Canon about Herbert West from the RA novelization (Before Miskatonic):

* Very likely killed his parents, even if it was accidental. (Chemical fire.) Likely not convicted, as he inherited and then sold his family estates.

* He was 13 when this happened, and spent the next 5 years in the foster system.

* As a child, he developed a stiff neck from hunching over a microscope for so long. He tried to amend this by balancing encyclopedias on his forehead.

* Has an aversion to sound. His parents watched a lot of TV, which held no interest for him. One of the reasons he liked Zurich was because of how quiet it was.

* Also has instances where he takes others’ statements literally. (Very autistic-coded.)

* Poisoned one of his foster siblings, resulting in him having green semen. (How Herbert even KNEW about this side effect is never explained. Yick!)

* From Ontario, Canada, originally.

* Attended New York University for undergraduate. They gave him a full scholarship.

* Studied with Gruber for approximately 3 years before his untimely death. (West was 24 at the time.)

* Wrote a complaint letter about the medical community in a science journal that attracted Hans Gruber’s attention.

* Herbert got everything in Gruber’s will. (How this wasn’t grounds for a murder trial is beyond me.)

* Spent his childhood talking to himself while watching the grass grow through the sidewalks. His parents (unsurprisingly) sent him to a psychiatrist.

* Had an unspoken father/son relationship with Dr. Gruber. (BTW, Hill’s mentioning of Gruber is the reason he’s crying in that deleted scene, not Dan.)

The novelization of Re-Animator states that Herbert grew up in Canada and as a Canadian I have a physical need for this fact to be known and acknowledged by the fandom I will simply perish away if it is not

HUGE WIN FOR AUTISTIC HERBERT WEST TRUTHERS

David using Gillian’s book like this is sending me

This is THE Jeff Rovin, isn’t it? The writer who helped G “write” her novel. The first and third clip can be found in the thread but here he speaks about celebrities and how he was the “fixer” who helped keep their secrets hidden. Mmmm, who might have wanted to keep secrets hidden? Nah, not possible. Celebrites “don’t lie”. It’s my imagination.  

Btw, as long as the Clintons don’t mess with minors, my post emphasizes stars. 

1,001 Great Jokes by Jeff Rovin

Vanilla

Herbert West is autistic and homoromantic asexual. Also trans. I headcanon West as nonbinary, because my adaptation, but him being a trans guy is awesome too.

Cat? When did we have a cat? We never had a cat.

How big do you think the age gap between Bi-Han and Kuai in the prior timeline because whenever I look at fanart, it seems a lot fans either believe Bi-Han was a kid(maybe 10) and Kuai being like 6 and there's the other side of Kuai being a baby and Bi-Han being in his late teens and approaching adulthood.

Personally I think if Bi-Han were that old compared to Kuai, Kuai would probably view him as a father figure rather than a brother.

Also I don't think the Lin Kuei would appreciate an infant being in their ranks since it'd probably distract Bi-Han from his duties and honestly Bi-Han would probably be more difficult to indoctrinate if he was in his teens. Seriously you can't tell me Bi-Han would appreciate his father shoving his teenaged self in a random clan with a baby and expect him to not only be a productive assassin whilst he's rocking Kuai to sleep.

It looks cute in pictures but in reality it'd probably be easier for the clan if Kuai wasn't a baby. Babies are a lot of work and it'd be more of a distraction than anything productive.

This is not strictly game source as the quote comes from Mortal Kombat novel (1995) written by Jeff Rovin but it is one of the most detailed information about Lin Kuei training:

They [Lin Kuei] would kidnap children when they were five or six and raise them in secret caves or woods to become superb athletes, great scholars, and unparalleled fighters, able to use all weapons and to improvise arms from common objects such as paper rolled to a knife-point or sand packed into a sock. They would train the children, boys and girls both, to be masters of many trades: carpenters, fishermen, priests, and even beggars, so they could blend in and make themselves useful in different towns as they traveled on missions for their lords. Many young people died during training: some could not hold their breath for five minutes and drowned, others weren’t fast enough to avoid the weapons of the masters, some starved or froze or dehydrated when they were stranded, naked, in deserts or on mountaintops and told to make their way home. But those who survived were Lin Kuei.

