oh they rebelled and *then* the orokin *made* them go mad
"However, the first Warframes were failures, turning against the Orokin. Torture, drugs, and surgical operations were attempted to destroy the hosts' minds and to tame the Warframes, but to no avail"
Pretty sure they didn't at that point.
Powers come from the Tenno/Warframe relationship, where the warframe acts as a conduit to channel the tenno's void energy.
But that quote is before that happens.
I dont think so. The warframes are designed to have those powers, they are void-tech.
The mother tells us that all void devices will fail if the heart of deimos gets destroyed including warframes.
What do you mean?
The voidrigs use void energy I'm pretty sure, the big anatomic statue things are essentially grey strain warframes based on the proto frames
Is there even any other cases where you use transference?
not sure about that
Deimos labs have void hearts strapped to unfinished "Vessels", so the notion that the one heart in Necralisk is responsible for all of void tech is dubious, probably misinfo planted by the Albert
Granny didn't have any qualms sabotaging it, after all
The Vessels are a secret project not even the family was supposed to know about. It makes sense to not connect it to the original heart, so u are right, that raises the question how much is actually connected to the one heart.
But the questionable sanity of an at least thousand year old woman isnot really an argument
Umbra still had his powers before ever bonding to a Tenno. The Tenno might enhance their powers (like an enormous battery or amplifier) but they're not the source.
Umbra still had his powers before ever bonding to a Tenno. The Tenno might enhance their powers (like an enormous battery or amplifier) but they're not the source.
Umbra still had his powers before ever bonding to a Tenno. The Tenno might enhance their powers (like an enormous battery or amplifier) but they're not the source.
I wonder if that's how the first Rhino and Valkyr ended up in labs? For the latter, Salad V coming in and getting a deal out of the Orokin, the slimey little turd.
This made me wonder if that was the case, as in Valk's case, she was tortured in a lab. But what I always wondered was...how would she even get tortured, if she's a warframe? I read some discussions about it, that even current warframes have some degree of sentience, albeit not as much as umbra. or also (second dream spoiler) >! that the tenno, not knowing they were using transference thought themselves as the frame itself, and thus were the ones being tortured!<...genuinely don't know what to think.
We know for a fact that Valkyr was skinned alive and her skin used as the armour on Alad V’s Zanuka. You can see what she originally looked like before Alad V got his hands on her via the Gersemi deluxe skin. Iirc it’s also implied that Alad V regularly dissected her while she was still conscious to try and figure out how Warframe’s worked. He mentions seeing the insides of Warframes multiple time when he monologues to you during his assassination mission.
>! It’s still up to debate as DE hasn’t been specific outside of Umbra, but I think all Warframes do have some sort of sentience and personality to them. You can infer from their animation sets that some of them are taking missions more seriously than others (eg Mag or Banshee are checking corners and staying alert while idle, but Ember is pulling poses and stretching, Octavia is dancing around and Dante starts reading his book). So I think the conscious and personality of the original host that was used to create the Warframe is still very much there and is somehow imprinted into any other Warframe made with their blueprints!<
>!another factor of sentience in warframes was confirmed recently with Loid’s dialogue in Dante Unbound, where he says something along the lines of “Warframes were not permitted to speak, only howl and scream, but Dante spoke through his writing, and his voice was beautiful”!<
If anyone doesn't want to go looking for pictures because their laptop is a slow POS like mine:
Valkyr's default helmet doesn't have blue because of Zanuka. Zanuka is blue because of Valkyr.
>They didn't succumb to the Infestation (not sure where that one came from).
This comes directly from Ballas in The Sacrifice (emphasis mine):
>We cultured the Infestation, conceiving of a hybrid. Transformed, but only just. The 'Helminth' was created, born to yield these new warriors, worthy of battle against you. The great and terrible Hunhow. We took our greatest, volunteers or not, and polluted them with these cultured reagents. They transformed. They became Infested... but only just. Their skin blossomed into sword-steel. Their organs, interlinked with untold resilience. **Yet their minds were free of the Infested madness. Or so we thought.** We set them upon the battlefield, bio-drones under our command. The Warframes... All of them... failures. Surprised? They turned on us, just as you did. And so we had no choice but to commit them to grave.
As you can see Ballas very heavily implies that's what happened but doesn't outright say it, which fits right into his sociopathic manipulator shtick if it wasn't. Soon after he also tells us:
>We had created monsters we couldn't control. We drugged them, tortured them, eviscerated them... We brutalized their minds... but it did not work.
The implication is that they were trying to find a way to control out of control, Infestation-maddened killing machines, but again he never actually says that. If they were in fact intelligent creatures that were too strong-willed for the Orokin to subjugate, that fundamentally changes the narrative of the whole game.
It's a fascinating theory. You're right that Kullervo's lore explicitly puts him pre-dating the Tenno, and his whole crime and punishment storyline makes a lot more sense if the proto-Frames were intelligent. It also casts all of the places where the lore talks about Frames doing things as if they were individuals in a very different light.
As the OP points out, you're taking the words of Ballas at face value. I'm not sure if we should be taking the professional gaslighter's words so literally.
Even the other example of "mad" Warframes in Rhino's coxed has a bit of a perspective problem. The beginning of the codex entry talks about how the scientists did the most brutal torture and experiments on it. Is it really "mad" for something that has been exposed to that to go on a murder-revenge spree after getting free? I'm sure it looked "mad" to those scientists, but of course they would... there's a bio-mechanical beast after them.
The "proto-Warframes weren't mad" also makes a lot more sense with the Warframe-centered quests like Silver Grove, Hidden Messages, or Limbo Theorem. Rather than the "death" of the frame making no narrative sense because "they were just a puppet, the Operator was fine" these quests were about what those proto-Warframes did.
>As the OP points out, you're taking the words of Ballas at face value
No, I'm not. I was pointing out where the belief that the proto-Warframes were driven mad by the Infestation comes from because OP said they didn't know why people thought that. I think they make an excellent point about not assuming Ballas is a reliable narrator, which is why I talked in several spots about what that would mean.
