Quan Chi (The Netherrealm necromancer): The sorcerer who does not kill: he aims someone else’s rage

In chapter 3 of the story mode of Mortal Kombat (NetherRealm Studios, 2011), Scorpion drags Sub-Zero down to the Netherrealm, the realm where he himself was resurrected, and defeats him. He could kill him, but he does not: Raiden has promised that if he spares the Lin Kuei ninja, he will ask the Elder Gods to return the Shirai Ryu, Scorpion’s exterminated clan, to the realm of the living. Then Quan Chi appears. He asks whether this is Scorpion’s retribution and orders him to kill Sub-Zero. Scorpion refuses: the man has been beaten. “Have you forgotten?” the sorcerer presses, and shows him a vision of the Lin Kuei slaughtering the Shirai Ryu and of Sub-Zero killing his wife and child. That is not me, Sub-Zero cries out. Scorpion tears off his mask and kills him. Quan Chi is the necromancer of the Netherrealm, a sorcerer who raises dead warriors to keep them in his service, and what he has just done is his specialty: he does not kill with his own hands, he aims someone else’s rage. This case file follows the saga’s second timeline, the 2011 reboot and its sequel, Mortal Kombat X (2015), and reveals how both stories end.

// The theoryRage needs a culprit

In 1992, Robert Agnew published his general strain theory in the journal Criminology. He started from Robert Merton’s strain theory (1938), the gap between the goals a culture promises and the legitimate means to reach them, and opened it up to any negative relationship: failing to achieve what one values, losing something valued, or suffering something harmful. These strains produce negative emotions, above all anger, and anger creates pressure for corrective action that is sometimes a crime. Agnew argued that anger arises above all when people blame their adversity on someone else, a feature that, according to Hoffmann and Spence (2010), later research has largely neglected. In 2001 he specified which strains matter most: those seen as unjust, those high in magnitude, those associated with low social control, and those that create pressure or an incentive to respond with crime. And he never claimed that pain condemns anyone: most people who suffer do not offend, because they have support, resources and legitimate outlets that soften the blow.

// The subjectThe necromancer who gets paid in souls

Quan Chi always presents himself as a servant, and the 2011 game shows him collecting his fee in three moments. In chapter 3, Shang Tsung announces Scorpion as the specter resurrected by the sorcerer, and Scorpion demands to face Sub-Zero because he killed his family and clan. Nightwolf warns him that his aggression is misplaced, and Raiden offers him another way to find peace. At the end of chapter 11, when Shao Kahn can no longer merge the realms through the tournament, Quan Chi proposes an invasion of Earthrealm and offers to resurrect Queen Sindel, whose sacrifice protects that realm: he will return her, he promises, much more cooperative. In chapter 16, Raiden goes down to the Netherrealm and offers him the souls of the fallen warriors, even his own, in exchange for help. Quan Chi mocks him for being so generous with other men’s souls and shows him that they are already his: Shao Kahn’s payment for the Netherrealm’s allegiance. In the epilogue he congratulates his true master, the fallen Elder God Shinnok, because the plan has worked to perfection, and Shinnok sums up the move: Shao Kahn was blinded by rage.

(Spoiler warning.) In chapter 9 of Mortal Kombat X, a flashback to five years earlier takes Hanzo Hasashi, by then restored to human life and leading a new Shirai Ryu, to the Lin Kuei temple. Kuai Liang, the new Sub-Zero and the brother of the man Scorpion killed, shows him the recorded memory of the cyborg Sektor. In it, Quan Chi demands his payment: the Lin Kuei Grandmaster gave Shinnok his word, and he has exterminated the Shirai Ryu as promised. As for Scorpion, he adds, he created him from Hasashi’s soul after he died. Back in the present, Hanzo and his ninjas have already stormed the camp where Special Forces are holding the sorcerer, and he shouts the charges at him: he killed his wife and his son, got inside his head, misdirected his vengeance and cost him his one chance to have them restored. He beheads him. But D’Vorah has arrived with Shinnok’s amulet, and Quan Chi finishes the spell that frees his master an instant before he dies. He had let himself be captured on purpose.

// The crackA strain with a scriptwriter

This reading has an obvious limit: general strain theory explains Scorpion, not Quan Chi. The sorcerer does not act out of anger or out of a loss of his own. He calculates, uses souls as currency and obeys a master, which brings him closer to the rational choice theory this archive uses to read his partner Shang Tsung. Fiction also simplifies. In real life, strain builds up through many channels and rarely has a single author dosing it out from the shadows. And Scorpion’s wound was not entirely invented: Sektor’s memory proves that the Lin Kuei bargained for the extermination, and Kuai Liang himself admits his clan’s complicity. Quan Chi did not conjure the culprit out of nothing. He cropped the picture, and pointed at the wrong man.

Explaining Scorpion is not excusing him, and explaining Quan Chi’s method does not make what he did any smaller. Scorpion had other ways out on the table, the peace Nightwolf proposed and Raiden’s deal, and he chose to kill a beaten man. Agnew does not deny that choice: he describes why anger makes it more likely, by pushing toward revenge and lowering inhibitions. The saga adds a final irony. When Hanzo at last turns his vengeance on the real culprit, that vengeance also serves the sorcerer’s plan. Rage, even when well aimed, was still a tool in someone else’s hands.