Mortal Kombat Conquest TV series (1998) whose events takes place in times of Great Kung Lao also mentions Lin Kuei attacks on families and kidnapping children - the age is not specified, but episodes “Kold Reality” (#3)

and "The Serpent and the Ice" (#15)

suggest a young age.

Then we have Mythologies: Sub-Zero tie-in material, that states Lin Kuei's "warriors are chosen at birth to be raised apart from the workings of day to day civilization and are stripped of their former lives. Only the clan knows their existence." and that Bi-Han and Kuai Liang have "already been chosen by the Lin Kuei to become warriors for the clan"

From Sub-Zero's backstory, we learn his mother "tried in vein to hide them from their father whose own life in America was only a cover for his true identity and purpose. Eventually they were found and their father returned with them to his homeland."

Taking all of those sources into consideration, my personal headcanon is that Bi-Han was around 6 years old - the age where Lin Kuei would have taken him away if mother did not rebel against that. I think, if she didn't interfere with Lin Kuei's plans for the boys, Bi-Han as the eldest, would be taken first, then in a few more years the clan would collect Kuai Liang and in another years the youngest sister if she fit the requirement. Yet because the mother tried to save her children - and most likely she died during that time, the father's cover was either blown up or he simply didn't have what to do with too young Kuai Liang so he took both boys at the same time.

The age gap between the original timeline brothers in my mind is around 5-6 years, with Bi-Han being around 6+ years old, Kuai Liang around 1+ and the youngest sister just a baby. That way Bi-Han is old enough to remember mother and youngest sister and build some resentment against father that presumably killed both, but still young enough to be indoctrinated into assassin life. His training started faster than Kuai Liang which is why Bi-Han either is lone wolf or partnered with Hydro while Tundra trained with Smoke who at some point joined the clan (not saying they were at the same age, rather that Smoke, as an outsider from different culture, had a lot to catch up on).

The Lin Kuei targets children old enough to be trained but young enough to have to be easily stripped of their former lives. However as the alternative timeline presents, kidnapping in modern times is exception rather than the rule, and as we have Sektor, the biological son of Grandmaster born into clan, so quite likely the clan has its own nursery and people tasked to take care and prepare infants and very young children for their future training and servitude. So when Bi-Han started his training, Kuai Liang needed to wait a few more years under those people's care.

In a strict sense of alternative timeline, I'm willing to tone down the age difference to more like 2-3 years, as MK9's Sub-Zero trailer did not give me the feeling of too big age difference?

My favorite, personal headcanon is the 5-6 years age difference. Though I do like imagine Bi-Han to always lurking around baby Kuai Liang to make sure the boy was okay, I doubt Lin Kuei would task him with taking care of the baby, because most likely the clan had a specialized group of people to perform these duties. The clan had after all centuries of experience how to deal and prepare kids for their benefit but also letting brothers to keep their family bond (memories of former life) doesn't sound as something Lin Kuei would care for.

Shang Tsung and his birds

from the Mortal Kombat novel by Jeff Rovin

Canon about Daniel Cain from the RA novelization:

* His middle name is Johnathan

* Attended Johns Hopkins University for undergrad.

* His father was a lawyer. There’s a bit of a conflicting error in the text that states Dan “enjoyed listening to his lectures (even now),” but then later in the book claims his parents died in a car crash when he was an infant. It’s hard to discern which storyline Rovin is following.

* The death of his parents created a kind of trauma that arrises every time he’s faced with death of a patient or anyone else. (Mainly Rufus, in this example.)

* Raised by a “spinster” aunt who “had the sensibilities of a nun” (Meg’s words).

* Hooked up with at least five girls at Miskatonic before meeting Meg. (“Damn, Daniel!”)

* Gets teased about his last name by a colleague, who refers to him as “Nova,” “Coe,” or “Candy.”

* Former roommate was named Eddie Grimley. Eddie’s parents had a lot of money that afforded them the rent of a whole house. Eddie dropped out of medical school to become a dancer. This is what led Dan to post the vacancy.

* Dan is a habitual stoner.

* Is a football fan, at least enough to hold a casual conversation about it.

* He and Meg had been dating for six months before Herbert’s arrival at MU. They were already engaged.

* Has Star Trek bedsheets. (Yes, it was pertinent for me to restate that.)

