1) Cause Rey and Captain Marvel are kinda crap.Let's assume any of this is true.
Why get up in arms about the existence of characters like Captain Marvel or Rey? If media has so many badass women, I think it would make more sense for those who dislike them to just shrug with indifference and move on to something they didn't like.
But that isn't what happened. We had hate campaigns, calls for boycotts, lies about how the movies were really financial failures and the studios were faking the box office results, video essays about how this was the death of cinema as we know it and in the case of Star Wars, pirating and trying to sell a version of the movie that removed the women characters.
2) Because they're the ones people seem to latch onto and be going "THESE ARE GOOD FEMALE CHARACTERS AND HOW ALL FUTURE ONES SHOULD BE"
3) They're in pretty big franchises people are or were fans of that generally have tried to do better.
Ah yes the go to example of video games being bad because of violence and they decide to tone down the characters being sexy...........MK has always been seen a pretty silly so if I were a conspiratorial type I'd have said it was they were hoping to get ESPN coverage at Esports events to use as free advertising.It wasn't the original costumes that people had an issue with. It was the ones from MK9 and to a lesser extent, the PS2 era costumes. That was the image Netherealm studios was trying to get away from.
I kinda think I need to see some figure on any of that.MK 11 was the highest-grossing game in the month it was released and even beat out Kingdom Hearts 3. It stayed the highest-grossing game for at least two more months and its sales are almost double the amount of previous entries. The notion that they needed the classic costumes because it was a financial failure is easily disproved nonsense.
And yet part of the argument was realism lolMost of the male cast wasn't dressed like this and the average woman doesn't look like the MK 11 either. And again, almost every woman was wearing high heels and figure-hugging outfits with two of them using moves in which they hit you with their asses. To say nothing of Sindel's intro dialogues being 49% sexual innuendos. The biggest hits were Sonya and Cassie who are soldiers and shouldn't be running around with the boobs out anyway and Sheeva who is supposed to be a monster.
And this isn't even getting into the fact that Mortal Kombat isn't Dead or Alive which built its identity around sexy women.