How Kronika Manipulates the Story of ‘Mortal Kombat 11’
Mortal Kombat’s messy history accidentally lends itself to the story of a villain who strives for perfection by manipulating others
While Mortal Kombat never had a major villain problem like the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s undercooked attempts to create foils to their equally hit-or-miss heroes, it was a franchise that never quite knew when to let its antagonists pass on into memory. And with that reluctance to allow antagonists to become a memory, when a new set was introduced, the issue quickly became the repetition of funneling the actions of the previous enemies through others.
Shang Tsung and Shao Kahn worked within Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat II, and Mortal Kombat 3 because the conflict and stakes of those stories result from their actions. There was an ebb and flow to what Shao Kahn and Shang Tsung could do individually or working together. When the story of the first three games came to a close they ceased to be story-relevant characters. They should’ve been phased out to make room for newer villains.
That seemed to be the direction they were going with Mortal Kombat 4 and Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero. The beginning of the 3D Era introduces Shinnok and Quan Chi, two characters who take the positions of Shao Kahn (conqueror) and Shang Tsung (sorcerer) as the new series antagonists.
Their narrative relevance only goes as far as Shinnok’s gambit to kill his elder god contemporaries with Quan Chi as his magic toadie. Except for Shinnok, who is a combination of the previous two antagonists, Quan Chi’s narrative relevance vanished after MK4. The side-story, Mythologies, released in 1997, only established his origins before the events of MK4.
I think the retcon that muddled the history of Kuai Liang’s brother, Bi-Han, worked to a certain degree. It worked if you were a fan who remembered Bi-Han’s clan was originally paid to kill Shang Tsung by an unknown benefactor, and it worked if you never needed a face put to that identity. But in the aftermath of MK4 and Mythologies, Quan Chi doesn’t serve all that much of a purpose.
The introduction of Shujinko (Liu Kang’s successor) and the demon Onaga in the 3D Era was a clear indication that the franchise wanted to go in a different direction. But that desire was undermined in Armageddon by the persistence of Quan Chi, Shang Tsung, and Shao Kahn. Three villains who serve no greater purpose to the story and only appeal to mere nostalgia.
Quan Chi’s lack of individuality as a villain is highlighted to a greater degree when he is retrofitted into the backstory of the first three games in both continuities. The accomplishments of Shao Kahn and Shang Tsung are either given to him or a direct cause of his actions. The need to make him and by proxy, Shinnok, a great mastermind undercuts the franchise's original villains.
That his victories (as it were) are the accomplishments of the marginally better antagonists is damning. Quan Chi epitomizes the lazy writing of Greg Weisman’s Young Justice, whose villains created an actual void in the conflict because Weisman and his staff could think of no creative means to make their villains seem formidable or even threatening.
Nothing is interesting about a villain who has everything mapped out before the protagonists do. Nothing is interesting about a villain whose plans go “according to plan” even when they lose. A villain who wins, even when they’re not winning, is the creative bottom of writing villains.
When Kronika was introduced, the idea of an omniscient villain with the power to control time felt like a character born out of the Quan Chi stock of villainy. There would inevitably be an “everything is going according to plan” moment and relatively no effort would be made to establish Kronika as a reasonable threat. The Xanatos gambit of “You didn’t win” would be the basis of her victories. That’s not a great impression to make.
But, that didn’t turn out to be the case for her character. For the most part, Kronika’s role within Mortal Kombat 11 is specific to the point of isolating her and her actions to this single entry and establishing a foundation for other characters like her so that she doesn’t have to show up again. How Kronika is approached in the story makes her one of the more functional antagonists in the series since Shao Kahn and Shang Tsung.
As a writer and a creative with the responsibility of growing a world, revision is necessary. Editing is crucial to refining what will be the digestible version of your story for audiences to consume. As the years roll on, it’s fairly easy to become trapped in a never-ending loop of changing things because things aren’t meeting that plateau of “just right” that you want to reach.
For years now, I’ve struggled with what is effectively the idea of perfection and being perfect. Afraid as I am of making a mistake (tied largely to childhood trauma I’m certain I’ll never reconcile with), wise enough as I am to know I can learn from mistakes, I hinder myself with that fear. I know, sometimes, something better might come of a mistake made, but crossing that line triggers self-deprecating anger.