Ah-Movie Monster magazine-edited by Jeff Rovin-not a fan of Jeff Rovin-who would take jabs at Bela Lugosi-he called Bela a clumsy ham! Fuck Jeff Rovin!

It lasted 10 issues-I had them all anyway-I bought anything monsterwise back then-my fruit picking money was spent on comics,mags,and books-and fishing gear.

Well Jeff-your a forgotten hack and Bela is more popular now than ever.

This cover art is cool, though!

Deadly Spawn

Image accessed on IMDB here

[The Deadly Spawn is a movie I’ve known about for decades, having read about it in Jeff Rovin’s Encyclopedia of Monsters and seen the truly grotesque creature design on The Bad Movie Report, one of the oldest b-movie websites still extant (even if it hasn’t updated since 2010). But I never got around to seeing it until this past weekend, and I am glad I did. It’s a very simple premise (monster comes to Earth in meteorite, eats a whole bunch of people in a country house), but the execution is stellar. The movie cost about $25,000 to make, yet the practical effects are as good as big budget movies from the same era. Don’t believe me? Watch it for yourself! A word of warning, it is incredibly, disgustingly gory. ]

Deadly Spawn CR ½ NE Aberration This creature looks something like a tadpole, but the resemblance is only superficial. It has an oversized eyeless head that is almost entirely mouth, a set of flabby protrusions along its underside and two vestigial arms growing from its upper side. It is a fleshy pink in hue.

Deadly Spawn Brooder CR 6 NE Aberration This grotesque mass of flesh has three heads, all of which are eyeless and dominated by toothy maws. The central head is larger; the two heads to the side are smaller and set slightly lower on the body. It has six flabby protrusions that it drags itself along, assisted by long arms ending in three clawed hands.

The deadly spawn are well named, as these ravenous creatures can strip a human to the bone in a matter of minutes, and reproduce whole armies in a matter of days. They travel through the vacuum of space in cysts found dormant within meteorites, and a single such space rock making planetfall can endanger an entire continent. An individual spawn is relatively weak, but they rarely are found alone, and are cunning enough to coordinate group ambushes of their prey. Worse, once they have fed well enough, they metamorphose into a deadly spawn brooder, a creature larger than a man with multiple gaping maws. The spawn brooder is the reproductive stage, and creates new spawn and helps protect them while they feed. Disgorging new spawn weakens a spawn brooder, but only for a brief time.

The deadly spawn have no society, living basically only to eat and breed. They are faintly intelligent, just enough to grant them curiosity and a savage disregard for life. They seem to enjoy intimidating and disgusting other creatures with their obscene appearances, and may leave their victims partially eaten in places where they will be found by others. The spawn brooders can understand Aklo, and may be persuaded to cooperate with evil alien creatures, but those who would control the deadly spawn put themselves at risk of being eaten themselves.

A deadly spawn is around six inches long, and the brooders stand almost six feet tall and eight feet long. There are rumors of enormous spawn brooders the size of houses that have grown fat by feeding undisturbed and without spawning (treat as a Gargantuan spawn brooder with 12 HD, Str 32, Dex 6 and Con 34, a CR 13 monster).

Deadly Spawn    CR ½ XP 200 NE Tiny aberration Init +0; Senses blind, blindsight 20 ft., Perception +5 Defense AC 13, touch 12, flat-footed 13 (+2 size, +1 natural) hp 8 (1d8+4) Fort +4, Ref +0, Will +3 DR 1/-; Immune gaze effects, visual spells and effects Defensive Abilities fast ability healing Offense Speed 20 ft., climb 10 ft. Melee bite +3 (1d2+1 plus attach) Space 2 ½ ft.; Reach 0 ft. Special Attacks chew (1d4+1) Statistics Str 12, Dex 11, Con 18, Int 3, Wis 13, Cha 6 Base Atk +0; CMB -1 (+7 grapple); CMD 9 Feats Stealthy Skills Climb +9, Escape Artist +2, Perception +5, Stealth +14, Swim +5; Racial Modifiers +4 Stealth, +4 Swim Ecology Environment any land and underground Organization solitary, pair, gang (3-8) or brood (9-30 plus 1 deadly spawn brooder) Treasure incidental Special Abilities Blindsight (Ex) A deadly spawn’s blindsight is based on its hearing. If it is deaf, it cannot use this ability and is treated as fully blind. Chew (Ex) A deadly spawn that begins its turn attached to a creature deals 1d4+1 points of slashing and piercing damage to that creature. Fast Ability Healing (Ex) A deadly spawn heals ability damage at a rate of 1 point per minute, and heals ability drain by resting as if it were ability damage.

