.
• Famed In-Story: Mostly averted. More characters know Malebolgia's name than Al's, who is often simply brushed off as a mere denizen of hell. The only characters that know who Spawn really is are those in the American military and Shang Tsung, who can read his mind.
• Filth: His Friendship involves him reading a Romance Novel called "Hellish Desires", which frankly speaks for itself. He even looks around nervously to make sure no one sees him reading the book!
• Flayed Alive: His first fatality has this in spades, having him use his razor-edged chains to peel the skin off his opponents before engulfing them in his cloak and reducing them to a skeleton. He can also do this to the opponent as a regular attack, although in this case it's just an illusion and the opponent quickly reverts to normal.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Despite Violator taking the role of one of the Spawns in a mirror match, Spawn or Violator himself can both be walking into the match with his severed head.
  • An intro has Spawn expressing to Cetrion he annihilated Malebolgia some time ago. This does not stop a perfectly well Malebolgia from recalling Spawn in one of his outros.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Spawn's eyes glow green with Necroplasm, and emit wisps of green smoke.
• Guest Fighter: From the self-titled Image comic book series. Interestingly, he's the second Mortal Kombat guest fighter to have previously guest-starred in the Soul Series,^note having appeared as a fighter in the Xbox version of Soulcalibur II and both versions of Soulcalibur II: HD Online the first being Kratos in Mortal Kombat 9^note PlayStation 3 and Vita versions only.
• Guns Akimbo: He's not afraid to use guns, especially in this fashion. One of his moves involves whipping out two submachine guns to pump his opponents full of lead.
• The Heart: Kuai Liang and Hanzo might not necessarily hate each other anymore, but that doesn't stop them from arguing non-stop should they work together. In Spawn's ending, he essentially keeps them together in their team of demon ass-kicking.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: One of Spawn's special attacks involves him extruding a ridiculous amount of firearms from his cape and riddling his opponent with bullets.
• Hypocrite: Somewhat. He relentlessly but justifiably antagonizes Kotal for his genocidal Disproportionate Retribution tendencies and overlooks anything good he did as Kahn. This causes Kotal to snarl back at Spawn with a question of how he ended up in his own state.
• Hypocritical Humor: Underneath the demonic symbiote, Spawn has the physical appearance of a charred corpse, with a Nightmare Face to go with it. Despite that, he's quite keen on snarking about how ugly some of the other kombatants are.
• It Is Beyond Saving:
  • His thoughts on the Mortal Kombat universe's Netherrealm, being determined to purge it.
  • He also believes Outworld's regime is this and is determined to eradicate every trace of it. This puts him at odds with even the relatively benevolent Kahns, who he is also determined to kill.
• Invisibility Cloak: One of Spawn's special abilities allows him to turn invisible for a few moments.
• Mirror Match: Notably, the intro dialogue in a match between two Spawns will justify it in a number of ways; either one of the Spawns is actually the Violator in disguise, or is apparently a demonic hallucination meant to torture Simmons with the pain of everyone he's killed.
• More Dakka: Spawn carries a pair of submachine guns around, and his Fatal Blow begins with him summoning at least a dozen guns to rain hot unholy lead on his victims.
• Mythology Gag:
  • One of Spawn's alternate looks is his black-and-red original appearance from the comics, lacking the spiked gauntlets. Another one of his costumes is inspired by Medieval Spawn's suit of armor and the other MK ninjas. Another still is based on the Commando Spawn action figures sold by McFarlane Toys in real life.
  • One of the weapons he can conjure is the Agony Axe from Soul Calibur II and Spawn: Armageddon.
  • One intro has him confuse Kollector for being another of Violator's fellow Phlebiac Brothers. Another reveals that D'Vorah is all too aware of the group:
    Spawn: Of course you uglies know each other...
  • One of his mirror-match quotes has him wonder if Mammon — a demon-lord who sought to manipulate Spawn into serving him — is behind his doppelganger. One of his alternate costumes is also named Mammon.
  • One of his intro dialogues against the Terminator has him compare the cyborg to Overtkill, the Terminator retorting that he is superior. One intro with Kano, who has a similar laser-eye, includes wordplay referencing the character.
  • One of Spawn's intro quotes against Raiden has Raiden note that Spawn reminds him of a certain dark knight, and Al ask if he means the "billion-dollar crusader", a reference to Spawn and Batman's crossover in the comics and Raiden's guest appearance in Injustice 2.^note Ironically, Spawn states that "he's a friend" in response to this comparison, when in the actual Batman/Spawn crossover, the two could not stand one another and departed on bad terms. Though knowing Spawn, he may have just been sarcastic.
  • Some of Spawn's intro lines against Scorpion and Sub-Zero reference their mutual guest appearances in other series.
    Spawn: You've been to other dimensions?
    Scorpion: Each has its own injustices.
    Spawn: Maybe that's why my soul still burns.
  • One of Spawn's kombo strings is called "D-E-D. Dead!" in reference to the Clown's line from Spawn (1997).
  • According to one of the intros involving Spawn, Sonya Blade seems to be all too familiar with Jason Wynn - a former boss of Simmons' who gave the order to kill him in the first place.
• The Nicknamer: He gives out quite a few of these.
  • Shao Kahn is "Skull-Fucker".
  • Liu Kang is "Golden Child".
  • Joker is "Clown".
  • Scorpion is "Fire".
  • Sub-Zero is "Ice".
  • Kung Lao is "Kid".
  • Himself is "Toast Face Killer" (given by Violator)
• Nightmare Face: As demonstrated in one of his outros, underneath his mask, Spawn's face is a rotted and decayed mess. His head-strike X-rays show he also has fangs, though they're not visible through his mask.
• Non-Human Undead: Under his symbiote, Al Simmons resembles a charred corpse and is called undead by numerous characters, though he's no longer truly human: making a deal with Malebolgia allowed him to return to the world of the living after his death, but also transformed him into a demonic entity imbued with Necroplasm and bonded to a Hellspawn symbiote.
• Original Generation: Not Spawn himself, but one of his skins, "Malefick", is. It was designed by NetherRealm Studios themselves, and it takes inspiration from the Mortal Kombat roster, with the MK ninja influence being very apparent.
• Playing with Fire: Spawn can conjure hellfire to burn his opponents.
• Power Creep, Power Seep: Even around the time of being Malebolgia's lackey, Spawn's power level in his own universe would likely put him in the league of deities like Raiden. Here, for the sake of gameplay, he can be fought and slain by figures such as Baraka.
• Precision F-Strike: Spawn has plenty of these in his fight intros, including the following.
  Spawn: Imagine Outworld free of slaves.
  Shao Kahn: Over my dead body.
  Spawn: Today's the day, skull-fucker.
• Real Men Wear Pink: His Friendship is this, showing him reading a rather saucy romance novel called Hellish Desires, that just so happens to have him on the cover. He's even using his cape as a hammock, and licks his finger to turn the page… despite wearing a mask. He even gets startled when the Friendship fanfare plays!
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Spawn's iconic color scheme is primarily black with white accents and a red cloak and armor. At the same time, though, Spawn's not a full-blown villain. One of his costumes is his original appearance, where the sides of his costume were red; and one of his costume variants inverts its usual colors — with the body of the costume being red and his cloak being black.
• Related in the Adaptation: According to Spawn, his master Malebolgia and Shinnok are cousins. Which, by extension, means he's related to Cetrion and Kronika as well.
• Scary Black Man: In life, Al Simmons was a ruthless African-American CIA operative who worked for the crime lord Jason Wynn. Upon dying, he returns as the sinister and very anti-heroic Spawn, who wields hell magic and is not afraid of being brutal towards his foes.
• Scary Teeth: Spawn's headshot X-ray strikes and an outro where he unmasks show that he has a mouth full of fangs under his mask.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Fitting for a former Vietnam veteran and CIA operative. In fact, Spawn is on par with Cassie and Jacqui - the resident military ladies of Mortal Kombat - in terms of his frequent cussing.
  Spawn: There still a man under all that shit?
  RoboCop: Bad language makes for bad feelings.
  Spawn: Perfect. You're about to feel real bad, motherfucker.
• Skull for a Head: Spawn is shown without his mask in his arcade ending, revealing his head is a charred skull with fanged teeth.
• Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: Spawn absolutely abhors slavery and claims the fact it's still active even when Kitana is Kahn is why Outworld's regime is beyond saving.
  Spawn: Imagine Outworld, free of slaves.
  Shao Kahn: Over my dead body!
  Spawn: Today's the day, skull-fucker.
• The Symbiote: Spawn's costume, chains, and cloak are actually a Hellspawn symbiote called K7-Leetha, which can manifest spikes and blades to lacerate opponents. Several Kombatants express interest in taking it for themselves.
• Technicolor Fire: Spawn wields an eldritch form of energy called Necroplasm, which typically manifests as eerie green flames.
• Truer to the Text: With both the advancements in technology since the release of Soul Calibur II and the change in setting, many elements of Spawn's character are represented in full in Mortal Kombat, namely his iconic cape and his use of firearms.
• Walking Armory: Spawn comes to battle with a machine gun, a sword, an axe, a mace and chains.
• Was It Really Worth It?: While their personalities couldn't be any more different, Spawn recognizes Frost pretty much sold out her soul the exact same way he did and asks her if it was really worth it. When she retorts that she still has hers, Spawn answers that she didn't Read the Fine Print.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: As typical of Spawn, he's more on the side of extremism. While he does push the idea of Outworld being free of slavery, helping it's suffering children, or leading those who are damned to the Netherrealm, he favors violence as the only acceptable answer. Keep in mind that Outworld has been merging who knows how many realms for thousands of years, so all of it's problems aren't something Kitana Kahn can fix by snapping her finger. Kitana Kahn tells him as much in their intros, but Spawn doesn't want to hear it.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Doubtlessly due to his experiences with Violator, his reaction to seeing the Joker has him remarking he "fucking hate[s] clowns." Another interaction has him mistake the Joker for Violator's clown form.
• With a Friend and a Stranger: In his ending, he forms one with Sub-Zero and Scorpion, kicking Netherrealm demon ass with the two of them.
• Worthy Opponent:
  • Spawn sees Scorpion and Sub-Zero as worthy opponents. He offers to team up with them to purge the Ten Hells, which is saying something, considering that Spawn prefers to work alone. Not that he will follow their commands, though.
    Spawn: Together, we can purge the Ten Hells.
    Scorpion: Only if you follow my lead.
    Spawn: All due respect, that's not in the cards.

    Spawn: Ready to freeze Ten Hells over?
    Sub-Zero: First, we must train together.
    Spawn: Training's over. Time for assholes to die.
  • In his Arcade ending, Spawn manages to get their help in conquering the Netherrealm. The constant bickering between Scorpion and Sub-Zero shows why Spawn prefers to work alone.
• You Remind Me of X: To Spawn, Jacqui Briggs reminds him a lot of Wanda Blake - a love of his former life. She (understandably) advises him not to let this thought mess with his head. He also compares the Terminator to Overtkill and, of course, gets heavy Violator vibes from The Joker. He also believes Kollector and D'Vorah to be associated with the Phlebiac Brothers (D'Vorah actually knows who they are, making it more reasonable on his end) and likens Kronika to Malebolgia in his ending.

The Terminator (T-800)

• Adaptation Amalgamation: He isn't a specific T-800, but an amalgamation of all of them, with him being good or evil depending on the clips used for the matchup.
• Adaptational Modesty: His time travel device does not render the subject naked.
• Adaptational Personality Change:
  • In the source material Terminators usually don't talk very much and are taciturn and silent, focusing on carrying out their mission and scanning the environment, and they only talk when they want something or to maintain their cover. The more sociable Terminators like the T-800 in Terminator 2 are the exceptions because they've been taught to act more human. The Terminator in Mortal Kombat 11, while still rather quiet compared to other kombatants, is much more chatty in its intro dialogues, and takes the time to ask questions and make comments unrelated to its mission and to answer questions asked of it. Several intros imply its been reprogrammed to be more friendly, but that reason isn't applicable to all of its intros.
  • The Terminator in 11 often threatens its targets with termination if they do not comply with its demands, and against Johnny Cage warns "leave, or be terminated". While Terminators in the films will make such demands of people who have things they want without immediately resorting to violence, they usually have no hesitation about resorting to taking them by force if they encounter resistance. They also would never directly tell their targets that they've been designated for termination, which this Terminator does many times.
• The Ahnold: Played with. The Terminator certainly looks like the Trope Namer, due to NRS modeling his face directly after the man himself, but his voice work is provided by a different actor doing a pretty decent impression.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Skynet determined humanity was a threat to the Earth as a whole, and thus decided to Nuke 'em, then build Terminators to finish them off. Averted with the Terminators, themselves, however: they always follow their programming, whether they were sent by Skynet to terminate or reprogrammed by the human Resistance to protect. In this Terminator's ladder ending, however, they subvert the trope by determining that it is in Skynet's best interest to not wipe out humanity, but allow machines and humans to coexist in peace.
• Ambiguously Evil: His intros with numerous fights are conflicting on if he was sent from the future by Skynet to change time to aid the machines, if he was sent by humanity to protect someone, or if he was initially sent by Skynet but reprogrammed once he got to the present time. Muddying things further is that he's a Composite Character of several T-800 Terminators from the films, of which some were heroic and some were villainous. In his Tower ending, it is made clear he was sent by Skynet to change the future so the machines prevail. But once he takes control of the Hourglass, he discovers that in all possible futures, humanity and Skynet always destroy each other. Thus he decides the best way to achieve his objective is to create a peaceful future where humans and machines live in cooperation.
• Awesome, but Impractical: From the Terminator's trailer, his exoskeleton form appears good; after a certain health threshold, its skin burns off to reveal the endoskeleton (which interrupts the action, getting out of pressure for free), it gets a Last Chance Hit Point, and has permanent Super Armor. What the trailer doesn't show is that the threshold for this to activate is so low that just about any attack will kill it again. Even if it manages to tank more than one hit, being permanently super armored has the drawback of not being able to use any defensive meter thanks to its inability to get knocked down. It's slightly better in Towers of Time where healing items can be used to get back to a safe point, because the skin doesn't regrow.
• Bad Future: Terminators hail from a future in which humanity was driven to the brink of extinction by nuclear war instigated by the A.I. Skynet, with robotic killing machines built to finish off the remnants. One of their fatalities gives their victim a taste of this future. In his ending, the Terminator ends up inverting this via a peaceful future after finding out that all of the timelines featuring said nuclear war killed off both sides anyway.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: One of his fatalities has the Terminator use his time travel device to send his crippled opponent forward in time to post-Judgment Day Earth, whereupon a Skynet-aligned Terminator casually executes them with a plasma rifle.
• Borrowed Catchphrase: Uses Scorpion's iconic "Get over here!" during his Fatal Blow.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: To Rain's confusion, one Terminator was sent to murder him on behalf of Shao Kahn.
• Cannot Tell a Lie: This being Mortal Kombat, the Terminator will always approach a fight head-on, never trying to hide its nature and being very clear about its orders, even though it should be designed for deception and infiltration. Even when it does not clearly state to be fighting as part of a mission, it will still act like this, which will sometimes cause some bizarre interactions.
  D'Vorah: You threaten the Kytinn's survival.
  Terminator: Correct.
• Car Fu: One of his fatalities has him ram the opponent with a motorcycle to send them flying and then shoot them to pieces in midair.
• Celebrity Paradox: Johnny yelled out "I saw that Arnie!" during his ending in 4, implying that Arnold Schwarzenegger exists in the MK universe. Despite that, no one directly compares the two, though intro dialogues involving the Terminator are chock-full of Arnie references.
• The Comically Serious: Most of his funny moments come from his reactions to the cast rather than its own humor.
• Composite Character: His appearance is taken from Terminator: Dark Fate, but he has a costume variant that gives him a younger appearance more like in the older Terminator films. His personality and moveset include elements from all of the T-800's appearances, with him using an uzi from the first film, throwing a power cell as an improvised explosive like the third movie, and employing a shotgun, which he does in most of the movies. His dialogue also references the films all over the place.
  • Certain dialogues that mention Skynet by name will occasionally replace it with Legion, despite it being a plot point in that film that Legion is an entirely different entity from Skynet, and does not have T-800 model Terminators.
