OK I've been thinking about this a lot and I think I've finally figured out how to put it into words, comparing it to its closest competitor in street fighter.
Mortal kombat characters have a lot of plot but verry little character.
Street fighter characters have a lot of character but very little plot.
Like if you list everything that happens from mk1 to... Uh... Mk1 (wow that name is still bad) to liu kang, with the deaths, resurrections, timeline reboots, God hood, titan hood, etc it sure sounds like he's an interesting character.
But if I think about what he's like in his spare time, just hanging out? I have a way better understanding of who Ryu is as a person.
And I think this comes down to the fact that Midway/Netherealm have never really understood these characters as 'characters' rather then player characters.
These two images illustrate what I mean pretty well I think.
From the jump, ryu has been a pretty well defined character, he is a shotokan karate practioner trained under a shotokan karate master with his mate, wears a simple, well worn gi and isn't too concerned about looking flashy or anything. This has been kept consistent across thirty odd years with every new addition to him (the torn gi, the robe in Sf6) adding to that base.
Compare that to liu kang he used Jun Fan in Mk1, then karate in mk2 then back to Jun fan, did pau chui in 3d era games, and is now a jeet kun do guy, so his stance changes in every game, he had a signature weapon of 'dragon sword' until that got changed to nunchucks. Hes gone from being a strict no kill nof fatalities character in Mk1 to that immediately being dropped.
He's supposed to be a shao Lin monk but is a tribute to Bruce Lee who was, famously hated by the shao Lin for teaching his style to westerners.
Like if he's a shaolin monk why doesn't he use shao Lin kung fu? Why did he use karate for one game when that's japanese?
Like this might seem minor but characters are built by stacking all these little details on top of one another untill you get a sense of who that person is. If that shit is inconsistent it erases what kind of character that is.
Is liu kang a humble shaolin monk or a cocky Bruce Lee expy? Both?
This problem is only expanded on when you look at how the games treat ken/kung lao. Both characters serve as a cocky more show boaty friend to the protagonist who comes from the same school.
This is obvious by everything about Ken. He has the same. Move set but changes it to fit his personality, he's more firey and outgoing so he gets fire. He gets the crazy kicks and run cancels and this just gets expanded on in each game. He wears similar clothes to ryu but in a more flashy colour cause he likes the attention. Even without being explicitly told just by looking at the characters you can tell him and ryu are connected.
Kung lao uh... Has a razor hat and teleport? He actually uses the shao Lin kung fu (though has the same issue of changing every game till they finally settled on wing chun) but liu kang and kung lao are the shaolin monks, they should have similar fighting styles and abilities. Instead if you didn't have a story guide or some shit you'd never know they were related. Does kung Laos fighting style show him to be more flashy and arrogant then liu kang? I... Don't really know? Who's to tell.
This is a problem that extends to the costuming too. Costuming is so important to giving a character an internal life because it's showing how they as a person chooses to present themselves to the world.
So uh why did Sonia, the hard arse military take no shit bad arse, dress like a stripper for like three games?
Like the fact that it's a sexualised design here isn't the issue, the fact it's such a horny design for Sonia specifically is the problem. This doesn't fit the character they're trying to portray at all. Wich kind of fucks up who that character is. You need to mentally seperate who you think the character is with how she's shown to be.
And again this isn't a problem of them sexualising a character cause they've done the exact same thing in reverse.
Sheeva isn't a clearly drawn character by any measure but one thing they made clear is she absolutely fucks.
She usually wears a string bikini, her winning pose in mk9 was her sexily rubbing herself down. She might be an 8 foot tall four armed monster woman. But she's an 8 foot tall four armed monster woman that knows she's hot and is dtf.
So when we got stoic noble warrior Queen in mk11 that just... Didn't feel like the same character.
Its honestly one of the reasons I don't draw mk fanart as much as I want to because the characters have so little consistent internal logic to them and who they are that it's hard to really think of how to draw them doing anything?
I will say the two times mk has actually nailed it though is Kano and Johnny Cage. Those two are fantastic. I just wish everyone else had gotten the same care as them