Deadly Spawn Brooder  CR 6 XP 2,400 NE Medium aberration Init +3; Senses blind, blindsight 40 ft., Perception +6 Defense AC 18, touch 9, flat-footed 18 (-1 Dex, +9 natural) hp 63 (6d8+36) Fort +8, Ref +1, Will +7 DR 3/-; Immune gaze effects, visual spells and effects Offense Speed 20 ft. Melee great bite +9 (2d6+5 plus grab), 2 bites +9 (1d6+5), 2 claws +7 (1d4+2) Special Attacks chew (2d6+5), disgorge spawn (6/day) Statistics Str 20, Dex 8, Con 22, Int 5, Wis 15, Cha 10 Base Atk +4; CMB +9 (+13 grapple); CMD 18 (24 vs. trip) Feats Improved Initiative, Multiattack (B), Power Attack, Stealthy Skills Climb +9, Escape Artist +5, Perception +6, Stealth +10, Swim +13; Racial Modifiers +4 Stealth, +4 Swim Languages Aklo (cannot speak) SQ weak claws Ecology Environment any land or underground Organization solitary, brood (1 plus 2-30 deadly spawn) or army (2-5 plus 4-150 deadly spawn) Treasure incidental Special Abilities Blindsight (Ex) A deadly spawn brooder’s blindsight is based on its hearing. If it is deaf, it cannot use this ability and is treated as fully blind. Chew (Ex) A deadly spawn brooder that begins its turn with a creature grappled deals 2d6+5 points of slashing and piercing damage to that creature. Disgorge Spawn (Ex) As a standard action, a deadly spawn brooder can vomit up 1d4+1 deadly spawn in an adjacent square. This deals the deadly spawn brooder 1 point of Constitution damage for every spawn it creates. A deadly spawn brooder can use this ability a number of times a day equal to its Constitution modifier (6/day for an ordinary spawn brooder) Fast Ability Healing (Ex) A deadly spawn brooder heals ability damage at a rate of 1 point per minute, and heals ability drain by resting as if it were ability damage. Weak Claws (Ex) A deadly spawn brooder’s claws are treated as secondary natural weapons.

i am nearly finished frankenstein and after this i will have no more new reading material… time to reread re-animator (the novelization of the film) by jeff rovin!!!!

trivia tidbits from the Reanimator novelization

‘so I’m not usually one for movie novelizations, but I heard pretty decent things about Jeff Rovin’s Re-Animator: The Novelization! and I wanted to find more Re-Animator content that doesn’t involve me actually having to watch Beyond Re-Animator. 

and it was pretty good! some of the expansions of lore in the novel were fun, especially with the side characters. it also included a few bits of trivia that made me laugh and/or feel, and thought it’d be cool to include them all in a little post! obviously these aren’t Canon Canon, but some of them are fun to play around with.

- Herbert West was raised in Canada - at least until a chemical fire (implied to be caused by him) burned down his home and killed his parents, upon which he was placed in a foster home. At some unspecified point, he made a serum that turned his foster home roommate’s semen green.

- He went to NYU before going over to work with Dr. Gruber in Switzerland.

- Speaking of Dr. Gruber, Herbert explicitly refers to him as being like a father to him. Dr. Gruber returns the sentiment. He willingly kills himself so that Herbert can test the formula on him, but the dosage is too high.

- Some fun hospital lore: it was created as an endowment by a chemical company as apologies/ass-covering for poisoning the river, it gets the overflow from a Springfield hospital, and they’re understaffed themselves.

- Dr. Hill has a Jaguar car. 

- Dan doesn’t drink milk because the first time he touched a corpse, the skin texture reminded him of a milk carton.

- Dan’s former roommate, Eddie Grimley, had a wealthy father and Eddie spent lots of money on both of them. Eddie dropped out of med school to become a dancer.