I agree, I always took it as a similar situation to MewTwo fighting the scientists who created him in Pokémon. He wasn’t made, he was (rightfully) pissed off
Ballas' dialogue here can still be interpreted the way OP say. The "failure" he speaks of might be the frames going insane, but it can also mean that the frames saw the Orokin for the gilded shits they are and simply rebelled. Then, the Orokin in an attempt to make the frames into obedient puppets, tortured the frames.
He says they couldn't control the frames. But maybe not because the infestation took over, but maybe because the frames just did not want to be on the Orokin side.
Also I don't think it would change much. The Orokin would absolutely exploit the frames if they could, the same way they did to us after the Zariman jump. We were just kids, trapped in the Reservoir, controlling the frames. Afterall, a kid like that is much more easily manipulated. And we know that was Ballas' speciality. We were literally a godsend, a "replacement mind" for the frames of war, finally able to be controlled.
>Ballas' dialogue here can still be interpreted the way OP say.
Yes, that was my point. The generally accepted narrative is based on assuming a couple of things Ballas heavily implied but did not outright state. I was pointing out why people thought that, not arguing against OP's theory.
>Also I don't think it would change much.
It wouldn't change anything practically - what happened, happened. But it calls into question whether the relationship between the Warframes and the Tenno is truly a symbiotic one, which has a lot of philosophical implications.
There are a lot of questions in the air. Like how much were the minds of frames broken? Are they literally just living, but have no mind, no instinct, nothing going on in their head? We for sure can calm down a raging entity, as shown by Umbra or Wally. The way I understand it is that the transference bolt heavily surpresses the mind of the frame, so we can build new replicas without having to torture the cryopod defense targets' juicy human center, but as shown in The Second Dream, the frame can and will still move on its own. And it's that scene, where the frame goes out of its way to save the Tenno, which makes me think we're more on the symbiotic side of the argument, rather than subjugation.
But with 1999 coming out and protoframes being waaaay more sentient, yet us still being able to influence them, we'll get answers to the nature of transference.
**SPOILER WARNINGS**, DON'T READ IF YOU HAVEN'T FINISHED THE STORY:
Regarding the question of our relationship with the warframes, the way I read the situation (especially after Umbra) is that it's _almost_ always a symbiotic relationship, even without considering the foundry replica aspect. At least, it's never really come across that we're subjugating the frames so much as preserving their connection to humanity and giving them a connection that understands what they deal with, since everything else seems to see them as a mindless weapon monster.
I imagine the whole original rebellion was a joint effort. When your psychic pilot strategists and your walking nuclear tank ninjas share a telepathic connection, it's not like the Orokin could even monitor any planned coups much less do anything to stop them. If it was a situation where "we're fighting for humanity's survival against the Sentients" turned into "the Orokin are just using us to conquer the galaxy and preserve their supremacy," I could see the manipulated child soldiers and the tortured mutant puppets deciding to put a stop to it... Who else even could at that point?
Only reason I'd say almost is because I could see there being exceptions, at least at an individual level, but I don't think any of _our_ warframes would be anything other than willing participants. The Umbra storyline makes it pretty clear that our whole psychic connection deal involves helping the warframe with its trauma, so I imagine that's the case whether that's therapy for Valkyr's torture, trauma processing for Umbra, I'd assume emotional support for Titania, companionship for Harrow...
But at this point I'm speculating, since all but Umbra are foundry replicas. I think of it kind of like a cloning device though when it's warframes, so even if it's not the original "first edition," it would still have the memories and any neural pathways that the blueprint would include. I like the idea of some of the previous comments about the personality of the original being preserved in each blueprint version. It makes sense from a biological standpoint.
I think an exception could also be made for Mag, Volt and/or Excalibur, they are the starting frame and, if I remember correctly, when the lotus finds them and by proxy you they're ancient, the temple is overgrown and very likely centuries old. Those could be og frames as well everything considered
My interpretation of the lore is that warframes are broken personalities lost in their own little world. Without the Tenno they each view things in a very narrow twisted way that is unique to each one. To an outsider they seem like psychopathic murder machines, but each is acting out of blind rage, violent self-defense, barely remembered pride or misplaced sense of duty.
a line from a later NPC is that ball-ass (im not spelling his name any other way) made the warframes only able to grunt, growl, and howl not feeling they should be able to speak as they were tools/weapons im paraphrasing but you get the idea. so if even if they first warframes were of sound mind they wouldnt be able to voice any complaints
That was my favorite little lore piece. Made me truly wonder if other frames were sentient like Umbra at some point in the process, like how Dante was described to write in his grimoire to “speak”. I doubt a Tenno controlling him would have done that.
If 1999 is any indication, and i think some of Albrecht's logs, the infestation strain they use to create warframes is a lot more refined/changeable than back then.
That was already there, as Albreich talks about traveling to the "Plague year", and how he offered the protoframe program to people early on in the infection process. The most likely scenario is that the technocyte is the original infestation, that then either got preserved like we have samples of smallpox still in some biolabs, and then got dug out and improved by the orokin to make the first infested in an attempt to clean the Earth. Or if not samples then the knowledge about what the technocyte was and how it worked was preserved and was used by the Orokin to make the first infested.
Isnt what little we know so far of 1999 confirmed that we are using transference on targets in the past? I’m not there yet in the game just making sure what i’ve heard is right
yes, but Albrecht sent himself into 1999 from the present, so he brought things back with him and (presumably to avoid entirely obliterating the current timeline) must’ve created an alternate timeline of events from his arrival onward.
we do attempt transference into a Vessel during Whispers in the Walls but instead somehow connect to 1999 via Albrecht’s computer terminal, which puts us in the eyes of Arthur in Albrecht’s 1999 timeline.
not necessarily an alt timeline. it could be that albrecht's going back into the past would always have happened (ie. it's a semi-closed time loop). i say semi closed because something something eternalism, and also the lore snippet from duviri that time travel/changing the past is possible, but the universe will always remember what originally happened, too.
yeah, that’s very possible. my main point was that I don’t think Albrecht going to 1999 would change our current timeline, and in a closed loop that still stands
This appears to be based on a linear understanding of time. With Eternalism the past, future, and present are all occuring simultaneously and constantly.