• Cool Shades: A Terminator trademark, in many different varieties as gear options.
• Cyborg: Terminators are explicitly called "cybernetic organisms". As opposed to most examples of cyborgs, who use technology to supplement their organic components, the T-800 inverts this: their organic flesh supplements their robotic bodies to help them better infiltrate human society. Thus, Krushing Blows performed on the Terminator display its mechanical skeleton taking dents rather than human bones and organs. Interactions with other characters also imply that in the MK universe, the term cyborg is reserved for full-body converts like the Lin Kuei's cyber initiative.
  The Terminator: You are also a cyborg?
  Jax: No. Just cybernetically enhanced.
• The Determinator: They cannot be bargained or reasoned with (as Erron Black finds out). They do not feel pity, remorse or pain (as Shang Tsung finds out, to his bewilderment) - and they will never stop, ever, until they complete their mission.
• Dramatic Gun Cock: One of his intro animations sees him doing this while speaking to his opponent.
• The Dreaded: Raiden and Shao Kahn are left terrified by the Terminator's lethality - and the fact that there are many more... even the usually unflappable Jacqui has to assure herself that she can fight against him.
  Jacqui: You can do this, Briggs...
• Early-Bird Cameo: Some of the intro dialogue for the Terminator references Legion, Skynet's successor in Terminator: Dark Fate, which was released about a month after the Terminator's inclusion into MK11.
• Electronic Eyes: Outwardly, their eyes appear human enough. If the flesh around their eyes is damaged, however, their real eyes - steely grey orbs with glowing red pupils - are revealed.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: How evil he is depends on the intros and thus what Terminator he is, but some of his interactions have this effect.
  Terminator: Have you killed anyone?
  Johnny Cage: Yeah, but they were all bad.
  Terminator: Why make that distinction?
• Evil-Detecting Dog: Kotal Kahn notes that Terminators can be recognized by dogs - a subtle detail from the movies. According to the Terminator, this is due to the chemicals in their skin.
• Exact Words: The Terminator's mission is to ensure that the future results in the best possible outcome for Skynet. That does not necessarily mean "Skynet wins the war", or even for there to be a war at all. In his ending, after multiple attempts with the Hourglass reveal that every war between man and machine ends with mutual extinction, the Terminator sets the future so that the two sides never fight in the first place but instead peacefully coexist, ensuring the best possible future for Skynet... and mankind.
• Expy Coexistence: Lampshaded in one dialogue where he uses Kano's Terminator-inspired cybernetic eye to guess that he's also a Terminator.
  Kano: Only thing cyber about me is the eye!
• Feel No Pain: The Terminator, similar to Jason Voorhees, makes no sounds of pain when getting hurt, although he still has facial animations implying some discomfort.
• The Future Will Be Better: After finding out that every single timeline which has the humans and machines fight against each other ends up with both sides getting killed off, he instead makes a future where both sides never fought and instead peacefully co-existed.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: The Terminator is an incredibly tough opponent who is made out of a titanium alloy and doesn't really need a number of his components to keep functioning, so he should not be destroyed by a number of fatalities and be unharmed by some brutalities. Of course, if this were true, the Terminator would be impossible to defeat.
  • Similarly, he has the standard 1000 HP which means he's only as durable as the average kombatant; both of the Kahns and RoboCop eventually got slight buffs to their max HP primarily for balancing reasons but it does line up with their portrayal as being able to take more damage than the rest of the cast.
• Glamour Failure: Some of their skins betray their robotic nature with various pieces of flesh missing, revealing their endoskeleton underneath. One move results in all of it being burned off and reduced solely to a skeleton.
• The Grappler: Terminator is one of the few characters in 11 with access to a command grab without Kustom Variations and is generally played like one, with TDE helping him close distance easily.
• Groin Attack: One of their krushing blows is a nut-crushing stomp. Eat your heart out, Johnny and Cassie Cage!
• Guest Fighter: From the Terminator film series, specifically borrowing its appearance from Terminator: Dark Fate.
• Heel Face Mindscrew: The benevolent ones were reprogrammed. Apparently, according to one of its intros, Johnny Cage is responsible for one and turned on its learning computer... and also taught it a number of comical things to call people. Another credits Jax.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Whether or not it's a good Terminator - or a bad one - depends on the intro and who it is fighting. Justified, as the Terminator is one of many identical models, so they're likely different ones altogether.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: Just like in the movies, the Terminator can be seen with his signature biker jackets.
• Hero Killer: One model killed Kuai Liang offscreen to Jacqui's shock. Two intros with Rain has him mention he killed Raiden and Kitana off-screen.
• Heroic Sacrifice: In their ladder mode ending, they create a new future where man and machine live in peace, then self-terminate to keep knowledge of the Hourglass from falling into the wrong hands. To fully cement this, the ending is not narrated by the Terminator himself, but by Cassie.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: Subverted; in his Ladder mode ending, he effectively "self-terminates", by tossing himself into the Sea of Blood, where he will sink at least until his power core fails in give or take 150 years.
• Immune to Flinching: With a certain custom move, the Terminator turns into a robotic endoskeleton which has unlimited armor, letting him not only attack while being hit, but also No-Sell moves which stun or capture the opponent (such as Scorpion's spear, Sub-Zero's ice ball, and all Fatal Blows).
• Killer Robot: They aren't called "Terminators" for nothing. Subverted with reprogrammed models, who only kill if it is to protect their wards.
• Knee Capping: They do this as part of their 1st fatality before throwing their defeated foe into the Bad Future, although legless.
• Literal-Minded: Befitting an emotionless machine, the Terminator is wholly incapable of detecting that someone is being sarcastic and/or figurative.
  Johnny Cage: Dude, you have "Blockbuster" written all over you!
  Terminator: [totally serious] Where?
  Johnny Cage: [sarcastically] HAH! And he's a comedian!
• Little "No": When faced with silly questions or bargains, the Terminator responds with this at all times.
• Machine Monotone: As befits a Terminator, his tone of voice is pretty static.
• Major Injury Underreaction: He's the only playable character that doesn't audibly react to any Fatal Blows or Fatalities. A given, since he's literally a machine wearing organic artificial skin.
• Multiple-Choice Past: Coming from a franchise with no set future, each Terminator who appears has a chance of possessing a different origin and purpose from the previous one.
• Mutually Assured Destruction: In his ending, he finds out that every timeline will result in the annihilation of both humans and machines, so he instead opts for a future where both peacefully coexist.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The pose he strikes right at the end of the Kombat Pack trailer is a full recreation of one piece of promo art◊ from Terminator Genisys.
  • One of his intros is a recreation of the "shotgun hidden in a box of flowers" scene from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, except with a box of Johnny Cage action figures.
  • Another intro features a photograph of Sarah Connor, the exact same one Kyle Reese had in the first Terminator film.
  • One of his victory outros is a recreation of the famous Out of the Inferno scene from the climax of the original Terminator film.
  • One brutality has him ram his fist into the victim's head the same way he did against T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Granted, none of the kombatants are made of liquid metal so the outcome is very different.
  • Another victory outro is a recreation of the Robot War scenes, specifically from Terminator 2, showing a Terminator endoskeleton crushing a skull and standing triumphantly as plasma beams fly in the background.
  • His Fatal Blow has him give an awkward smile with a thumbs-up before blasting the opponent in the face. Both of these are things John Connor taught the T-800 to do in Terminator 2.
  • Its Arcade Ending recreates the ending of Terminator 2, in which the Terminator, to destroy any knowledge of the Hourglass, decides to self-terminate by throwing itself into the Sea of Blood, with its pose even mimicking that from the movie, though without the thumbs-up.
  • Several pieces of banter between the Terminator and the other kombatants pay homage not only to the Terminator films, but much of Arnold Schwarzenegger's filmography, including Predator, Total Recall (1990), Commando, The Running Man, Conan the Barbarian (1982), True Lies, Last Action Hero, Batman & Robin and even his comedy films like Kindergarten Cop and Jingle All the Way.
  • One of his Brutality win animations will have him take out a knife and carve the flesh off of his arm to reveal the robotic framework, in the same manner as in Terminator 2.
  • One of his Brutality win quotes references Arnold's iconic Catchphrase:
    "You won't be back."
