Summer Project

Overall the text Mortal Kombat represents men and women in very stereotypical ways. Women are structured aesthetically pleasing to pleasure male audiences, and men are depicted as violent powerful and destructive.

Large breast Large behind

Seductive pose Sexually outfit

Martial Arts outfitReinforces violence

Powerful pose

Fist clenched in a destructive manor

Analysing this text from a denotative point of view we can clearly see it is violent and sexist as this female character is being objectified and demoralized.

The character has an unhealthy clench for death and many close up shots are used after the fatality, to compliment the characters body however subjecting her more as she is being used as a tool for male pleasure.

Alternatively, the character could invoke substitute thoughts into the audiences mind such as females must bee seen as dangerous and powerful, which reinforces the statement ‘more then just a pretty face’.

The mise en scene of all the levels on the text have been colored and designed in a way which bring more attention to the characters, the level above is dull and colours such as black and grey have been used to contrast with the suggestive clothing of the other characters. The sound has no dramatic effect on the text, as it only enhances the scene when a character has the opportunity to perform a fatality (finishing attack). The dominant iconography, which has been reoccurring in this text for the last 10 years, would be the violence, characters are able to chop other characters in half and tear of body parts.

Mortal Kombat is a science fantasy fighting game

Within MK (Mortal Kombat) Humans and super beings fight in a tournament which will determine who is the strongest fighter in the universe. The fighter who makes it to the end will fight Shao Kang the villain in this text.

The institutional source of the text is from Warner Brothers games department. For many years Warner Brothers have been creating high graphic, exciting, and carefully configured games, because Warner brothers focus more on deconstructing realities and re-creating them in fantasying ways.

This text has had to follow in that course which is why the graphics have been carefully configured to make the characters aesthetically pleasing to the consumers

in addition throughout the story mode a greater sense of the narrative has been giving as 20th century Warner Brother games want to be more insightful to their consumers.

The narrative follows Propp’s theory.

Villain

Princess

Hero

The helpers

The major values in this text are that humans can be powerful if they train and are willing to sacrifice their lives.

A key value promoted is that power is everything and without it you are worthless, assumptions within the text are that humans are weak, so weak that super beings are able to invade the earth, the super beings have moderate success once invading and are only stopped when text goes against its key values and that is when the humans begin to fight and conquer the super beings.

The text is addressed at players of the age of 18+, which shows the target audience of this text are older teens who do not need supervision or guidance as the text contains excessive violence.

Assumptions we can make about the audience who consume this text are that they are probably misogynistic as women are attacked in the text and are subjected as no more then tools for the pleasure of the male audience, in addition murder displayed in a supernatural form is acceptable as it is not real which has desensitized the existing audience.