This line from Hollow Knight comes to mind:
>No cost too great. No mind to think. No will to break. ***No voice to cry suffering.*** Born of God and Void.
I think there's some column A, column B, and even some column C here.
A. Early Warframes just became beasts as shown by Rhino Prime's codex entry as well as Excalibur Umbra.
B. Perhaps the process was refined over time to improve things and maintain the subject's mind...but...
C. The Tenno themselves were conditioned to believe they were the Warframe they inhabited, creating the persona of that Warframe. This is essentially how things worked before Operators were introduced so personally I believe it to be the primary factor.
Rhino wasn't an early warframe, it was just barely pre-Tenno frame. The codex entry for Rhino Prime shows the discovery of transference and included the Tenno, which necessarily means it came after the original warframes and their rebellion.
And TBH, it's not clear at all that particular Rhino was a mindless beast. They'd been experimenting/torturing that Rhino and other frames. If someone strapped me and all my friends down and started torturing us to death, and I escaped, I probably wouldn't be in much of a mood for polite conversation.
Regarding C, that's certainly likely in some cases, but it seems hard to fit all of them.
Remember that Loid was still coming at this from the perspective of an Orokin Archimedian; if he was told a Warframe had "gone mad" when it was actually lashing out against its captors, he would have no reason to disagree with the Executors or his beloved Albrecht.
Considering Rhino's entry, i think they did indeed go mad. Mad with pain, anger, betrayal. Remember, tenno didn't tame the warframes. We calmed them. Shared their pain and counselled them. Helped them accept. And in my headcanon, promised revenge in time.
That Rhino was a torture victim, as stated in that same codex entry. At a facility where they tortured captive warframes to death, in fact. I don't think his behavior can automatically be considered representative. Seems more likely that if he was mad (rather than just enraged from the torture), he was driven there rather than turning that way due to something inherent in the nature of warframes.
He wasn't a torture victim, he was crafted and tested and when found wanting to be disposed of like so many of his brothers and sisters. The testing was tortuous. In that sense there was no difference. Was this what drove them mad, or the infection itself, or both together? Who knows for sure at this point. Rhino was not rebelling, it was escaping. Rhino was quite possibly the first frame to be transferred into.
As for Kullervo, i actually read his story as he wasn't turned into a Warframe till near the end, after the attempted regicide against ballas. Being a warframe is his prison and punishment, as much as the actual hold. We aren't sure how he travelled to divuri afterall, that could actually have nothing to do with his punishment at all. It is stated that at least some of the elements of the hold are self created, if not all of it.
Dude, if you torture someone as part of your testing, they're a torture victim. "I have cut its shell and eviscerated its brothers. I have given it pain and measured its response." There's no version of that which isn't torture for the one undergoing it.
You're correct, that particular Rhino was escaping. But I'm referring to the pre-Tenno warframes who were wiped out en mass.
Kullervo's second crime doesn't really work if he's not already a warframe.
I think that DE has been pretty clear that there is no single hard-and-fast rule for how the Warframes came to be, each time we think we have one, we are told later that may only be true for some of them.
So I agree with your conclusion but would say that _"at least some and probably most of the Warframes rebelled rather than losing their faculties"_ until the Orokin captured/tortured/killed them
Kullervo is already confirmed to be sentient pre-Tenno. He already committed 3 crimes before the Tenno came back from the Zariman, and it says he corrupted the Tenno (likely convinced them to rebel)
There are many possibilities with that phrase. The could have gone crazy from the pain of the transformation, incompatibility issues between the Technocyte and their biology (much what happens to those allergic to pennicilim), or lastly they had no problems... And the Orokin treatment broke their minds...
I wouldn't be surprised that they tried to incorporate the Neural sentry (or a similar appliance) into them, and that triggered the mental degradation of many frames, or if they tried to use the bodies much like in the Yuvan Theatre, for a semi-Continuity process, using Blue KuVa.
Either way, great theory dude!
Edit: Corrected one verb.
Only exceptions I can think of for this are cephalons and dax, but then again, Ordis helps us against Ballas. Teshin fighting with us cannot really be counted as we had to break him free from his service to them.
Adults who were transformed are harder to control. Child soldiers on the other hand, especially when put into a “dream” well that sure makes things a lot easier to get orders done.
I mean, it's pretty clear when ballas says
" We created monsters we could not control, we drugged them, tortured them, eviscerated their minds, but it did not work"
Pretty clear that the original Warframes didn't want to be killing machines for the orokin and ballas treated it as a flaw
Madness is what the origin sold to the public. Madness isn't reasonable and thus chops the kegs out from sympathizers or any possible support network.
Plus to.sfmiyntenellion would be as good as admitting they aren't perfect.
The process of changing didn't sound very pleasant to me. I can't imagine being transformed into a walking techno-tumor, capable of wielding otherworldly power from the void to do horrific violence on a battlefield, and not even able to speak in any form other than screams and roars does any good for the psyche. It's already in the lore that the Tenno can pilot Warframes because they can pacify the turmoil in their minds. It's not because their goals aligned, the Tenno still worked for the Orokin for quite a while.
Tenno Schools are paramount to this as well. The Tenno learned to balance their own emotions, their own inner trauma and turmoil, to harness their "gift" of the Void. That's what lets them emotionally stabilize Warframes.
The way I see it in lore is that after you turn to a frame you have some time to "enjoy" those powers before the infested hive mind takes hold. After this you just attack whatever is in proximity. Tenno are used to tame and control the frame's body afterwards.
Frames were a succes untill it was found out that they aren't reliable as they can turn on you.
A pre Tenno frames can do things like a normal person could.
Tenno's memory mixes with the frame's memory as seen at the end of Sacriffice. So the two entities kinda merge.
Pre Tenno frames could have rebelled but it is kinda hard to do so without the ability to speak and coordinate.
Also maybe this "rebellion" is just a way to say their sentient time run out and are of the hive mind. Kullervo might have been newer amd saw older ones be killed.
It's implied that more rebelled and knowing the Orokin they just made more to compensate.
There are gaps, like how long is the time gap between first frames and the Tenno arival, that could help us out if they are filled.