  • His first Fatality is also titled "I'm Back".
  • Another possible Brutality quote? "Hasta la vista, baby."
  • Him saying "Get over here" in his Fatal Blow may be a reference to how, in the films, Terminators can learn speech by copying what they hear others say, an ability which can even go as far as to let them flawlessly mimic people's voices.
  • The "Out of the Inferno" outro plays the Terminator's signature five-note Leitmotif.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: The Terminator lacks the martial arts prowess and finesse of most kombatants, and many of his melee attacks are relatively simple kicks, punches, and grabs, that utilize his cyborg strength. His pre-fight intros are relatively light on the banter and taunts of most other kombatants, and he's direct and to the point — identifying targets for termination, making demands or asking questions related to his mission, and/or informing his target that they will not win against him. His speech patterns also tend to be short one or two-word sentences.
  Erron: Can't bargain or reason with you, can I?
  Terminator: No.
• One-Man Army: Dialogue with Shao Kahn suggests that he at least slew a small army the Kahn sent after him single-handedly.
• Organic Technology: It isn't only the Terminator's flesh that's human-like: as Krushing Blows and Fatalities performed on them demonstrate, their brains and hearts are also cybernetic.
• Perpetual Frowner: Justified. He is a robot disguised as a human, after all. The only times he smiles are during his Fatal Blow while giving a thumbs-up (in reference to Judgment Day), and when he's doing a motorcycle stunt for his Friendship.
• Portal Cut: One of his fatalities has him use time travel the send his opponent to the future, without their legs.
• Precision F-Strike: Only once in one of the more memorable interactions in the game. After all, this is a killing machine that recommends any dickwads to chill out, and Johnny Cage put him up to it.
  Baraka: What did Cage teach you to call me?
  Terminator: An "ugly motherfucker".
  Baraka: I will eat him alive!
• Prepare to Die: The antagonistic models are fond of telling their opponents that they will be "terminated."
• Production Foreshadowing: His appearance here has foreshadowing to the in development at the time Terminator: Dark Fate. One of his outros has him identify the target as terminated, which happens to John Connor in the film. He has a skin showing him with a tank top alone which no Terminator has had a significant scene in. It is what he wears in the first scene in the film. Occasionally, intro dialogue that mentions Skynet will replace it with Legion, Skynet's replacement in that film.
• Protectorate: The benevolent ones are sent back to protect someone. One of them is protecting John Connor, as in canon, but another model is sent back to protect Kitana.
• Screw Destiny: The war after Judgement Day is always destined for an "Everyone Dies" Ending between both factions. It decides to correct that by bringing peace between human and machine.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Downplayed; his shotgun attacks can hit an opponent from fullscreen and is effectively a hitscan after the startup but it will do increased damage at closer ranges and Terminator's status as a grappler means he's encouraged to use the advantage frames on hit to continue his mix-up game.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: It makes use of several types of Lever-action shotguns, some sort of look like the Winchester 1887 from T2: Judgment Day.
• Skelebot 9000: His skeleton and internal organs are generally metallic, unlike all other characters. One custom move also causes his flesh to burn away when low on health during the final round, leaving him as a robotic endoskeleton which is Immune to Flinching.
• Shout-Out: Despite not being voiced by Schwarzenegger himself, several of his intro dialogues reference the actor's film career.
• The Stoic: True to the character, it really never displays any type of emotion whatsoever.
  Joker: Would it kill you to smile?
  Terminator: That is beyond my programming.
• Subverted Catchphrase: One of his Brutality quotes is "You won't be back." When you consider that "I'll be back" is often used in the Terminator movie series...
• Take a Third Option: In its Tower Ending, it finds out that all futures with the war destroys both factions. It took the nth option, in this case, by avoiding the war altogether by creating a better future.
• Terminator Twosome: One of its mirror matches has the classic one of two being sent back in time to protect John Conner while the other is sent to kill him.
• Time-Shifted Actor: The T-800 can sport Arnie's signature looks from the original 1984 movie all the way up to Dark Fate via customization options.
• Time Travel: Skynet uses a time machine to send Terminators back in time. The T-800 can also use time travel by themself, as both a teleport move and a fatality.
• Undying Loyalty: It's absolutely loyal to the Machines in the future, so much so that, when it's revealed, in its Tower ending, that the war between humans and machines will always end up killing both factions, it served Skynet's best interest by ensuring peace between humans and machines.
• Unexplained Accent: The T-800's Austrian accent remains as unexplained as ever^note "Sgt. Candy" notwithstanding., despite Schwarzenegger not actually providing the voice here.
• Unflinching Walk: One of their special abilities allows them to recover from otherwise fatal damage, their clothes and skin burning off and leaving their robotic endoskeleton as they march towards their foe and No-Sell attacks.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Skynet seems to have neglected Hand-To-Hand combat programming since he swings with little other than haymakers. That said, he's a nigh-unstoppable cybernetic warrior that can slam those fists with as much force as you expect from someone with a metal skeleton.
• The Unsmile: Flashes a few of these in his Fatal Blow and his Friendship.
• Villainous Respect: Gets this from Shang Tsung in a pre-fight dialogue. The sorcerer is impressed with his sci-fi capabilities, regarding that technology may indeed be superior to magic.
  Shang Tsung: Perhaps technology is superior to magic.
• Wrestler in All of Us: Has a few wrestling moves under its belt.
• You Have Failed Me: One intro between two Terminators has the first one asking why a second one was sent, only for the second one to answer: "You failed your mission".
• You Will Be Assimilated: Not exactly assimilated, but at least one Terminator wants Baraka alive to produce Tarkatan-Terminator hybrids. A conversation with Sheeva has him declare that future Terminator models will be based upon Shokan biology.

RoboCop (Alexander James "Alex" Murphy)

• Actor Allusion: If RoboCop is picked while Johnny Cage is the announcer. He will say "Hey there, Buckaroo.", a reference to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, another film that Peter Weller starred in. Likewise, Noob Saibot tells Murphy, "Your fate is sealed by a curse. Doomed is your soul, damned is your life," another reference to Buckaroo Banzai.
• Adaptational Badass:
  • RoboCop's main weakness had always been his infamously slow movement speed which forced him to rely on endurance, resourcefulness, and sometimes sheer luck to survive against fast, stronger enemies. Here his normal walking speed is much faster comparable to a normal person and he has rocket boosters on his feet for charging attacks, so he can keep up with the other kombatants no problem. He also comes with new built-in armaments (such as a shoulder-mounted missile launcher, arm-mounted weaponry) for extra lethal capabilities, implied to be upgrades installed by the Special Forces in one of his intros.
  • ED-209 shows up as an Assist Character for Murphy's Fatality and Fatal Blows — and isn't played as a joke unlike the films, doing real damage to Murphy's enemies.
• Adaptational Villainy: Murphy is much more violent than in his home series and brutally beats up and kills his enemies when normally he's a proper, upstanding, and just officer. This is somewhat justified by the fact he's in a World of Badass where many of his opponents have abilities beyond normal humans, so such extreme tactics may be necessary just to incapacitate them enough to properly arrest them, and in a few intros he recognizes his opponents are particularly dangerous and uncooperative and thus lethal force is authorized. On the other hand, in many of his finishers, his opponents are dazed and senseless, or may even be surrendering and beg for mercy, and Murphy still executes them in cold blood. His "Kase Klosed" Brutality in particular has him re-enact his own murder by Clarence Boddicker on his opponent, including shooting out their knees and blowing their hand off.
• Arm Cannon: He has a lot of arm-mounted weaponry. Which includes a flamethrower, a wrist-mounted rocket launcher, and a grenade launcher.
• Arch-Enemy: RoboCop frequently references his pursuit of Kano in intro dialogues, as the latter's crimes in his version of Detroit began his involvement with Earthrealm.
• Assist Character: A variation with an ED-209 as it makes an appearance in an intro, and helps out in his Fatal Blow and one of his fatalities, where it comes in to pulverize the opponent with rapid dual-cannon fire, with Murphy finishing ED's barrage with a shot from the Cobra Assault Cannon.
• Badass Boast: In his intro dialogue with Baraka.
  Baraka: What in the ten hells are you?!
  RoboCop: The future of law enforcement.