In the sixteen years I’ve spent actively working to become a better writer, the habit of [constant] revisionism isn’t something I embraced until I hit my mid-twenties, and then it was a process of learning to know when to stop. Because I know now nothing will ever be perfect enough for the mindset that wants perfection, but knows I can’t achieve that in the words that come from the mind.
There are so many ways something I can write can change into something else. It doesn’t matter if I spent time away from the work, or spend hours buried in it. So, for a lot of purely emotional reasons, I find myself endeared to and frustrated by Kronika’s particular villainy.
“Sculpting the Sands of Time requires great power and skill. You have neither, [Liu Kang]. You may be a god, but I am a Titan!” — Kronika
How Kronika came to be was a late addition in MK11. Not in the sense that she was a radically new character dropped into the game at the eleventh hour, but in that her presentation was very different. Despite the concept art that chronicles her design evolution, Kronika was originally conceptualized as a male villain. Members of the MK community discontent with the story mode presume that “the villain was originally male” meant a character like Geras was the head honcho, but that’s not the case.
In Gameinformer’s “Rapid Fire Questions” interview with Ed Boon, he specifies, that, for a considerable amount of the story’s development process, Kronika was originally a male character named “Kronicle” or just “Kronos” (the way he stumbles with the name makes me uncertain). The character was aligned closer to the god of time (Chronos), who has been canonically conflated with the father of Zeus and Titan of Greek mythology, Kronos, for thousands of years now.
Later in the game’s development, the design team made the switch from male to female villain on a suggestion. They believed the latter concept was cooler than what they went with initially. There was a big to-do about Kronika being the franchise’s “first female villain”, but it just highlights the damning problems the series has with female representation. That said, the change ultimately works to the benefit of the plot they’re telling with Kronika.
Kronika is defined through her ability to manipulate the fighters she approaches to represent her. Where a character like Quan Chi is established as a master manipulator without a workable foundation to support it, Kronika’s manipulation is reasonably justified through her status and her role in the story as the literal god of time and architect of destiny.
Kronika approaches her allies under the guise of empathy and understanding. She achieves her goals not through brute force but a gentle voice and the appearance that she understands their plight. With Liu Kang, Kitana, and the other Revenants, she plays on the idea that their fates were railroaded and their current existence is not the path she created for them. Under the corruption of Shinnok’s magic, none of them are hard to convince to help her. They don’t question her ulterior motives.
To the elder Jax Briggs, she’s the Avant-garde angel emerging from the sands with reassurances of goodwill and a better future for him and his daughter. She plays on his PTSD and his tendency to self-punish. He does the rest himself. Shao Kahn, the two Kano’s, and the Cyber Lin Kuei are all promised a future without Earthrealm’s champions to stop them.
She plays on their single-minded, self-serving nature. She promises a better future in a new timeline and vows the kill Raiden, the root of everyone’s suffering, by erasing him from existence. I believe those are promises she would’ve kept under the pretense of her definitions. A sort’ve Monkey’s Paw wish. Her power and her goals are too sweet a deal to refuse.
Kronika approaches the circumstances of the current timeline with the detached practically of a primordial god. She isn’t about ruling the world, but more about how she can realign it to its perceived balance. If she can’t do that, she starts over. She upends a fairly stable timeline on the technicality of a small error that is, in her mind, too big to ignore.
Because she approaches her allies using wisdom instead of violence, she is potentially a greater threat than the previous antagonists. If she convinces you her line of thinking is right, it will be difficult to reconsider her position without knowing all the facts.
If you’re big on trying to be pragmatic, it’s hard to view her actions as inherently evil. Even if her first alliances are with people corrupted or harmed by the power of Shinnok, how is fixing time a bad thing? Kronika is being misunderstood here.
A lot about Kronika on a whole is performative in nature. She is disingenuous in the why of her aims, but completely honest about her goals nonetheless. Like a lot of characters, Kronika is painted with broad strokes and not offered an incredible amount of depth. The basic thesis of the character is established through her actions, but a lot of the above is inferred or based on impression.