- Herbert is straight up like ‘you have a basement? cool. I’m turning it into a lab’

- Before Dan moved in, the owner died in the basement. His name was Phillips, a horror writer, and his family let Dan sign a four month lease so long as he didn’t get rid of Phillips’ junk.

- Dan and Meg have been exclusively dating for six months.

- West is 24. With 4 years in New York and 3 years in Zurich, that makes West 17 when he enrolled in NYU.

- Very odd interlude where Dan admires Dr. Hill’s hands (during the famous pencil-breaking scene). He concludes that Dr. Hill must be a doting lover with those hands.

- A test subject (a student) died in Dr. Hill’s study while he worked with Dr. Gruber. He was cleared of any wrongdoing, but had to leave because professors were not allowed to date students.

- Herbert left money for whatever he uses - a buck in the toilet paper and two bucks in the Meow Mix. 

- Both of Cain’s parents died in a car crash when he was little, leaving him to be raised by an aunt.

- Dan used to have a bat problem in the house. He poisoned some in the attic and nailed their bodies outside the house.

- Meg is 20.

- It’s heavily implied that Meg’s Dad would actually be thrilled if she and Dr. Hill started dating, and that he brings professors around as ‘suitors’ of sort for her.

- After the talk where Herbert gets kicked out and Dan gets his loans rescinded, all he wants to do is go home and smoke weed.

- They’re both questioned after the first reanimation (where Halsey died). The officer asks if they’re lovers. Dan snickers and says he’s engaged to be married, Herbert’s gaze falls to the floor.

- West used to balance encyclopedias on his head as a child to make up for the neck strain from looking through a microscope.

- There’s a funny line where Herbert remarks that Dan would make a good husband. It’s clearly meant to be ‘a good husband in general’, but, y’know. 

- Apparently, there hasn’t been a murder in Arkham in six years. 

- When West and Cain go to the hospital to stop Dr. Hill, they’re stopped by the same officer who questioned them again. Cain says he thinks he has AIDS and that he’s going to be tested.

- THEY CHANGED THE ‘GET A JOB IN A SIDESHOW’ LINE. LIKE IT BASICALLY SAYS THE SAME THING BUT IT’S VERY CLUNKY

- When Herbert is about to be lobotomized, he begs Hill to not to. ‘Leave me my brain!’

- He claims that his stated goal with Gruber was to end suffering.

- Herbert does explicitly die at the end [they find his body]. Dan and Meg (or Meg’s body, it isn’t made clear) escape, nowhere to be found.

Overall the book takes a very middle-of-the-ground road with Herbert’s characterization. They show him having a lot of heart with Gruber, thinking that he’s a father figure, but tend to phrase any bonding moments with Dan as pure manipulation. 

Thoughts on the two sub-zeroes?

(OOOOOH, CHINESE NINJA WARRIOR, WITH YOUR HEART SOO COOLD....SUB-ZEEERO.... OOOOH, YOUR LIFE IS A MYSTERY, WARRIOR WITH THE MASK! SUB-ZEEERO....)

I said as much in the tags of my Scorpion post that I generally don’t play favorites between Scorpion and Sub-Zero, whichever I prefer between the two usually depends on how I’m feeling that day. That being said, I pretty unambiguously consider Sub-Zero to have the better story and to be the more versatile character overall.

Like Scorpion, Sub-Zero’s appeal necessitates him to have a darker personality than the other MK heroes and for him to straddle the line between hero and villain in a way the others don’t, even in a cast full of characters which, in most other franchises, would be barely acceptable anti-heroes at best. Scorpion does this based primarily on the strength of his backstory and his highly volatile and flawed personality, Sub-Zero manages to do this by actually directly splitting the balance: With two Sub-Zeros. One is the scumbag who ruined Scorpion’s life (even if bigger villains were involved) and died to transform into an even bigger and spookier scumbag, the other is a major hero and player in the MK universe who gets to be directly involved in more storylines and affairs than Scorpion does without ruining his appeal. 

Both characters can be brought out to play depending on what kind of story you want to tell with Sub-Zero and both work really well in those contexts. I don’t usually like to default to this kind of shorthand but, I think the easiest way to get across what works about Sub-Zero (that isn’t just retreading my Scorpion post, much of which also applies here) is to point out that, for all intents and purposes, he’s the Mortal Kombat equivalent of Batman. Ed Boon directly stated that Noob Saibot’s mystery and shadowy persona were intended to be akin to Batman’s, and for Kuai Liang it doesn’t really get more blatant than, in the MK vs DC crossover, him being the only MK character allowed to beat Batman, and then going on to don a cape and become the MK Batman in his ending. 

