Nothing of Note

DE has said that the Perita Rebellion was modeled after World War I in some ways. with that in mind, borrowing aesthetics and tropes from a genre characterized by post-war Americana doesn't come out of nowhere, even if film noir is about the period after WW2 rather than WW1

more importantly, it serves to clarify what kind of story is being told about the Sentients. it is not a story about colonialism. the Sentients are not an allegory for native peoples. they aren't native to Tau, and their existence as a creation of the Orokin Empire does not compare to indigenous histories in any way. the closest thing we have in real history to a people being created from nothing by another people... is the act of colonizing, not the experience of being colonized

if anything, the Sentients are an allegory for the United States. even that is far from a perfect allegory, of course. I don't think they're meant to be an allegory of anything. not all sci-fi is allegory, though a lot of it is. sometimes sci-fi functions as a thought-provoker by creating an unlikely combination of aesthetics.

anyway, the Sentients colonized Tau, then they rebelled against the empire that sent them there, then they made their own mess. sound familiar?

as a caveat to "they made their own mess," it's also worth pointing out that the aftermath of war tends to involve material conditions that push people to desperation, like destroyed infrastructure, depleted or inaccessible resources, and widespread trauma. in the Sentients' case, the naturally-occurring flower that gave them individuality was wiped out. clearly Bloom was a hasty solution to that problem that stuck; it's right there in the name

who invented Bloom? how was it distributed then, and how is it distributed now? what resources are required to concoct it, and are those resources scarce or abundant? how difficult is it to produce in large quantities? what are the side effects? it will be interesting to learn the answers to these questions. it might explain a lot about Fornax

also worth noting that Fornax isn't the whole of Sentient society in Tau. DE said there are going to be multiple different locations of that size, and if I remember correctly, they said not all of Tau is like Fornax. presumably there's a percentage of Sentients who live in a hive mind, and I don't doubt that hive mind looks down on the individuated Sentients and their problems while having its own obvious, inherent problem. there will also probably be groups of individuals who organize themselves very differently from Fornax. whatever you hoped Sentient society would look like, it may actually exist somewhere!

and that's nothing if not realistic. individuals never universally agree on what society should be, and even when some who have high ideals manage to come together in a stable community, they never completely succeed in meeting those ideals

A: Chill, y'all. They're not going to leave the Operator in the dust. Who tf do you think is gonna pilot the Vessel when the time comes? It has to be the young traumatised atrophied child, or the Evangelion reference DE have been building to for more than a decade won't land!

B: The Operator is literally an atrophied, void-riddled, traumatised child. They have not, as far as we can see/tell, ever physically recovered from their extensive time in the Lua pod. Remember, we can never be 100% sure they are ever physically present when they use Transference, given what happens when they get shot up/'die'. As far as we know, they've possibly never physically left the pod, so are we really expecting them to go pick up the Lotus? They can barely pick themselves up - I don't think they have the leverage to make Wally second-guess itself like the Drifter does, either.

The Drifter was, both diagetically and non-diagetically, the way that DE chose to 'age up' the Operator without removing the Operator from the game, and (both literally and metaphorically) 'handing off' the adult work from the Operator to the Drifter - from the literal child to the adult, so DE don't have to constantly wonder if it's alright to be portraying a child doing all of this buck-wild stuff (like physical romance, I remind you) and maintain their ESRB M rating.

It was necessary, and I think it was necessary in the story as well; the Operator isn't ever going to drastically change or grow (to, say, the extent of the difference between the Operator and the Drifter), partly for actual narrative reasons (yet another Evangelion reference - stuck as children forever), and also specifically because of ludonarrative issues - it's a game that has to have so many things remain applicable and valid across the life of the game - old content, cosmetics, player entitlement, etc.

Whether you chose the Drifter or not, that part of the story is canon across all Tenno, and one of many surprisingly hard-locked points of the otherwise supposedly all-possibilities-filled 'Eternalism'.

There's also something to be said for leaving childhood behind, no matter how traumatising it was. You can bring it with you, but you'll never be, or stay, the same.

Your torch was passed on from your own Operator to you, the Drifter you are now, probably before you were ready to truly stand on your own two legs in this world.

But our Warframe Operator and Drifter have something that we didn't; The team at DE. And if it's one thing I've learned about DE after more than a decade, it's that I do trust them to make it worth while.

Have faith, Tenno. They are both You, and You Did Not Leave Yourself Behind. Trust Yourself.

But do it quickly, because

TAU IS IN SIGHT