“Blame yourself for the Elder god’s deaths, Raiden. Your actions have irrevocably altered Kronika’s golden balance of light and dark. Shinnok’s decapitation was the cap stone. […]Nature demands equilibrium. Balance is perfection.” — Cetrion
MK11 introduces an entirely new group of immortals into the series: The Titans. They are primordial, and the presumed architects of the universe, or a big part of its reason for being. If it happened, then it’s reasonable to assume the Titans allowed it to be and vice versa. Kronika is one of these Titans, the prime creator of the Mortal Kombat’s timelines following the Dawn of Time™. The keeper of the Hourglass, she crafts the fates of everyone who live in the separated realms. She guides their destinies to what we’re meant to believe are their intended paths, but, for all the talk of “puppets on strings”, their actions remain largely a consequence of their own agency.
However their influence affects the universe, Kronika and the Titans remain an invisible component to the individuals living within it. No one knows about them, and intervention is largely a last resort or it never happens. Kronika has destroyed and recreated timelines in an effort to achieve or maintain a balance between “light” (good) and “dark” (evil), but no one save immortals (like Raiden) know of it. Yet, even they can be manipulated by Kronika’s power and retrofitted into different roles. In a lot of ways, Kronika defines just how meaningless it is to get hung up or attached to any particular period of the universe. It will inevitably change, things will be discarded, whether you or I like it or not.
While “the arc of the universe bends to her will”, she is not entirely omnipotent. She can manipulate time itself, but she can’t pick and choose who comes falling out of the mangled timeline. That’s a side effect of her otherwise all-encompassing control. She requires massive amounts of energy to perform a full-on time reset, and certain aspects within the timeline are tailored failsafes that make that possible.
Shang Tsung’s destiny as a soul-sucking sorcerer, his obsession with collecting souls, becomes tragic. The Dragon Grotto underneath the Wu Shi Academy makes the Shaolin Temple’s constant destruction inevitable as opposed to a random misfortune. Kronika’s actions seem to counter the elder god Cetrion’s belief that no one’s fate is determined by the timeline, but of their own free will.
When push comes to shove, Kronika isn’t all that great a fighter despite all her strength. (It’s easy to see why Liu Kang overpowers her, his sheer determination notwithstanding.) Her very first creation, Geras, is a fixed point in any timeline she creates, and serves her to the detriment of himself, and willingly so, as her protector and enforcer.
The elder gods Shinnok and Cetrion are extensions of her will, the moral scales of every timeline. Shinnok’s exile to the Netherrealm is by design, Cetrion’s definition of virtue counters her brother’s darkness. Both are responsible for the conflicts within the realms and determine outcomes. Both abide by their mother’s will for the timelines and are one of the many failsafes that grant her the power to reset the timeline at all.
Kronika isn’t a malicious character in the same vein as previous antagonists, her primary concern is balance above everything and everyone. Her balance, maintaining constant realm conflict in a cycle of recreation and destruction by her influence, is a ‘necessary evil’. I don’t think she enjoys suffering so much as she lost or never had a shred of empathy for the fallout she creates. That isn’t required to do her job. At worst, she’s a perfectionist who views herself as a pragmatist and cannot be convinced of wrongdoing otherwise.
If the nature of the roster’s Arcade Endings achieved in the towers is any kind of sign of Kronika’s attitude, there is nothing to revel in her position as a creationist — even with that all power. The playable characters who achieve control of Kronika’s hourglass to create their ideal timeline, to correct some wrong in their former lives, learn the trade-off in the Hourglass’ responsibility sometimes isn’t worth the exchange of their humanity or peace of mind.
Cetrion cannot abide by the free will of man, their agency, and so she subjugates them with tactics far more brutal than Kronika’s. Liu Kang is unfulfilled with the constant oversight of the world that robs him (and Kitana) of personal happiness, but resigns himself to the role regardless. Jacqui Briggs’s self-destructive need to make her father happy leads to her erasure from the timeline. Other characters swing from extreme to damaging self-interest that sees them as gods, idols, rulers and petty heroes (Noob Saibot, Skarlet, Shao Kahn, Kung Lao, and the Kollector). Only a handful abandon godhood altogether and leave the Hourglass unattended (Cassie, Erron Black, Kotal Kahn, Geras).
Raiden, Jade, and Sonya, funny enough, are the exception to the rule. They are only characters who embrace godhood with the mindset to create a better future at their own expense, hardly challenged by the free will of the souls they’re charged to protect.