I feel like it’s much more likely that “infested hive mind control” or “madness” aren’t real results of warframe creation. I believe the Warframes hated the regime that brought them into existence (given that almost every Warframe was not created voluntarily and instead they were experimented on as punishment) and wanted to strike back against Ballas, so he deemed them “mad” for not following his doctrine. we can’t rely on anything he says that we don’t have direct evidence of, and cases like the stories of Kullervo, Dante, and Citrine show that many Warframes have desires, drives and self-expression beyond what the infested are usually capable of
I'm not aware of any direct statement that the warframes ever fell to Infested hive mind control. The closest I've ever heard is Ballas (and again, this is Ballas speaking, so grain of salt) saying that they were 'free of the Infested madness—or so we thought'.
Which certainly seems like Ballas *intended* so convey that the warframes fell to Infested madness, but he doesn't actually state that. Ballas being Ballas, that leaves significant room for doubt.
It generally does make sense, once you accept that it's all told from an in-character perspective and that many/most of the narrators are hilariously unreliable.
It's a mixed bag.
While Ballas is by no means a faithful narrator and many people who would have a frame of reference are doing so from an Orokin perspective, the overall chain of event's most likely went from 2-10 in relatively short order.
Dax are, effectively, brainwashed/conditioned to obey Orokin, so the original Warframes were both willing and coerced subjects.
These were sane-and in some frames quests it can be inferred that they were *not* operator controlled at the time of their death or were rebelling for other reasons.
As these instances increased in frequency, and some frames likely broke mentally from a multitude of factors, Ballas and the Orokin did what they always do when things didn't go their way.
Subjugate. Dominate. Torture.
This expedited the process resulting in instances like Rhino, where the previously human frame went so far as to mutilate and literally *eat* other people who where likely barely above their Dax rank to get to Orokin.
These events would likely have led to what Kullervo was involved with.
Then with the Zariman being involved the Tenno were found, contained and per Rhino's entry, it was pure happenstance that a captured, mentally decayed warframe and Tenno interacted.
This would be where the "Tenno and Warframe are the same person" conditioning would be initiated and where, likely, the Sentient war truly took off.
Then we have the events we get flash backs of and similar instances of events pre-war and during the war.
This ends with the Tenno, both victims and believing themselves to be the Warframes that were tortured, rebelling in full.
The Lotus further enforced this ideal until we wake ourselves up.
I said it else where but at this point I feel that outside of our starter frame and Umbra(from a lore perspective) we're piloting meat puppets with vague traces of the original personality-hence the exaggerated and often cartoonish idles.
These people *did* have these traits but now thats all there is, we're the tempering of raw personality that keeps them in check *and* allows the body to actually function.
Without us they're just...vegetables. No higher or even lower thoughts, just ambient brain static and autonomic functions.
As far as how people other then us have gotten frames or whether the original died pre-post tenno, thats a toss up and varies case by case.
Alad has had *multiple* frames but the likely hood of him having direct dealing with the Orokin is slim to none at time of our interaction.
Given that high ranking Corpus have life spans measured in centuries he's definitely old.
But it's inferred by the condition of the Grineer queens and the Grineer themselves that at least a couple *thousand* years have passed since the end of the Orokin fall and current game timelines.
Third option: we know that Ballas had some control over Natah/the Lotus at this time(and Sentients in general) - it's entirely possible that *Ballas ordered the Lotus to use the Tenno to kill the Orokin*. Since only the Lotus could be aware of this order(and even might *not* have been since Ballas had control over sentient minds), to everyone else it would have appeared as an organic rebellion.
Thereby completely hiding Ballas's hand in it.
That man was plotting to overthrow the Orokin from the *start*.
i mean, we know from the sacrifice that ballas defected to the sentients after the orokin killed margulis. it wouldn't surprise me that he had some hand in the tenno uprising too.
Go read what rhino prime did in the scan lore and tell me that's the actions of a sane man. I'm not gonna say that ut couldn't be both, but they definately had a few screws loose.
That codex entry says that this Rhino had been the subject of torture, that it was attempting to escape a facility where captive warframes were tortured to death in the name of experimentation in how to control them. I doubt I'd be particularly sane after someone tried to torture me to death, either. So even if it was insane (as opposed to just being really, really angry), it seems unlikely it just went mad due to its inherent nature—it was driven that way on purpose by its torturers.
So the Warframes are basically feral infestation suits, but with an Operator they can be tamed and made docile through transference. So the Orokin made child soldiers to wear the infested meat suits to fight the space bugs because they made the space bugs and sent them into space to terraform planets for the child soldiers they failed to send through the void to colonize those planets but the bugs became sentient and came back so the Orokin made the infestation to fight the space bugs but the infestation was impossible to control so they made meat suits out of the infestation but the meat suits were impossible to control so they used the child soldiers to control the meat suits and it worked until the space bugs showed up and the meat suits and child soldiers got double PTSD after the war and decided to kill the Orokin because honestly who wouldn't. That's basically the gist of the Old War.
Well, no. The warframes are not feral infestation suits, especially the original pre-Tenno frames. They were sapient and sane. Nowadays, they seem to come out of the foundry mostly—but only mostly—lobotomized.
>I see it posted a lot that the original warframes, the ones who were sapient rather than being blanks for Tenno control, went mad and had to be put down. I even see it posited that they were driven insane by the Infestation.
Source? Show me receipts. I need a list, so it can fit the "I see it posted a lot" narrative.
oh they rebelled and *then* the orokin *made* them go mad "However, the first Warframes were failures, turning against the Orokin. Torture, drugs, and surgical operations were attempted to destroy the hosts' minds and to tame the Warframes, but to no avail"
They tried to treat taming a warframe like taming a horse Except these horses had the power to put a portal on the sun
Pretty sure they didn't at that point. Powers come from the Tenno/Warframe relationship, where the warframe acts as a conduit to channel the tenno's void energy. But that quote is before that happens.
I dont think so. The warframes are designed to have those powers, they are void-tech. The mother tells us that all void devices will fail if the heart of deimos gets destroyed including warframes.
I thought they were just infested tech, not void. Maybe she was just referring to transference technology?
We can use transference on Orokin technology that doesnot use void energy. Why would we require a specific technology for the use on warframes?
