The Implied Setting of Mortal Kombat 2 Fighting Arena Backgrounds

Hear and attend and listen, O best beloved. Once there was a man who had two daughters. Each Saturday, the elder of the two daughters attended a dance school, O best beloved, around the corner from which was an emporium which sold coffee, and this was what befell and was befallen: the man would visit the emporium each Saturday to drink said coffee in the morning sun and entertain his daughters before, lo, the eldest's dance classes would begin. 

And in the corner of this emporium, about which I have told you, best beloved, it so became and was become that there was a row of arcade machines, which included among their number Pac-Man, Street Fighter II, and Mortal Kombat 2. And since these arcade machines were free to use, O best beloved, the man would play Mortal Kombat 2 with his daughters and they would woop and yell with glee at the sight of the great gouts of blood that sprayed forth across the screen in the games they played. And so it was that the man learned of the mysteries of babalities, friendships and special moves, though he was mostly reduced to operating the joystick while his youngest daughter pressed whatever buttons she so chose.

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Yes, I have been playing a lot of Mortal Kombat 2 recently. And last week, while performing my allotted role of joystick-operator and trying to anticipate the quixotic button-pressing antics of a four-year-old, I began to study the backgrounds in the various arenas in which fights take place, noticing that they were absolutely redolent of a type of extreme sword-and-sorcery that I have written about before - an approach to fantasy art where

magic is everywhere and poorly understood, where monsters are mythic and better understood by Freud than Darwin, where there are no farmers or cities because everyone is either Conan or The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Something illustrated by Frazetta, Brom, John Blanche, Dali and Brueghel the Elder, penned by Leiber and Vance, and printed in 1968.

I do not claim this is what the plot of Mortal Kombat is all about (I actually have no idea, and no great interest in finding out), and I have not watched any of its various dramatised iterations - it was only in doing some 'research' for this post that I discovered there is actually a Mortal Kombat II film that has recently been released. All I know is the characters and the arenas in which they duke it out. I am talking not about its actual or canonical setting, but about its implied one. I therefore base my comments on the images alone:

What we see here is a forest of living, demonic trees: not so much an entire forest of Old Man Willows, but an entire forest of Old Man Willow's psychotic nephews. These are not mysterious, brooding treants filled with resentment of the 'quick', as we find in Tolkien's ouevre. No: they are just gleeful, sadistic tormenters of those with legs. They like murder. Tolkien's Old Forest has a soundtrack written by Bruckner. The Mortal Kombat 2 forest has a soundtrack written by Wolves in the Throne Room.

Brutal weapons. Molten metal (or lava chanelled from a nearby volcano?). The people of this world are warriors, not soldiers - an important element of the sword-and-sorcery genre. Soldiers are citizens who defend their territory in organised armies. Warriors rely on their martial prowess and concern themselves with glory, not defence. Soldiers equip themselves like hoplites. Warriors equip themselves with big, scary weapons which accentuate their power and individual strength.

What more needs to be said about this other than, floating wizards, interdimensional portal, red planet? Here, magic is great and powerful. It is to be feared and misunderstood. It can change the metaphysical presuppositions on the basis of which we orient our lives. It can transcend the barriers between worlds. There is nothing ordinary about a reality in which this is possible. This world does not contain humdrum civilisations - it is not one in which there is a comfortable Hobbiton which can serve as the base for adventure. Everything is adventure because everything is Weird.

This is a world with conflicting motifs. Yin and yang: all is harmony. Yet all is also DEATH. And WINGED (I should probably say WINGÉD) BEASTS. There is not a philosophical or epistemological consistency to this world. Rather, there is a consistent mood. It is a mashup defined by aesthetic 'fit' rather than by any notion of thing having to make sense.

There may be peace in this world, but it is a peace that is contingent. One imagines a sultry night of lovemaking between a warrior and his woman under the stars and a clear moon, with incense in the air and the distant sound of croaking frogs and insects. And yet! In the background a duel commences between a man and fire demon. Because this is just the sort of thing that happens. 

It is a world where life is plentiful and cheap, for the masses, but not for the Heroic and Villainous, who are literally larger than life itself. I am reminded here of the sense one gets reading Lord of Light that there are untold numbers of ordinary people going about their business but whose concerns are completely meaningless when set against those of the Great. What defines individual importance is not the santity of life and the moral worth of the human person but what one Achieves. We are in the world of Nietzsche, not Jesus - Eddison, rather than Lewis. 

This is world in other words that has been washed in a purple glaze; a world in which whenever it is not the night time it is only ever dusk; a world in which the magical and martial are of equal but oppositional status; a world in which might makes right, and a world in which whatever peace and tranquility are found are momentary, fleeting, bittersweet - because death may strike at any moment. It is a world in which glory triumphs over good, and a world in which power stands astride virtue. It is a world of sword and sorcery's value writ large.

I rather like it.