The biggest impression Bi-Han as Sub-Zero left on me actually didn’t have anything to do with his game appearences, which are very limited besides the fact that he starred in his own solo adventure game. Bi-Han in both of his forms is more interesting as a dark counterpart and source of torment for both Hanzo and Kuai Liang, than he is as a character onto himself. But the one big impression I actually have for him actually comes from the tie-in novel written by Jeff Rovin which took a lot of liberties with MK lore, as there really wasn’t much of it at the time to go off on, and had a pretty interestingly creepy take on Sub-Zero, playing up the character as sort of a crazed, inhuman survivalist and mercenary, remarkably humorous for such a chilling character. There’s a moment in the book when Scorpion introduces himself for the first time dramatically proclaiming “I am Scorpion”, and Sub-Zero snickers and responds “I’ve eaten scorpion, and had scorpion soup. I can’t say I cared for either. Now, tarantula stew–”. 

In particular the first scene he shows up really stood out to me, more so than anything else in the book. I loved it’s setting and it’s description of what his home looks like, I loved it’s description of the Lin Kuei’s origin and horrific training tactics that created Sub-Zero, I loved it’s description of Sub-Zero’s gear and attributing his powers to “silver plates that allowed him to reach deep into his dead soul and generate waves of cold", way cooler as an explanation for Sub-Zero’s powers than him descending from some Outworld/Edenia cryomancer race, and I loved how casual of an introduction it was to the character. It’s just Sub-Zero waking up, getting a message via pigeon, petting the birb, and dressing to go to work, which contrasts elegantly with just how bizarre and inhuman everything else about Sub-Zero is established before we even meet him.

He dwelt in a cave two hundred feet up the face of a cliff by the sea. The mouth of his home was barely wide enough to accommodate a slender adult, and was accessible only by climbing the sheer wall of rock, a feat that was impossible for most adults and daunting even to the few arachnids and marsupials that tried it. It was still hours before dawn when the pigeon reached it. Landing in the narrow mouth, the bird cooed once then stood still, as it had been trained to do.

The ninja was awake and beside it in an instant, crouched beneath a ceiling that didn’t allow for him to stand. Dressed only in a white loincloth, despite the cold floor and chill air in the cave. He was reading the message by moonlight a moment later.

A smile crossed his lips, lips so pale and claylike that they appeared dead. His small, very narrow eyes looked from the message to the bird to the moonlight that lit just the entrance of his dark abode. He ran the back of an index finger up and down the bird’s breast.

“Good Hamachi. Return to your master so he will know that I have received his message and am on my way to do his bidding. For a price, of course,” he said. 

He glanced at the several pyramid-shaped stacks of scrolls in the rear of his cave. His fee was another manuscript from Shang Tsung’s library, one of the many scrolls that were centuries old, dating back to the dawn of the days of the first ninjitsu and containing arcane secrets of the league of assassins to which he belonged, the widely-feared Lin Kuei.

Removing the string from a scroll Shang Tsung had long ago given him in payment, the ninja placed it in the bird’s beak, gently turned the white pigeon around, and coaxed it into the night.

I actually don’t recall much else about the novel or whether it was any good as a whole, but this sequence really stood out to me at the time as a very interesting way to reinterpret a videogame character into a literary medium, and it really reinforces a lot of what makes ice powers so inherently creepy. It’s something that I’d have liked to see partially carried over to the game’s take on Sub-Zero, even Kuai Liang.

Kuai Liang to me is easily the most interesting of the “purely” good guys in Mortal Kombat (closely followed by Jax and Johnny Cage), a character where it’s never really into question whether he’ll fight for Earthrealm (unlike Scorpion, who can take some convincing), and being a purely good character in MK is not an easy task considering how often Mortal Kombat games struggle to make it’s more heroic protagonists entertaining (I know nowadays people have come around on the guy a lot, and rightfully so because MK11 really made him great, but let’s not pretend “Liu Kang sucks” wasn’t the prevailing opinion for decades to the point they kept killing him off or making him evil to try to “fix” it). The closest Kuai Liang ever came to being evil (besides the Revenant bizz) was when he was made into Cyber Sub-Zero, and that lasted for, what, a couple seconds at best, before he was rescued and then went on to beat Kano, Goro, Kintaro, and Ermac at once in quick succession.