• Baritone of Strength: Courtesy of Peter Weller reprising his role for the first time^*second if one counts a KFC ad in 2019 since RoboCop 2.
• Beating A Dead Player:
  • An outro sees Murphy arrest his half-dead opponent, as expected of a police officer. But after cuffing them, he brutally slams his target headfirst on his car before hauling them off.
  • Another outro has Murphy walk up to his kneeling foe and violently Neck Lift them, slightly choking them out in the process.
• BFG: Uses the Cobra Assault Cannon from his series in his Fatal Blow, a fatality and throw. It can be customized through the gear system.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: The neural interface/terminal spike which can be used as a makeshift shiv, especially in a place like Earthrealm. He makes use of it in an intro, certain moves and in a fatality.
• Body Horror: Murphy was brutally shot to death, has his right hand blown clean off and the rest of him absolutely shredded by shotgun blasts. What was left is then taken apart and put into a cyborg body. This is best exemplified by a Gear piece that allows his helmet to be removed and show his face, which is visibly grafted onto his robotic skull and has a bullet hole from where he was shot.
• The Cameo: An ED-209 appears alongside Murphy in one of his intros, the Fatal Blow and in one of the fatalities.
• Catchphrase: His dialogue incorporates many of the ones he had from the films, most famously "Dead or alive, you're coming with me!"
• Clothing Damage: A variation, some of his skins and gear make it appear like he went through a beating, very similar to what he usually goes through in the films.
• Composite Character: Of himself. While based on his counterpart from the films, the addition of several weapons built into him hearkens back to the Alpha Commando cartoon and his feet contain the rambolt devices built into him in RoboCop: The Series.
• Cool Helmet: His signature visor, which can be replaced with a number of alternative designs through the gear system and even removed.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: One match intro with Sub-Zero asks if being made into a cyborg extinguished his soul like when it happened to him.
  Sub-Zero: Did your creators extinguish your soul?
  RoboCop: Despite their best efforts, no.
  Sub-Zero: You may yet still be worthy of the Lin Kuei.
• Cyborg: With the exception of his brain and parts of his face, Murphy's body is purely robotic.
• Electric Instant Gratification: Downplayed. When John Rambo asks him whether he's haunted by what happened to him, RoboCop says that he has programming which helps dull the stress. The exact mechanics aren't clear, but presumably it works something like this.
• Enemy Mine: In the films RoboCop and ED-209 are mortal enemies. Here thanks to some possible reprogramming by Murphy, the roaring robot stands alongside RoboCop and aids him in kombat.
• The Fettered: Robo's prime directives are to "serve the public trust", "protect the innocent" and "uphold the law". His fight intros heavily emphasize his moral character and commitment to dealing justice to criminals.
• Foil: To the Terminator. Both are Cyborgs, but Murphy Was Once a Man before his grisly murder and was resurrected by replacing his dead body with robotic components, while the Terminator is a Ridiculously Human Robot designed to resemble a human being. In terms of weaponry, the Terminator uses standard human firearms for the most part while RoboCop has high tech military grade equipment, much of which is built-in to his body. One is a man rebuilt as a machine, the other is a machine built like a man. Of course, this isn't the first time the two have crossed paths.
  Terminator: You are a machine.
  RoboCop: I identify as human.
  Terminator: Then you choose termination.
  • This even extends to gameplay: while both of them wield firearms in kombat, Terminator is normally played as a grappler who happens to have a ranged shotgun while RoboCop is a zoner who can be equipped with a command grab.
• Good Is Not Soft: He's pretty liberal in using lethal force in order to uphold the law against the other kombatants.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Much as in his home series, Murphy rarely swears and does not approve of opponents who do. The worst he says is "damned" in his arcade ending, and in his intros he uses "slime" and "scumbag". This is a standout departure from most other kombatants who curse freely.
• Groin Attack: A rather common move from him.
  • One of his fatalities has Murphy shoot his opponent below the belt, the bullet piercing through and hitting a grenade he lobbed behind his victim.
  • One of his brutalities is a simply a bullet to the crotch, leaving his victim to bleed out. Note that it only works on male fighters.
  • One of his Krushing Blows is also shooting them through the groin.
• Guest Fighter: From the self-titled RoboCop film series, based on his incarnation from the original trilogy. With some aspects from other RoboCop media
• Hand Cannon: One of his weapons is his trademark Auto-9 pistol, which can be customized through the gear system.
• Happy Dance: His Friendship features RoboCop dancing, complete with a gold OCP chain on his neck, video static and '80s stereo system as he does the Robot among other moves.
• Have We Met?: Asks the Terminator this during an intro. The latter says he has no records of it, but RoboCop is pretty sure they have.
• Humble Hero: Very polite and not at all afraid to ask for help from those around him more familiar with Outrealm and the Kombat tournaments, and eagerly embraces the training and education they offer him, though he remains firm about being the one to arrrest Kano.
• The Immune: One match dialogue with Skarlet shows that she's unable to track him by blood because of how mostly cybernetic he is.
  Skarlet: I cannot smell your blood.
  RoboCop: There is little left of me that is organic.
  Skarlet: Then killing you won't subdue my hunger.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: One of his moves is called Trick Shot which has him shoot at the screen which then ricochets onto his opponent. The Brutality version" Let's Step Outside has the bullet ricochets around the arena repeatedly from several surfaces, before hitting the floor and the bouncing up into the opponent's skulls and blowing their brains out.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Played With, as while RoboCop retains Peter Weller's likeness, it uses his 1987-era likeness as opposed to reflecting his actual age in 2020 when he reprised the role.
• Jurisdiction Friction:
  • Two of his match dialogues with Sonya Blade has this with who gets Kano. First this one.
    RoboCop: Kano is coming with me.
    Sonya: Can it, Tinhead.
    RoboCop: Let's keep this professional, Lieutenant.
  • Followed by this one.
    Sonya: Surrender Kano to the Special Forces.
    RoboCop: He's my prisoner, Lieutenant.
    Sonya: Gonna wish you hadn't said that.
• Kill It with Fire: Uses an arm-mounted flamethrower as a part of his arsenal.
• Killer Robot: Not so much RoboCop, as he acts within the limitations of his directives to protect and serve. The ED-209, on the other hand, is a brutal machine that will riddle you with bullets for the most minor of transgressions.
• Kirk Summation: Several intros have him unflinchingly iterate his duty to justice as he calls out kombatants for their crimes.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Murphy can deploy a collapsible riot shield from one of his arms to counter melee attacks and No-Sell projectiles.
• Machine Blood: Murphy doesn't bleed proper blood anymore, he bleeds oil. Which gives him some advantage according to one intro with Skarlet.^note Though she can still manipulate the "oil" with her moveset during the match.
• Made a Slave: As he explains to Kitana, he has no rights and is considered OCP's property. When he explains to Jade that loyalty to OCP is literally embedded into his programming, she invokes the trope almost exactly by name. Defied in his ending, wherein the energies of Kronika's Hourglass upgrade him and give him the knowledge that OCP is utterly corrupt, both of which allow him to throw off his directives and act freely against the company.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: Chasing Kano down to another dimension for arms dealing in Old Detroit ends up in Robocop defeating Kronika and unintentionally absorbing her powers and overcoming the OCP's programmed Restraining Bolt via finding out through her hourglass that OCP was absolutely corrupt by beefing up both cops and criminals, leading him back home to take down the company with help from his new friends.
• Mistaken for Subculture: In one of their intros, Sheeva mistakes him for a Cyber Lin Kuei and instigates a fight despite his protests.
• Mythology Gag:
  • His first fatality combine the deaths of Boddicker (getting stabbed in the neck with the terminal spike), Murphy himself (getting his hand shot off), OCP staffer Kinney (shot by the ED-209) and the destruction of the ED-209 unit right before Murphy confronts Dick Jones (destroyed by a Cobra Assault Cannon). One of his brutalities perfectly replicates Murphy's death and even had a reference to RoboCop: The Series with a spike coming out of Murphy's foot, referring to the rambolt devices he had stored in his feet in The Series.
    • For bonus points, should said brutality be used in a Mirror Match, one of the two RoboCops says 'again?', specifically referencing Murphy's death- and this 'again?' line ONLY happens in RoboCop dittos.