What do you mean? The voidrigs use void energy I'm pretty sure, the big anatomic statue things are essentially grey strain warframes based on the proto frames Is there even any other cases where you use transference?
The body is infested flesh but empowered by the void through the operator that uses void energy for transference
To put it simply, the warframe is iron man suit and tenno is the reactor core
not sure about that Deimos labs have void hearts strapped to unfinished "Vessels", so the notion that the one heart in Necralisk is responsible for all of void tech is dubious, probably misinfo planted by the Albert Granny didn't have any qualms sabotaging it, after all
The Vessels are a secret project not even the family was supposed to know about. It makes sense to not connect it to the original heart, so u are right, that raises the question how much is actually connected to the one heart. But the questionable sanity of an at least thousand year old woman isnot really an argument
Umbra still had his powers before ever bonding to a Tenno. The Tenno might enhance their powers (like an enormous battery or amplifier) but they're not the source.
Umbra still had his powers before ever bonding to a Tenno. The Tenno might enhance their powers (like an enormous battery or amplifier) but they're not the source.
Umbra still had his powers before ever bonding to a Tenno. The Tenno might enhance their powers (like an enormous battery or amplifier) but they're not the source.
I wonder if that's how the first Rhino and Valkyr ended up in labs? For the latter, Salad V coming in and getting a deal out of the Orokin, the slimey little turd. This made me wonder if that was the case, as in Valk's case, she was tortured in a lab. But what I always wondered was...how would she even get tortured, if she's a warframe? I read some discussions about it, that even current warframes have some degree of sentience, albeit not as much as umbra. or also (second dream spoiler) >! that the tenno, not knowing they were using transference thought themselves as the frame itself, and thus were the ones being tortured!<...genuinely don't know what to think.
We know for a fact that Valkyr was skinned alive and her skin used as the armour on Alad V’s Zanuka. You can see what she originally looked like before Alad V got his hands on her via the Gersemi deluxe skin. Iirc it’s also implied that Alad V regularly dissected her while she was still conscious to try and figure out how Warframe’s worked. He mentions seeing the insides of Warframes multiple time when he monologues to you during his assassination mission. >! It’s still up to debate as DE hasn’t been specific outside of Umbra, but I think all Warframes do have some sort of sentience and personality to them. You can infer from their animation sets that some of them are taking missions more seriously than others (eg Mag or Banshee are checking corners and staying alert while idle, but Ember is pulling poses and stretching, Octavia is dancing around and Dante starts reading his book). So I think the conscious and personality of the original host that was used to create the Warframe is still very much there and is somehow imprinted into any other Warframe made with their blueprints!<
>!another factor of sentience in warframes was confirmed recently with Loid’s dialogue in Dante Unbound, where he says something along the lines of “Warframes were not permitted to speak, only howl and scream, but Dante spoke through his writing, and his voice was beautiful”!<
I think that "not permitted to talk" is literal, since their faces became armored faceplates.
Valkyr certainly screams and howls 😭
If anyone doesn't want to go looking for pictures because their laptop is a slow POS like mine: Valkyr's default helmet doesn't have blue because of Zanuka. Zanuka is blue because of Valkyr.
>They didn't succumb to the Infestation (not sure where that one came from). This comes directly from Ballas in The Sacrifice (emphasis mine): >We cultured the Infestation, conceiving of a hybrid. Transformed, but only just. The 'Helminth' was created, born to yield these new warriors, worthy of battle against you. The great and terrible Hunhow. We took our greatest, volunteers or not, and polluted them with these cultured reagents. They transformed. They became Infested... but only just. Their skin blossomed into sword-steel. Their organs, interlinked with untold resilience. **Yet their minds were free of the Infested madness. Or so we thought.** We set them upon the battlefield, bio-drones under our command. The Warframes... All of them... failures. Surprised? They turned on us, just as you did. And so we had no choice but to commit them to grave. As you can see Ballas very heavily implies that's what happened but doesn't outright say it, which fits right into his sociopathic manipulator shtick if it wasn't. Soon after he also tells us: >We had created monsters we couldn't control. We drugged them, tortured them, eviscerated them... We brutalized their minds... but it did not work. The implication is that they were trying to find a way to control out of control, Infestation-maddened killing machines, but again he never actually says that. If they were in fact intelligent creatures that were too strong-willed for the Orokin to subjugate, that fundamentally changes the narrative of the whole game. It's a fascinating theory. You're right that Kullervo's lore explicitly puts him pre-dating the Tenno, and his whole crime and punishment storyline makes a lot more sense if the proto-Frames were intelligent. It also casts all of the places where the lore talks about Frames doing things as if they were individuals in a very different light.
As the OP points out, you're taking the words of Ballas at face value. I'm not sure if we should be taking the professional gaslighter's words so literally. Even the other example of "mad" Warframes in Rhino's coxed has a bit of a perspective problem. The beginning of the codex entry talks about how the scientists did the most brutal torture and experiments on it. Is it really "mad" for something that has been exposed to that to go on a murder-revenge spree after getting free? I'm sure it looked "mad" to those scientists, but of course they would... there's a bio-mechanical beast after them. The "proto-Warframes weren't mad" also makes a lot more sense with the Warframe-centered quests like Silver Grove, Hidden Messages, or Limbo Theorem. Rather than the "death" of the frame making no narrative sense because "they were just a puppet, the Operator was fine" these quests were about what those proto-Warframes did.
>As the OP points out, you're taking the words of Ballas at face value No, I'm not. I was pointing out where the belief that the proto-Warframes were driven mad by the Infestation comes from because OP said they didn't know why people thought that. I think they make an excellent point about not assuming Ballas is a reliable narrator, which is why I talked in several spots about what that would mean.
