Even though these deaths are "photo realistic", the context is not. The clean limp bodies of the pets I've owned have haunted me a million times more than anything I've seen in MK. That's how I know death. Just a lifeless body. The spectacle of gory violence doesn't really connect with my experiences of death.
Sorry if your own experiences have been different.
Taking scorpio's head and spine with sub-zero is one of my most cherished childhood memories and bonding with my brother.
I'll reiterate a part of my comment I left in a different subthread:
If you have a problem with violence, Mortal Kombat should be near the bottom of the list because it's just pixels, without anyone getting killed or disabled in real life.
Just look at how popular UFC, MMA, WWE, boxing and other contact sports are. Billions of people watch them. Floyd Mayweather was paid hundreds of Millions of dollars for beating his opponents, imagine just how many people paid to watch that? And they really enjoyed it. This is infinitely more worrisome to me than people not handling gamedev well.
People have been maimed and killed in the (boxing) ring. Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson's syndrome as the result of all the head trauma he went through.
Maybe I'm just getting older now, but when you start having life experiences of people you care about being involved in accidents and having their bodies destroyed, and all tolls that takes on someones life, it makes seeing senseless violence so much more pointless. There's really nothing to celebrate by glorifying the different ways a human body can be destroyed.
At the same time, I'm against legislating against this kind of expression, and I don't hide behind "think of the children." If we just made wiser decisions about the end results of our life's work, we wouldn't have to be having these kinds of conversations.