  • Many of his gear options give him a black color scheme with red highlights and a red visor, calling to mind the reboot film. While none of RoboCop's gear here exactly duplicates the reboot look, he can get passably close.
  • His second fatality and one of his brutalities reference his first night after his resurrection where he shoots a rapist in the crotch.
  • His arm-mounted flamethrower takes after a function of his gun arm from RoboCop 3.
  • Customization options include a skin and helmet inspired by the standard police uniform worn by Murphy before he was murdered.
  • A lot of his intros have RoboCop or his opponent quote the original trilogy.
  • When facing The Terminator, RoboCop has a bit of dejá vu:
    RoboCop: Haven't we done this before?
    Terminator: I have no record of a previous encounter.
    RoboCop: We have met. I am sure of it.
  • In a mirror match, there's this dialogue.
    RoboCop 1: Where did you come from?
    RoboCop 2: The RoboCop program, Phase 2.
    RoboCop 1: I will not be cloned.
  • Johnny Cage knows a blockbuster when he sees one:
    Johnny: Part man. Part machine. All cop.
    RoboCop: That is correct.
    Johnny: Please tell me no one signed you.
  • Shao Kahn briefly channels one of Robo's inspirations:
    Shao Kahn: My actions are not your concern...
    RoboCop: Even you must obey the law!
    Shao Kahn: I AM the law, fool!
  • Murphy tells Skarlet that she reminds him of someone "similarly crazed and bloodthirsty", likely a reference to Dr. Faxx and/or Angie from RoboCop 2.
  • The "On the Record" outro, itself a reference to MediaBreak, a Show Within a Show in most RoboCop installments, has a ticker that references several events from the original trilogy, such as namedropping Mayor Gibson from the first movie and mentioning a police strike, or OCP's parent company Kanemitsu Corporation, which bought them out in RoboCop 3
  • One of his outros features his Prime Directives flashing before him, with Directive 4 listed as "[Classified]" as in the original, then disappearing as in RoboCop 3 after he's repaired. The same outro features him holding his defeated opponent in a choke hold like he did to Boddicker during his raid of Boddicker's drug lab.
  • His default intro has him step out a police car, replicating his pose from the original poster◊.
  • His Fatalities are named after two of his famous catchphrases: "Dead or Alive" and "Thank You For Your Cooperation".
• Original Generation: Possesses a costume depicting RoboCop as a hybrid with the klassic Cyber Lin Kuei design from Mortal Kombat 3, with said costumes having colors referencing the Cyborg Ninjas.
• Other Me Annoys Me: Thanks to timeline tomfoolery Murphy can run into alternate versions of himself. One chose to become a cyborg willingly, to "our" Murphy's audible shock and disgust. Another claims to be from the Phase 2 of the RoboCop project, which Murphy is equally displeased to hear about.
• Our Souls Are Different: Spawn and Noob Saibot make statements which indicate that Alex Murphy's soul is damned, likely due to the process which created him. For his part, Murphy believes his soul is intact in spite of OCP's "efforts", as he tells Sub-zero.
• Pet the Dog: A case of this happens between Murphy and Johnny Cage: A few of Johnny's interactions with other kombatants involve him asking for assistance for upcoming movies he's doing, only to be refused. Murphy on the other hand is willing to help him instead. Another interaction explains this as Murphy seeing Cage's other cop oriented films as a disservice to the force.
  RoboCop: How can I help you, Cage?
  Johnny Cage: Research! I'm a robot cop in my next blockbuster.
  RoboCop: What do you want to know?
• Pragmatic Adaptation: Replacing a part of his model mid-fight with a gun-arm would take more processing than just having a weapon appear for a few seconds, so instead of the full gun-arm he just pops out arm-mounted weaponry to do the same thing.
  • His increased movement speed is also a result of this, as he'd be no fun to play otherwise.
• Precision F-Strike: In his arcade ending, when he finds out that OCP was Running Both Sides in the conflict between cops and criminals, he says, "It wasn't just a couple of greedy executives... it was the whole damned company."
• Retraux / Stylistic Suck: His Friendship is styled after an 80's music video, complete with video static and a stereo.
• Robocam: Both of Murphy's fatalities briefly show the targeting mode/camera.
• Robo Speak: As a result of his full-body prosthesis, Murphy's voice has a very distinct mechanical reverb effect to it which, combined with his calm cadence, makes him sound robotic.
• Sociopathic Hero: Like Stryker before him, Murphy might be a cop but he is merciless and can be downright sadistic with his enemies. One of his brutalities even has his opponent openly surrender, but Murphy decides to shoot them in the groin to painfully bleed out to death. Also a minor case of Adaptational Villainy since Murphy, even in the R-rated first two films, had never displayed this level of cruelty before, instead opting to kill his targets swiftly and professionally.
• There's No Kill like Overkill: A brutality sees Murphy mow down his foe with a hail of gunfire, incapacitating them. He then walks over and stomps on his defeated foe with a bladed heel before assailing them with the same barrage of gunfire as before.
• Turned Against Their Masters: His arcade ending shows that defeating Kronika removed all the limiters OCP put into him, allowing Murphy to see how corrupted the company really is. Once he returns to his Earth, Murphy enlists the help of the Special Forces to take down OCP.
• Unwanted Revival: Alex was killed and then bought back as a cyborg, which was all arranged by OCP without any regard for the man himself. A fate Al Simmons relates to in one of their match ups.
  Spawn: So your ass got resurrected, too.
  RoboCop: For the company's benefit, not mine.
  Spawn: It's a special kind of hell, isn't it?
• We Can Rebuild Him: Alex's entire body is mechanical with the exception of his face and parts of his brain. Any X-Ray attacks even show this, showing his head as organic and the rest as mechanical.
• You Do Not Want To Know: In one of his intros against an alternate timeline version of himself, Murphy asks who said alternate version is. His other self warns him that he may not like what he's going to see, but Murphy insists. It's a reference to the first movie, but in-universe it's never made clear what alternate-Robo means when he tells Murphy this.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: One dialogue with Johnny Cage has him say this when asked if he's considered movies.
  Johnny: You ever consider doing movies?
  RoboCop: Are you serious?
  Johnny: Absolutely. Can you sing?

John James Rambo

• Alternate Self: A Mirror Match involves a version of himself who says to be from Philadelphia instead of Bowie.
• Anti-Hero: On one hand, Rambo is firmly on the side of good and fighting against any kind of evil. On the other, he has no qualms about using any means to win. This and his natural taste for violence puts him at odds with many heroic characters in the cast.
• Armor-Piercing Question:
  • This intro with Fujin where he questions his capabilities as protector of Earthrealm.
    Rambo: I'm told you're a god.
    Fujin: A demigod, and protector of Earthrealm.
    Rambo: Then why is this place such a mess?
  • He gets another with Cassie Cage, but this time it's played for laughs, and he's the only character to actually visibly bruise her ego.
    Cassie: This fight isn't necessary, stranger.
    Rambo: *smirking* Afraid you can't win?
    Cassie: *irritated* Ok, NOW it's necessary.
• Audience Surrogate: Because he is from a world without any sci-fi or magical elements, he is confused and unfamiliar with a lot of the Mortal Kombat lore and characters, putting him in the shoes of newcomers of the franchise. Most of his interactions with the other fighters are simply Rambo asking them who or what they are.

  Rambo: So, you're a vampire?
  Skarlet: I am a blood mage, not a vampire.
  Rambo: The difference being...?

• Badass in Distress: Colonel Trautman - superior officer of Rambo's - is still yet to be found. A fellow Vietnam veteran Spawn goes as far as to quote Trautman himself to Rambo:
  "Go home, John. You have done enough damage."
• Badass Normal: Rather than having any supernatural abilities or futuristic weapons, he's instead a One-Man Army who makes use of conventional weapons and traps.
• Badasses Wear Bandanas: He's pretty much one of the most famous examples of this trope, so it's a given. It's also his gear item so you can choose various other bandana designs for him to wear.
• Baritone of Strength: As provided by Sylvester Stallone.
• Beating A Dead Player: Downplayed. His "Mission Accomplished" outro has him hurl his opponent to the floor, seemingly about to execute them with his knife. Instead he psyches them out by sparing them, plunging his knife to the side of their head.