That Kronika even remained a neutral kind of ‘evil’ in her manipulation of the timeline is impressive.
MK11 does enough to show that she is a “guardian” detached from the concept of humanity, chasing the illusion of perfection. Man’s free will is more dangerous to her vision than the damage that Shinnok’s desire for suffering and death through darkness creates. Her son’s desires aren’t a moral negative for her. Neither is Cetrion’s warped perception of “light” and the belief that the greatest virtue of all is honoring one’s parents to the detriment of yourself. Her children sustained her plan so she never had to take the direct action as she does in the game. Her worldview typically went opposed despite who realized what’s going on.
Cetrion espouses that she and Shinnok are necessary to maintain the “golden balance” Kronika created, but the necessary evil argument crumbles when you realize how Raiden’s actions against Shinnok simply removed any chance of Kronika obtaining his power to restart the timeline without issue.
Many view her actions as an angry mother seeking retribution for the maiming of her son. But the “love” for her children is perfunctory. It’s not a genuine affection like Cetrion displays for her.
“Out of desperation comes invention. I had not thought it possible for Raiden to surprise me.” — Kronika
In a muddled presentation of facts, Kronika asserts that the damage done to the timeline is a consequence of Raiden’s former actions to prevent Armageddon from taking place in MK9. His message and final words, “he must win”, are vague, unhelpful, and leaves his past self operating on the presumption that he can do anything about events he couldn’t decipher from good or bad.
Raiden’s errors in MK9 created a chain reaction of events that resulted in the deaths of multiple heroes and villains alike, throwing the balance of light and dark off-kilter. The deaths that followed because of his actions were not the destinies Kronika intended. Raiden was acting against the script of his role, his destiny.
The circumstances that escalated in MKX, Scorpion killing Quan Chi and Raiden absorbing Shinnok’s darkness to save Earthrealm’s life force, brought things to such a head that the undeath of Shinnok forces her to intervene and step out of the shadows. Raiden is explicitly blamed for the destruction of the timeline that he now knows in MK11. He is told by Cetrion that he’ll shoulder the responsibility of the deaths of millions lost in the destruction of time itself. Her mother will also erase him. The New Era™ has no place for him on account of his “crimes”.
Raiden sees the actions of the keeper of time as a threat to the universe, as do the others who want to stop Kronika. But, because Kronika plays things so close to the chest, the jobbers who work with her succeed in distracting Raiden, preventing him and his champions from successfully looking for her whereabouts. It’s not until Scorpion and Sub-Zero remember they know a Netherrealm sailor that Kronika’s Isle of Time is located.
Even with the two grandmasters working to find Kronika, Raiden panics. His desperation feels genuine as time draws to a close. Raiden becoming a self-fulling prophecy, ignoring the warnings about how terrible things got when he wielded Shinnok’s amulet, reinforces his desperate arrogance being the root cause of a lot of problems in the new timeline.
Then he remembers his repeated killing of Liu Kang is merely part of the end-state Kronika has trapped him in. Raiden remembers all of the terrible things that happened or will happen to his champions are of her design, not the ripple effect of their agency.
Kronika had me sold on her whole mission statement the first couple hours of the game. That she only infers that “Raiden ruined the timeline” and could fix it if those harmed by Raiden would help her, genuinely had me thinking it wouldn’t be a huge loss that Raiden (my favorite character) disappeared from existence.
Every time Raiden remembers what’s happening, she’s already resetting the timeline, already making improvements. (But I couldn’t tell you why immortals that function outside the flow of time never remember these events.) It would be easy to say that Kronika has worked tirelessly in the defense of her children, but her actions are nothing if not self-motivated and self-indulgent at this point.
Maybe everything witnessed in MK11 is just an iteration of characters she’s wronged realizing what’s going on and trying to stop her. Maybe this is the first time this has happened for everyone except Raiden. That she even admits to actively manipulating Raiden and Liu Kang into becoming enemies, because she feared their cooperative power, highlights her fallibility. In a moment of supreme arrogance she parallels Raiden’s blind certainty of his own message in MK9.
