Raiden has never ruled Earthrealm as a despot, but as a weary guardian, one who'd rather stay silent while the balance holds, even if it means watching champions die he could have saved with a single bolt.
It's said he once gave up his status as an Elder God, disgusted by peers too content to watch rather than act, the day Liu Kang, his dearest student, fell to a blade he had no right to stop.
That refusal to intervene without sufficient cause isn't cowardice.
It's the price he pays for never becoming what he fights.
When lightning split the sky over Skyrim's peaks with no storm cloud in sight, the Nords didn't see a natural event, they saw a sign.
Kyne has always spoken through storms, and a man in a straw hat, his eyes crackling an electric blue, matched their old stories far too closely to be dismissed as just another lost mortal.
Raiden never bothered correcting the misunderstanding.
He simply kept doing what he's done for millennia elsewhere, watching in silence, and striking only once silence, itself, is no longer enough.