• Beware the Honest Ones: As far as any other character goes, Rambo is brutal, destructive and dangerous to get on the wrong side of, but he's still willing to admit that he's rather scared of Shao Kahn... while about to fight the emperor himself.
• Birds of a Feather: He and Jax are both veterans who struggle with PTSD. Their intros show they get along pretty well.
• Blood Knight: Completely averted. Despite being a One-Man Army who only knows war, he openly states he does not want to fight anyone and often offers his opponents multiple chances to stand down or stop provoking him into taking action.
• Brutal Honesty: He's willing to admit that he's afraid of Shao Kahn straight to the emperor's face, but he's still not backing down or taking any grief for it.
• Celebrity Paradox: Apparently, according to interactions with the Cages, in the Mortal Kombat universe, Sylvester Stallone does exist (but not the Rambo film series), while he doesn't in Rambo's home universe.
• Combat Pragmatist: Spending time fighting in Vietnam has taught Rambo that the best way to survive in war is to fight dirty: in addition to bringing various weapons to kombat, he can also trap his opponents in snares, crawl along the ground to avoid projectiles, and break out concealed machine guns as one of his specials.
• The Comically Serious:
  • Some of his interactions with other kombatants highlights Rambo being a Fish out of Water yet kept his seriousness:
    Rambo: So you're a hero, huh?
    Johnny: Men wanna be me, women wanna be with me.
    Rambo: Nothing about this place makes sense.
  • Also present in his Friendship. Be honest, have you ever seen anyone treat a non-lethal game of Laser Tag like it's a life-or-death firefight?
• Crazy-Prepared: A lot of Rambo's attacks in the game are animated as if they were traps or weapons he had set up and hidden in the area before the match even began.
• Deadpan Snarker: Much like the rest of the cast, he has a few moments where his Brutal Honesty aims right for the opponent's ego. Bonus points for his voice tone remaining stoic enough for some textbook deadpan delivery.
  Rambo: So you're a vampire.
  Skarlet: I am a blood mage, not a vampire!
  Rambo: The difference being...?
• Dub Personality Change: In the Latin American Spanish dub, Rambo sounds more like a cocky and arrogant soldier than someone with PTSD like the original English version.
• Empty Shell: The man knows nothing but violence and is practically robotic in nature, something many characters lament. In particular, even a princess warrior like Sheeva is horrified and exclaims who made him that way must pay. It's played with in that there are moments in some intros where his humanity peeks through. He's embarrassed in one intro with Cassie (because her dad seems to think he's an action movie star), smiles with audacity in another intro when she tells him she doesn't want to fight him, and is conversational with both members of the Briggs family. Jax, notably, is the only person who brings up Rambo's past during an intro without Rambo getting annoyed or angry.
• Evil Twin: One Mirror Match has Rambo asking this of his other.
• Extreme Omnivore: Rambo is trained to eat all sorts of things that would make a normal man vomit, and in one of his special moves he can catch a bug crawling on the ground with his knife and eat it to restore a tiny sliver of his health or a bit more if his Fatal Blow is on cooldown. But he can't overindulge in it, or else he's going to vomit, becoming open to the opponent's attacks.
• Famed In-Story: After a fashion. In at least one timeline, Skynet regards him as enough of a threat to send a Terminator after him. And he manages to elude it, at least until the tournament.
• Fate Worse than Death: He considers RoboCop's situation to be this.
  Rambo: What's with all the robot parts?
  RoboCop: My organic body was destroyed in the line of duty.
  Rambo: Should've been put out of your misery.
• Fish out of Water: While Rambo is certainly capable of matching the brutality of the MK cast, he's definitely out of place in a universe where the kombatants rely on magic and cybernetics to defeat their enemies, a point he readily acknowledges in many intro banters. Case in point; aside from Leatherface, Rambo is the only Guest Fighter in the franchise to originate from a universe with no sci-fi or fantasy elements.
• The Gods Must Be Lazy: He holds this opinion during one of his intros with Fujin.
  Rambo: I'm told you're a god.
  Fujin: A demi-god, and Protector of Earthrealm.
  Rambo: Then why's this place such a mess?
• Grin of Audacity: In an intro with Cassie Cage, she remarks fighting with him wasn't necessary. Rambo flashes one of these while asking "Afraid you can't win?".
• Guest Fighter: From the Rambo film series, particularly based on his appearance from Rambo III, although he also has costumes from other movies in the franchise.
• Guns Akimbo: With the belt-fed M60 machine guns for one of his enhanced special moves and corresponding Brutality.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Despite being unquestionably on the side of good, most good or neutral characters on the roster in 11 look down on or pity him for his past. Most villains, on the other hand, favorably view him and seek to recruit him. Rambo also mentions he was unwelcomed back home after his tour of duty to Jax.
• I'm Your Worst Nightmare: Says this word-for-word to Mileena, right before opening fire on her and Rain, in the Kombat Pack 2 announcement trailer.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Much like with RoboCop prior, Played With. Rambo is still modeled after and voiced by his actor Sylvester Stallone, but the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible for Stallone himself to lend his facial capture, so Netherrealm instead had to completely create the character's model from the ground-up, and use a sculpture of young Stallone's likeness as a base.
• Lock-and-Load Montage: Played for Laughs with his Friendship, showing Rambo gearing up and preparing for combat... in an intense game of Laser Tag. Complete with using covers and crawling under fire.
• Martial Pacifist: Ironic, given how nuts he really is, but Rambo states he isn't an aggressor and would really rather not have to fight anyone. However, he warns foes that absolutely refuse to stand down that they will die if they keep harassing him.
• Mundane Made Awesome: He has one of the only Krushing Blows that doesn't involve his opponent at all: eating a bug while his Fatal Blow is on cooldown has the camera zoom in on it and slow down with the same gravitas as someone's skull getting smashed in.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Rambo makes his intro in the Kombat Pack 2 reveal trailer by mowing down Mileena and Rain before lifting up his machine gun and yelling while still firing. This was what he did upon returning to base in Rambo: First Blood Part II. He also does this with one of his outros.
  • His line to Mileena in the reveal trailer is a reference to his exchange with Colonel Zaysen in Rambo III:
    Col. Zaysen/Mileena: Who are you?
    Rambo: I'm your worst nightmare.
  • One of his Fatalities has Rambo ripping his opponent's throat, much like he did to a Mook in Rambo IV.
  • Rambo's Fatal Blow and one of his outros have him posing to the camera while pointing an explosive arrow at it, similar to a scene in Rambo: First Blood Part II.
  • One of his costumes is the poncho from First Blood.
  • His second Fatality involves the use of an electric metal bedspring matress that Rambo was tortured on in Rambo: First Blood Part II.
  • Also from the second Rambo movie, one of his outro reenacts his confrontation with the corrupted CIA agent, Marshall Murdock, with Rambo choking his opponent on the ground and plunge his knife next to their head and saying "Mission accomplished."
  • His intro with Geras brought up Rambo's conflict with Sheriff Teasle and how [Teasle] drew first blood, not him.
  • His intro with Robocop has Murphy tell Rambo to come with him, Rambo sneers "What's my crime? Vagrancy?", the same crime Teasle initially tried to arrest Rambo with.
  • Several pieces of banter between Rambo and the other kombatants pay homage not only to the Rambo films, but much of Sylvester Stallone's filmography, including Rocky, The Expendables, Cobra, Cliffhanger, Demolition Man, Over the Top, Judge Dredd, Bullet to the Head, Tango & Cash, Nighthawks, The Specialist, and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.
  • Rambo’s primary weapon is the two-tone survival knife from the second movie. He can also use the mini-machete from the fourth movie and the Heartbreaker knife from the fifth movie.
• Nice Guy: Despite being a ruthless killer with a lot of pent up anger, Rambo is chillingly calm and approachable in his interactions with most characters. He also points out many times over he doesn't want to fight his opponents or to not provoke him, but many unpleasant characters enjoy poking at his pacifistic efforts anyways.
• No Man Should Have This Power: In his ending, Rambo considers using the Hourglass to right every wrong in history. But it then occurs to him that this will alter the fates of untold billions. He refuses to do so, thinking it would make him no better than the men who sent him to Vietnam, and returns to his normal life.