Kronika and Raiden’s dynamic as mortal enemies is one that is, unfortunately, barely touched upon in the last two chapters of MK11’s story mode. As a twist, it works. The anti-thesis of a functioning relationship between two immortals is interesting because it’s the first time one of the higher beings that rank above Raiden is a personality and has a reason to object to his interference. It’s the first time a Mortal Kombat story gives Raiden a legitimate reason to rebel against his superiors.
Before now, alternate endings or the failure that is the character of Dark Raiden has seen Raiden muck things up as a totalitarian figure on the notion that his superiors are incompetent or uncaring of mortals. But there was no voice to counter-argue or put pay to that belief. The implication that Raiden is trapped in a fail state created by Kronika is a narrative retcon is far more interesting than the basis of MK9’s wayward narrative of vague messaging.
It raises questions that don’t have to be answered but could’ve done a great deal for the story. The unfortunate part of knowing that this narrative exists only to further wipe away the fired rubber band nature of Mortal Kombat’s continuity post-1997 (more power to it), makes asking questions like when Kronika realized or began to believe Raiden was ruining her ideal world kind’ve pointless despite the theories that can arise from that mental exercise.
Kronika never existed before now. Her war with Raiden is a late addition in the canon that clashes with “failed timelines” that never see Liu Kang and Raiden at odds. Alternate canon stories often see to it that Liu Kang isn’t present, or make him such a minor character, that Kronika’s belief is rendered untrue. Is that a bad thing? No, not really. It just takes the fun out of trying to weave a multiverse theory together on her deposition alone.
“The realms are you knew them are undone. Erased! You cannot save a future that no longer exists.” — Kronika
As a villain, Kronika works for me because she feeds into and represents the worst aspects of the perfectionist. Perfecting a timeline by removing one thing is an enticing idea. However, how that system works in Mortal Kombat’s universe is one ultimately exposed for the falsehood that it is. I love that this game surprised me with how in the wrong Kronika was and badly I bought into it.
Most of the action by and done in her name is justified by the time travel mechanic and her nature as a primordial creator. That she can undo anything makes her a more immediate threat than the combined actions of Quan Chi and Shinnok. Their ability to control the circumstances in MK9 and MKX is less the result of character action, and more because the plot was hurried along to the detriment of its characters.
Where a character like Quan Chi had the accomplishment of previous antagonists retrofitted onto his character, inherently damaging the narrative of those characters, Kronika is the architect of destiny. She justifies her position as the author of history but leaves the accomplishments of the previous antagonists their own. Kronika’s methods and goals are unlike Shang Tsung and Shao Kahn, and she benefits from that.
Kronika never directly intervenes into the conflicts she creates, which is how she maintains her control over all circumstances. When she faces someone who is almost her equal, her efforts in undoing the timeline are rendered moot by the determination to stop her.
Her [emotional] unraveling works as the climax because Raiden throws her a curve-ball. She loses everyone who allied themselves to her cause (or they just kinda disappear from the narrative), save Cetrion and three Revenants (Kitana, Jade, and Kung Lao). It’s a loss she thinks she can handle with ease because she is so close to undoing the universe. Then Raiden creates a new immortal in Liu Kang, an outcome she never accounted for because it never happened before now.
Cetrion, while against her mother’s actions, illustrates how easy it is to manipulate your child to throw themselves on the sword in your name when she sacrifices her power to her mother, paralleling Raiden’s sacrifice to save Liu Kang’s soul.
Creating an omniscient antagonist who acts as a stand-in for twenty-seven years of broken authorial intent is kind’ve brilliant as far as this goofy franchise is concerned. A god that pretends to express discontent with a timeline on account of the actions of one (Raiden), when she is responsible, is a reflection of discontent in the audience (frustration with a past or present era) and writers (changing continuity whenever it suits them, better or worse).
It doesn’t matter that she rewinds time, the story outright states her perfect world is never coming into realization because she is opposed by an idea (Fire God Liu Kang) greater than her vision of balance: A mortal’s free will.
Liu Kang and Raiden poke holes in her plan until she just lets her anger and arrogance consume her. She falls apart as her perfect world falls apart. It’s fitting that Liu Kang’s dragon fire burns her until she turns to glass and he smashes her into pieces. Perfection does nothing if not leave the pursuer in a mess, shattered into fine pieces.
This story is part of a four part series focused on Mortal Kombat 11’s story mode.