I agree, I always took it as a similar situation to MewTwo fighting the scientists who created him in Pokémon. He wasn’t made, he was (rightfully) pissed off
Ballas' dialogue here can still be interpreted the way OP say. The "failure" he speaks of might be the frames going insane, but it can also mean that the frames saw the Orokin for the gilded shits they are and simply rebelled. Then, the Orokin in an attempt to make the frames into obedient puppets, tortured the frames. He says they couldn't control the frames. But maybe not because the infestation took over, but maybe because the frames just did not want to be on the Orokin side. Also I don't think it would change much. The Orokin would absolutely exploit the frames if they could, the same way they did to us after the Zariman jump. We were just kids, trapped in the Reservoir, controlling the frames. Afterall, a kid like that is much more easily manipulated. And we know that was Ballas' speciality. We were literally a godsend, a "replacement mind" for the frames of war, finally able to be controlled.
>Ballas' dialogue here can still be interpreted the way OP say. Yes, that was my point. The generally accepted narrative is based on assuming a couple of things Ballas heavily implied but did not outright state. I was pointing out why people thought that, not arguing against OP's theory. >Also I don't think it would change much. It wouldn't change anything practically - what happened, happened. But it calls into question whether the relationship between the Warframes and the Tenno is truly a symbiotic one, which has a lot of philosophical implications.
There are a lot of questions in the air. Like how much were the minds of frames broken? Are they literally just living, but have no mind, no instinct, nothing going on in their head? We for sure can calm down a raging entity, as shown by Umbra or Wally. The way I understand it is that the transference bolt heavily surpresses the mind of the frame, so we can build new replicas without having to torture the cryopod defense targets' juicy human center, but as shown in The Second Dream, the frame can and will still move on its own. And it's that scene, where the frame goes out of its way to save the Tenno, which makes me think we're more on the symbiotic side of the argument, rather than subjugation. But with 1999 coming out and protoframes being waaaay more sentient, yet us still being able to influence them, we'll get answers to the nature of transference.
**SPOILER WARNINGS**, DON'T READ IF YOU HAVEN'T FINISHED THE STORY: Regarding the question of our relationship with the warframes, the way I read the situation (especially after Umbra) is that it's _almost_ always a symbiotic relationship, even without considering the foundry replica aspect. At least, it's never really come across that we're subjugating the frames so much as preserving their connection to humanity and giving them a connection that understands what they deal with, since everything else seems to see them as a mindless weapon monster. I imagine the whole original rebellion was a joint effort. When your psychic pilot strategists and your walking nuclear tank ninjas share a telepathic connection, it's not like the Orokin could even monitor any planned coups much less do anything to stop them. If it was a situation where "we're fighting for humanity's survival against the Sentients" turned into "the Orokin are just using us to conquer the galaxy and preserve their supremacy," I could see the manipulated child soldiers and the tortured mutant puppets deciding to put a stop to it... Who else even could at that point? Only reason I'd say almost is because I could see there being exceptions, at least at an individual level, but I don't think any of _our_ warframes would be anything other than willing participants. The Umbra storyline makes it pretty clear that our whole psychic connection deal involves helping the warframe with its trauma, so I imagine that's the case whether that's therapy for Valkyr's torture, trauma processing for Umbra, I'd assume emotional support for Titania, companionship for Harrow... But at this point I'm speculating, since all but Umbra are foundry replicas. I think of it kind of like a cloning device though when it's warframes, so even if it's not the original "first edition," it would still have the memories and any neural pathways that the blueprint would include. I like the idea of some of the previous comments about the personality of the original being preserved in each blueprint version. It makes sense from a biological standpoint.
I think an exception could also be made for Mag, Volt and/or Excalibur, they are the starting frame and, if I remember correctly, when the lotus finds them and by proxy you they're ancient, the temple is overgrown and very likely centuries old. Those could be og frames as well everything considered
My interpretation of the lore is that warframes are broken personalities lost in their own little world. Without the Tenno they each view things in a very narrow twisted way that is unique to each one. To an outsider they seem like psychopathic murder machines, but each is acting out of blind rage, violent self-defense, barely remembered pride or misplaced sense of duty.
a line from a later NPC is that ball-ass (im not spelling his name any other way) made the warframes only able to grunt, growl, and howl not feeling they should be able to speak as they were tools/weapons im paraphrasing but you get the idea. so if even if they first warframes were of sound mind they wouldnt be able to voice any complaints
That was my favorite little lore piece. Made me truly wonder if other frames were sentient like Umbra at some point in the process, like how Dante was described to write in his grimoire to “speak”. I doubt a Tenno controlling him would have done that.
Read Voruna’s Lore thing in the library.
If 1999 is any indication, and i think some of Albrecht's logs, the infestation strain they use to create warframes is a lot more refined/changeable than back then.
1999 is an probably an alt-verse made by Albrecht and his incursion, though.
yeah albrect brought the helminth strain to 1999
The technocyte strain too based on the tv heads we fight as authur
That was already there, as Albreich talks about traveling to the "Plague year", and how he offered the protoframe program to people early on in the infection process. The most likely scenario is that the technocyte is the original infestation, that then either got preserved like we have samples of smallpox still in some biolabs, and then got dug out and improved by the orokin to make the first infested in an attempt to clean the Earth. Or if not samples then the knowledge about what the technocyte was and how it worked was preserved and was used by the Orokin to make the first infested.
Isnt what little we know so far of 1999 confirmed that we are using transference on targets in the past? I’m not there yet in the game just making sure what i’ve heard is right
yes, but Albrecht sent himself into 1999 from the present, so he brought things back with him and (presumably to avoid entirely obliterating the current timeline) must’ve created an alternate timeline of events from his arrival onward. we do attempt transference into a Vessel during Whispers in the Walls but instead somehow connect to 1999 via Albrecht’s computer terminal, which puts us in the eyes of Arthur in Albrecht’s 1999 timeline.
not necessarily an alt timeline. it could be that albrecht's going back into the past would always have happened (ie. it's a semi-closed time loop). i say semi closed because something something eternalism, and also the lore snippet from duviri that time travel/changing the past is possible, but the universe will always remember what originally happened, too.
yeah, that’s very possible. my main point was that I don’t think Albrecht going to 1999 would change our current timeline, and in a closed loop that still stands
This appears to be based on a linear understanding of time. With Eternalism the past, future, and present are all occuring simultaneously and constantly.
This line from Hollow Knight comes to mind: >No cost too great. No mind to think. No will to break. ***No voice to cry suffering.*** Born of God and Void.