• Noodle Incident: His intros seem to indicate that John's been a busy bee since getting sucked into the Mortal Kombat universe, since it's commented that he's run from the Shaolin, picked a fight with Kitana, survived a Kytinn hive, repelled a termination attempt by the T-800, and single-handedly routed Shao Kahn's army.
• Not So Similar: He rejects Erron Black's claim that they are alike because they are both killers, pointing out that, unlike Erron, he doesn't kill solely for the thrill of it.
• Not So Stoic:
  • Whilst his vocal tones don't change much, some of his intros show that even Rambo isn't unaffected by all the stuff around him, including expressing disgust at some of his freakier opponents like Millena and D'Vorah, being embarrassed by Johnny Cage and actually expressing genuine surprise/concern when Jacqui Briggs mentions that there are zombies in Outworld.
  • One intro with Scorpion has him remark: "What kind of place is this?", as he realizes that the kind of people he's fighting have superpowers.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: For such an indifferent man that at worst threatens to kill his enemies, he outright threatens Cold-Blooded Torture on the Joker, stating he deserves it for his crimes.
• Oh, Crap!: His "Mission Accomplished" outro draws a glorious one from each of his opponents… including himself.
• One-Man Army: While he is already one in his movies, his intro with Jax implied that he single-handedly took on Shao Khan's army and won.
• Outside-Context Problem: Unlike other Guest Fighters, Rambo comes from a more grounded world and thus, has never fought a enemy who is magically empowered or armed with high tech weaponry. As a result, against someone like Kronika, all his tactics and training mean nothing to a god like her and their fight, as Rambo puts it, is more akin to a battle of wills.
• Precision F-Strike: He delivers a few F-bombs: once upon learning humanity is extinct in a Bad Future where a Terminator hails from, upon learning that Shang Tsung wants to recruit him, and upon finding out D'Vorah wants to make him into food.
• Psycho for Hire: Owing to his history, most villains think Rambo is this and try to hire or recruit him for their ends. They're all in for a rude awakening when they realize Rambo is against any kind of evil or hurting innocents.
• Related in the Adaptation: Rambo's always been half Native American, but according to an intro with Nightwolf, his father is apparently Matokan.
• Shouting Shooter: He does this in the Kombat Pack 2 reveal trailer and one of his outros. Fitting, given how he is deeply associated with the trope.
• The Stoic: Practically an Empty Shell. Rambo never raises his voice or expresses much of any emotion.
• Suddenly Ethnicity: While the movies state he's of German and Native American descent (and novelizations state he had an Italian father and Navajo mother), an intro with Nightwolf states he's Matoka on his father's side.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Sure, Rambo is able to "eat things that would make a billy goat puke", but if he eats too many bugs in order to recover his health, he will end up vomiting.
• Taking You with Me: When Noob Saibot claims Rambo's death is near, John says he will at least take Noob with him.
• Trap Master: Many of Rambo's attacks and even his Fatalities have him springing his deadly traps on his opponents.
• Unnecessary Combat Roll: One of his variations allows him to roll towards his opponent and can follow up with a couple of options.
• Vocal Dissonance: A much older Sylvester Stallone voicing a younger version of his iconic character.
• Walking the Earth: His Arcade ending has him doing this after giving up the Hourglass.
• Worthy Opponent: Both Kano and Frost see Rambo as this, with the former positively relishing in the prospect of fighting him saying he wouldn't miss the chance for the world and the latter calling him the best if she needs to kill him for bragging rights. Ditto for Geras and Erron Black, the latter whom is excited to fight a crack shot like him and the former wanting him to give the mother of all battles.
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: Joker likes the idea that Rambo is possibly more violent than him and also knows how shitty the world really is, to the point that expresses interest in partnering up. Rambo, on the other hand, isn't at all keen on teaming up with a fully embraced killer.
• You Won't Like Me When I'm Angry: Often says this almost verbatim as a final warning for people looking to fight him.

Kharon

• Complete Immortality: Suggested to be the case, as Kharon speaks with confidence that D'Vorah cannot kill him. Unfortunately, she retorts that her only aim is to render him "unfit to ferry Kronika's enemies".
• Creepy Good: A pretty creepy looking guy who transports damned souls but otherwise seems to be a benevolent god who wants nothing to do with Kronika's schemes.
• Distressed Dude: Hanzo finds Kharon All Webbed Up and at the mercy of D'Vorah, as punishment for refusing to assist Kronika's Legion of Doom.
• Expy: A fairly transparent one of Charon from Classical Mythology, a denizen of the Underworld who ferries the souls of the dead across the River Styx to reach their appointed afterlives.
• Ghost Ship: His ships seemingly have no crews, and are implied to be controlled remotely by Kharon himself from the helm of his flagship.
• Keystone Army: Invoked. Raiden explicitly tells Sub-Zero and Scorpion that if Kharon is incapacitated, his fleet will be dead in the water without his guidance. Therefore, the ferryman needs to be protected at all costs.
• Non-Action Guy: Despite being an immortal Psychopomp, Kharon is no kombatant, and plainly tells Raiden that his humble fleet of barges can't take on Kronika's armored battleship in a straight fight. As such, he leaves the battle to Raiden's forces and focuses his attention on steering.
• Psychopomp: Ferries the souls of the dead across the Sea of Blood, which covers the furthest reaches of the Netherrealm and is implied to exist somewhere between all the realms.
• Prophet Eyes: Sports a set of these.
• Remember the New Guy?: Scorpion brings him up to Raiden as if Kharon has been a known fixture of the Netherrealm for ages, but 11 is the first time he's ever been mentioned (though Raiden doesn't know who he is until Scorpion and Sub-Zero, both formerly Netherrealm revenants, inform him). Justified as his role as a ferryman is largely irrelevant to the kombat around him in the realms, given he is only truly important in this game due to needing to find a place between them on the Sea of Blood.

Descendant of Apep

• All Your Powers Combined: Thanks to half of the key items he pilfers belonging to many Kombatants, some of them do grant him powers and abilities of said Kombatants.
• Badasses Wear Bandanas: Dons Kenshi's blindfold this way, it still retains a vestige of the blind swordsman's powers which allows him to peer into the spirit realm. He can activate it by putting the blindfold over his own eyes. However, you have to be careful while doing this. A spirit might appear and try to kill him, so make sure you swing the hammer right after you don it.
• Chain Pain: He can grab Scorpion's Spear/Kunai, which was left behind on a wooden column with the chain still attached and on fire. He makes use of it the good ol' Scorpion fashion by using it to target out of reach objects and targets, allowing him to either destroy them or pull them closer towards him.
• Cool Mask: Wears a rather ornate face mask or possibly menpo. That covers the lower half of his mug, from nose to chin.
• Continuity Nod: If his "name" is of any indicator, he may be the descendant of Apep from MK: Deception's Konquest Mode. The latter whom was also referenced inMKX in "Fallen Friend" premiere tower where Apep was killed by Quan Chi, and Bo' Rai Cho has to free his soul.
• Death by Cameo: Makes an appearance in the MK11 Aftermath Story Mode... as a corpse that fell victim to the traps in the Shaolin Dungeon.
• Flat Character: Somewhat justified considering his entire purpose is to be the playable character in the Krypt.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: What seems to have befell upon him in the Aftermath Story Mode. Thanks to some spikes from the Shaolin Dungeon.
• Heroic Mime: The most you'll hear from him are a few grunts.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: Aside from his treasure hunting ventures in the Krypt, he straight-up steals Ermac's amulet and Kenshi's blindfold from their corpses. Alongside that, he also pilfers all kinds of items he deems useful in his treasure hunting on the Krypt, from Shao Kahn's Wrath hammer to Scorpion's Kunai and many more.
• Legacy Character: As noted up earlier in Continuity Nod, his name might suggest that he could be a descendant of Apep, a minor character from MK: Deception who was Shujinko's guide and one of Bo'Rai 'Cho's students.
• No Name Given: He remains unnamed in the game itself, with the Descendant of Apep moniker coming up on the patch notes.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: In The Krypt proper, when he unlocks The throne room, he also no longer has any visible way out. In the game, he's also found dead in the Shaolin Dungeon.