I think Kuai Liang has consistently had some of the best character writing in the series because right from the get go he had two other great characters to contrast and rival with, and he was allowed to grow and change, from Sub-Zero 2 to THE Sub-Zero, from renegade and runt to undisputed leader, with a whole lot of drama along the way. Ed Boon himself said that Kuai Liang "has a very deep, soap-opera like history and story in his relationship with a number of the Mortal Kombat characters”, which makes him contrast quite nicely with not just Scorpion, but the other ninjas as well, who mostly stay on the sidelines with their separate storylines until called upon. Actually, come to think of it, the concept of a “legacy character” wasn’t at all a thing in videogames at the time (even nowadays it rarely is), even in 90s superhero comics it was still rare to see a successful example of one, let alone one who succeeded in completely outshining an already extremely popular character (the Spine Rip fatality alone made Bi-Han a hell of a legacy to live up to). 

By all accounts he should be every bit as evil as Bi-Han was. The two have the exact same backstory, raised to be assassins by a shadowy organization since children, enduring grueling training into becoming cold and vicious murderers. Kuai Liang is pragmatic, distant, stern, and bound by honor to the Lin Kuei, but he is very much not his brother. In fact, in every matter except killing ability, he is indisputably superior to his brother (and he is repeteadly established to be stronger as a warrior, more skilled as a cryomancer, and the better Sub-Zero). Unique among MK characters, Kuai Liang’s greatest virtue comes from his compassion and, yes, his cool head. Through him, Sub-Zero’s cold persona becomes not a sign of evil, but a virtue that allows him to better focus and assist and teach other warriors.

He redeems the name Sub-Zero, and going by his MK11 ending, he would go through extreme lengths to redeem his evil brother as well if given the opportunity. He rises through the ranks of the unfathomaly ancient and evil organization that turned him and his brother into cold killing machines and single-handedly reforms the Lin Kuei into a fighting force for the good of Earthrealm, and forms allegiances with other factions. He’s the one to put an end to the feud between the Shirai Ryu and the Lin Kuei and to form an allegiance with Scorpion, inviting his brother’s murderer for a peace offering and even keeping his cool when things go sideways because of Frost and Scorpion nearly kills him again, and now, the two are allies. 

And people like seeing Scorpion and Sub-Zero as allies so much that we all forget that it took about 20 years for the two of them to even be seen fighting on the same side, in Kuai Liang’s non-canon MK9 ending, which once again, was instigated by him reaching out to Scorpion. Kuai Liang turned one of the greatest and most famous feuds in videogame history on it’s head simply by proving that the only thing cooler than Scorpion and Sub-Zero fighting is Scorpion and Sub-Zero working together, and because everything in Mortal Kombat works by rule of cool, that’s where their relationship has been headed this decade.

Yeah, it’s dawning on me a lot recently just how much of Mortal Kombat is influenced by it’s creators being massive comic book nerds, because while I wouldn’t say this about a lot of other fighting games whose lore and characters I keep up with, Mortal Kombat is mired extremely deeply in superhero storytelling and it’s a game where every character basically is a superhero/supervillain, I really wasn’t just putting the Batman comparison here for simplification. And it makes sense too, considering just how vast the shonen manga and anime influences run in Street Fighter and King of Fighters and Tekken and so on, combined with martial arts history real and fictional, it only makes sense that their American rival would pull a similar trick, but with comic books instead. It’s very interesting how, through these two brothers, the same character, with the same costume and the same powers and even the same personality in general, can shift between such drastic opposites in role.

And, yeah, Ed Boon is right, Scorpion vs Sub-Zero absolutely is a soap opera. “Superheroes” and “soap opera drama” are a combination that I generally do not care for, in the slightest, but, whether it’s in comics or manga or videogames, no one is immune to fierce color-coded rivals with contrasting powersets and personalities going from deadly enemies to even deadlier partners over the course of years while generally stealing the show out of anything they show up in. As to be expected.