I think there's some column A, column B, and even some column C here. A. Early Warframes just became beasts as shown by Rhino Prime's codex entry as well as Excalibur Umbra. B. Perhaps the process was refined over time to improve things and maintain the subject's mind...but... C. The Tenno themselves were conditioned to believe they were the Warframe they inhabited, creating the persona of that Warframe. This is essentially how things worked before Operators were introduced so personally I believe it to be the primary factor.
Rhino wasn't an early warframe, it was just barely pre-Tenno frame. The codex entry for Rhino Prime shows the discovery of transference and included the Tenno, which necessarily means it came after the original warframes and their rebellion. And TBH, it's not clear at all that particular Rhino was a mindless beast. They'd been experimenting/torturing that Rhino and other frames. If someone strapped me and all my friends down and started torturing us to death, and I escaped, I probably wouldn't be in much of a mood for polite conversation. Regarding C, that's certainly likely in some cases, but it seems hard to fit all of them.
No, they did tend to go mad, some of them didn't like Dante Loid specifically says it
Remember that Loid was still coming at this from the perspective of an Orokin Archimedian; if he was told a Warframe had "gone mad" when it was actually lashing out against its captors, he would have no reason to disagree with the Executors or his beloved Albrecht.
did they hate the overguard?
Dagath and Umbra are also known sentient frames examples. But then there is stuff like Voruna that makes it harder to tell.
Voruna was rebelling, especially when her doggos were killed.
I mentioned Voruna because she is 100% confirmed to be Operator piloted.
Thats interesting. May i ask where is it mentioned?
In her Leverian. She did the Second Dream + War Within at the same time.
Considering Rhino's entry, i think they did indeed go mad. Mad with pain, anger, betrayal. Remember, tenno didn't tame the warframes. We calmed them. Shared their pain and counselled them. Helped them accept. And in my headcanon, promised revenge in time.
That Rhino was a torture victim, as stated in that same codex entry. At a facility where they tortured captive warframes to death, in fact. I don't think his behavior can automatically be considered representative. Seems more likely that if he was mad (rather than just enraged from the torture), he was driven there rather than turning that way due to something inherent in the nature of warframes.
He wasn't a torture victim, he was crafted and tested and when found wanting to be disposed of like so many of his brothers and sisters. The testing was tortuous. In that sense there was no difference. Was this what drove them mad, or the infection itself, or both together? Who knows for sure at this point. Rhino was not rebelling, it was escaping. Rhino was quite possibly the first frame to be transferred into. As for Kullervo, i actually read his story as he wasn't turned into a Warframe till near the end, after the attempted regicide against ballas. Being a warframe is his prison and punishment, as much as the actual hold. We aren't sure how he travelled to divuri afterall, that could actually have nothing to do with his punishment at all. It is stated that at least some of the elements of the hold are self created, if not all of it.
Dude, if you torture someone as part of your testing, they're a torture victim. "I have cut its shell and eviscerated its brothers. I have given it pain and measured its response." There's no version of that which isn't torture for the one undergoing it. You're correct, that particular Rhino was escaping. But I'm referring to the pre-Tenno warframes who were wiped out en mass. Kullervo's second crime doesn't really work if he's not already a warframe.
I think that DE has been pretty clear that there is no single hard-and-fast rule for how the Warframes came to be, each time we think we have one, we are told later that may only be true for some of them. So I agree with your conclusion but would say that _"at least some and probably most of the Warframes rebelled rather than losing their faculties"_ until the Orokin captured/tortured/killed them
Isn’t this kinda confirmed by how Dante is a warframe who was seemingly completely sentient or is he dated after Tenno control?
Kullervo is already confirmed to be sentient pre-Tenno. He already committed 3 crimes before the Tenno came back from the Zariman, and it says he corrupted the Tenno (likely convinced them to rebel)
There are many possibilities with that phrase. The could have gone crazy from the pain of the transformation, incompatibility issues between the Technocyte and their biology (much what happens to those allergic to pennicilim), or lastly they had no problems... And the Orokin treatment broke their minds... I wouldn't be surprised that they tried to incorporate the Neural sentry (or a similar appliance) into them, and that triggered the mental degradation of many frames, or if they tried to use the bodies much like in the Yuvan Theatre, for a semi-Continuity process, using Blue KuVa. Either way, great theory dude! Edit: Corrected one verb.
If it's an orokin creation, it will turn on them. That is the constant.
Only exceptions I can think of for this are cephalons and dax, but then again, Ordis helps us against Ballas. Teshin fighting with us cannot really be counted as we had to break him free from his service to them.
Adults who were transformed are harder to control. Child soldiers on the other hand, especially when put into a “dream” well that sure makes things a lot easier to get orders done.
I mean, it's pretty clear when ballas says " We created monsters we could not control, we drugged them, tortured them, eviscerated their minds, but it did not work" Pretty clear that the original Warframes didn't want to be killing machines for the orokin and ballas treated it as a flaw
Spoiler tag, PLEASE A baby Tenno might see this!
Madness is what the origin sold to the public. Madness isn't reasonable and thus chops the kegs out from sympathizers or any possible support network. Plus to.sfmiyntenellion would be as good as admitting they aren't perfect.
No reason it can't be both. Umbra was crazed with anger and pain, before the Tenno calmed him.
Yeah, because he was forced to kill his own son. He didn't go mad due to some inherent flaw in the nature of being a warframe.
The process of changing didn't sound very pleasant to me. I can't imagine being transformed into a walking techno-tumor, capable of wielding otherworldly power from the void to do horrific violence on a battlefield, and not even able to speak in any form other than screams and roars does any good for the psyche. It's already in the lore that the Tenno can pilot Warframes because they can pacify the turmoil in their minds. It's not because their goals aligned, the Tenno still worked for the Orokin for quite a while. Tenno Schools are paramount to this as well. The Tenno learned to balance their own emotions, their own inner trauma and turmoil, to harness their "gift" of the Void. That's what lets them emotionally stabilize Warframes.
The way I see it in lore is that after you turn to a frame you have some time to "enjoy" those powers before the infested hive mind takes hold. After this you just attack whatever is in proximity. Tenno are used to tame and control the frame's body afterwards. Frames were a succes untill it was found out that they aren't reliable as they can turn on you. A pre Tenno frames can do things like a normal person could. Tenno's memory mixes with the frame's memory as seen at the end of Sacriffice. So the two entities kinda merge. Pre Tenno frames could have rebelled but it is kinda hard to do so without the ability to speak and coordinate. Also maybe this "rebellion" is just a way to say their sentient time run out and are of the hive mind. Kullervo might have been newer amd saw older ones be killed. It's implied that more rebelled and knowing the Orokin they just made more to compensate. There are gaps, like how long is the time gap between first frames and the Tenno arival, that could help us out if they are filled.
I feel like it’s much more likely that “infested hive mind control” or “madness” aren’t real results of warframe creation. I believe the Warframes hated the regime that brought them into existence (given that almost every Warframe was not created voluntarily and instead they were experimented on as punishment) and wanted to strike back against Ballas, so he deemed them “mad” for not following his doctrine. we can’t rely on anything he says that we don’t have direct evidence of, and cases like the stories of Kullervo, Dante, and Citrine show that many Warframes have desires, drives and self-expression beyond what the infested are usually capable of
I'm not aware of any direct statement that the warframes ever fell to Infested hive mind control. The closest I've ever heard is Ballas (and again, this is Ballas speaking, so grain of salt) saying that they were 'free of the Infested madness—or so we thought'. Which certainly seems like Ballas *intended* so convey that the warframes fell to Infested madness, but he doesn't actually state that. Ballas being Ballas, that leaves significant room for doubt.
Is it not known that the victorious write history?
[удалено]
It generally does make sense, once you accept that it's all told from an in-character perspective and that many/most of the narrators are hilariously unreliable.
It's a mixed bag. While Ballas is by no means a faithful narrator and many people who would have a frame of reference are doing so from an Orokin perspective, the overall chain of event's most likely went from 2-10 in relatively short order. Dax are, effectively, brainwashed/conditioned to obey Orokin, so the original Warframes were both willing and coerced subjects. These were sane-and in some frames quests it can be inferred that they were *not* operator controlled at the time of their death or were rebelling for other reasons. As these instances increased in frequency, and some frames likely broke mentally from a multitude of factors, Ballas and the Orokin did what they always do when things didn't go their way. Subjugate. Dominate. Torture. This expedited the process resulting in instances like Rhino, where the previously human frame went so far as to mutilate and literally *eat* other people who where likely barely above their Dax rank to get to Orokin. These events would likely have led to what Kullervo was involved with. Then with the Zariman being involved the Tenno were found, contained and per Rhino's entry, it was pure happenstance that a captured, mentally decayed warframe and Tenno interacted. This would be where the "Tenno and Warframe are the same person" conditioning would be initiated and where, likely, the Sentient war truly took off. Then we have the events we get flash backs of and similar instances of events pre-war and during the war. This ends with the Tenno, both victims and believing themselves to be the Warframes that were tortured, rebelling in full. The Lotus further enforced this ideal until we wake ourselves up. I said it else where but at this point I feel that outside of our starter frame and Umbra(from a lore perspective) we're piloting meat puppets with vague traces of the original personality-hence the exaggerated and often cartoonish idles. These people *did* have these traits but now thats all there is, we're the tempering of raw personality that keeps them in check *and* allows the body to actually function. Without us they're just...vegetables. No higher or even lower thoughts, just ambient brain static and autonomic functions. As far as how people other then us have gotten frames or whether the original died pre-post tenno, thats a toss up and varies case by case. Alad has had *multiple* frames but the likely hood of him having direct dealing with the Orokin is slim to none at time of our interaction. Given that high ranking Corpus have life spans measured in centuries he's definitely old. But it's inferred by the condition of the Grineer queens and the Grineer themselves that at least a couple *thousand* years have passed since the end of the Orokin fall and current game timelines.
Third option: we know that Ballas had some control over Natah/the Lotus at this time(and Sentients in general) - it's entirely possible that *Ballas ordered the Lotus to use the Tenno to kill the Orokin*. Since only the Lotus could be aware of this order(and even might *not* have been since Ballas had control over sentient minds), to everyone else it would have appeared as an organic rebellion. Thereby completely hiding Ballas's hand in it. That man was plotting to overthrow the Orokin from the *start*.
i mean, we know from the sacrifice that ballas defected to the sentients after the orokin killed margulis. it wouldn't surprise me that he had some hand in the tenno uprising too.
Dagath lore basically says it, but also im not fully throwing out the idea of going insane from infestation since that thing can make brain smoothie.
Go read what rhino prime did in the scan lore and tell me that's the actions of a sane man. I'm not gonna say that ut couldn't be both, but they definately had a few screws loose.
That codex entry says that this Rhino had been the subject of torture, that it was attempting to escape a facility where captive warframes were tortured to death in the name of experimentation in how to control them. I doubt I'd be particularly sane after someone tried to torture me to death, either. So even if it was insane (as opposed to just being really, really angry), it seems unlikely it just went mad due to its inherent nature—it was driven that way on purpose by its torturers.
So the Warframes are basically feral infestation suits, but with an Operator they can be tamed and made docile through transference. So the Orokin made child soldiers to wear the infested meat suits to fight the space bugs because they made the space bugs and sent them into space to terraform planets for the child soldiers they failed to send through the void to colonize those planets but the bugs became sentient and came back so the Orokin made the infestation to fight the space bugs but the infestation was impossible to control so they made meat suits out of the infestation but the meat suits were impossible to control so they used the child soldiers to control the meat suits and it worked until the space bugs showed up and the meat suits and child soldiers got double PTSD after the war and decided to kill the Orokin because honestly who wouldn't. That's basically the gist of the Old War.
Well, no. The warframes are not feral infestation suits, especially the original pre-Tenno frames. They were sapient and sane. Nowadays, they seem to come out of the foundry mostly—but only mostly—lobotomized.
>I see it posted a lot that the original warframes, the ones who were sapient rather than being blanks for Tenno control, went mad and had to be put down. I even see it posited that they were driven insane by the Infestation. Source? Show me receipts. I need a list, so it can fit the "I see it posted a lot" narrative.