i'm actually planning to not reset the KIM at all if possible (it's very easy now that you can force it to show you all conversations at each rank before going to the next), so the way characters keep going "i know you might have looped us...and that's okay. i trust you." actually becomes insaaaaaaanely off-putting in a way i really enjoy.
my drifter really is like "i'm gonna relate to these people as people, and we're gonna be friends :)" and then everyone's like "i guess you might just see me as an instrument or pawn....and that's okay. i trust you. and i mean...i couldn't even change it anyways, could i? but it's okay. if it's you." and my drifter's like WAIT WHAT HUH
literally anyone in the KIM: you could have looped this countless times, and i would never know, right? but...i guess maybe that's what fighting the indifference requires.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
wasn't sure i'd have my drifter romance anyone but honestly at this point eleanor's seeming pretty likely because she is like...the only one who pushes the romance forward without your input. i'm hitting the point where i have started getting [confess] options (and i do think it's fun there's dramatically appropriate moments to bust out a confession in everyone's chats, arthur's is particularly fun), and honestly it's all pretty well-handled for a stripped-back dating sim! i was especially impressed by how i felt when aoi started sending hearts, which gave me the exact sinking feeling i had in middle and high school when a person i was only interested in as a friend would start sending signals.
but i had decided to be like ehhhh we'll wait and see what happens, we'll see what people do, possibly these will all accidentally pass me by before i decide on drifter's stance. and then eleanor rolls through with:
the rare jarringly bad kim conversation, and not even from a themes/characterization perspective but just because the drifter lapses into completely toothless chatgpt speak
You've got their brains and drive, but you've made it your own. That's what counts.
It sounds to me like you've grown into the kind of loving, attentive person you needed when you were younger. That's something worth being proud of.
You've taken everything they gave you and built on it—not just with dreams and drive, but compassion too. That's not easy to do.
that last one especially has all the hallmarks. i'm not saying i know it's ai for real or anything. but yiiiiiiiiiikes on a dialogue level.
okay listen sorry i know i've been very critical of warframe's writing at times but this is just beyond the pale
i could buy arthur nightingale singing. i can believe he has knowledge of pop culture he won't admit to. i can certainly believe velimir would do all this.
i do not believe arthur nightingale knows all of oklahoma by heart. i simply do not. i am listening, i am learning, i am holding space, but i am challenged deeply by this.
you're telling me arthur nightingale sang surrey with the fucking fringe on top??
wait wait wait ooooooh my god this is because the fucking HUGH JACKMAN OKLAHOMA REVIVAL WAS IN 1998 LOL ohhhhhhhh wow. hugh jackman canon in warframe. declaring it now. we don't have a canon warframe name for australia yet but i choose to believe velimir and arthur were like "wasn't that meganesian guy amazing in it? what a voice."
in retrospect i really should've seen it coming that i would find lizzie most endearing of all the KIM characters, but it caught me genuinely by surprise. but as soon as that fucking demon guitar sent back ":(" it was over for me. i'm pro-lizzie forever now i'm afraid.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
oh and just got to the drifter's crash-out about ordis with amir. very very good. KIM really hitting today.
again there's something askew here. amir is like "i wish i could fix my adhd by being a robot" (me 🤝 amir), and the drifter's response is "well one of my friends is a robot and it freaks me out because he's programmed to love me! what if he doesn't really love me!" and it's great because that's kind of off! those are not, immediately, identical concerns.
but they don't need to be! what's really happening here is the KIM system revealing why the drifter has been portrayed as being clearly emotionally activated by all the cephalon talk. ordis is one of their only links to normality (seemingly the first person they befriend after emerging from duviri), and they know that relationship has this foundational element that makes it impossible to ever really know what ordis "truly" wants. drifter (who like, doesn't know shit about shit, lmao) is almost portraying a pretty classic fear in relation to disorders like adhd: if i take medication, will i cease being me? how much of my personality is bound up in this? if i do change, what will that say about me? and if i don't, how do i reckon with the parts of this that irritate other people (a thing amir explicitly raises early on)? do i have to reckon with just being a person people don't like, if it's not my adhd? if i get on a dose of something every day just to live, what does that say for my sense of selfhood? and then he's projecting that onto ordis and amir.
and amir, a person who's been medicating his adhd for a while, is like...probably way past this part of the conversation. but the key is he doesn't drop this desire or really change his underlying feelings at all!
drifter's outburst is upsetting, not persuasive! and amir is like, damn, okay, i will stop bringing this cephalon stuff up. let's go get some food. we don't actually address his concerns at all! instead it's a conversation in which he chooses to be the shoulder to lean on, because he realizes he's accidentally been repeatedly touching on a sensitive subject for the drifter that's upsetting in ways they were intentionally holding back. it does a lot for both characters!
just hit my absolute favorite hex conversation so far, which is quincy hitting you up to be like "hey, tell me about duviri. haha okay yeah yeah what i really wanted to say was: be cool to thrax because i identify with him as a child who also feared abandonment, okay?" and you get rewarded for being like "yeah okay i will take that seriously".
it's so bizarre! dming your friend to be like "so here's my stance on how you should treat people from your extremely traumatic upbringing, a thing i'm acknowledging up front we've never discussed." hell, how you should treat the person responsible for that. and there's a harmonious (and possibly intended) reading here where thrax is of course really fundamentally the drifter, or at least reflects something from inside the drifter, and therefore encouraging the drifter to treat thrax with charity and generosity even if he doesn't "deserve" it is to encourage the drifter to do the same with themself, and we should do that because it's good.
but i much prefer to sit in the weirdness of it. how presumptive! how arrogant! and yet the KIM accurately reflects that when a guy like quincy wants to give you advice like that, he's not looking to have a back-and-forth with you about it. in part because what he's really doing is using his lightly invasive commentary on your background as a way to make disclosures about his at a distance!
he frames it very clearly: he was a kid and he was a "proper nightmare," and that was okay, that's how kids can be. thrax is a permanent kid and did awful things to you, and that's okay, because that's how kids can be. of course he wants you to agree! if you tell him you can't forgive thrax for that, it puts him in the position of having to question if his father and grandmother couldn't forgive him! i have seen dudes do this all the time in conversation, tell you how to live your life in a naked projection of their own fears about their own self-concept; hell, i've been having conversations like this with a coworker for the past week! it's such an excellent and honest little bit of emotional work.
so so weird what it does to the thrax/drifter relationship too, in a very satisfying way. what was a friendship now takes on the cast of parent and child, simply because thrax can never grow up.
as a non-protoframe-liker i was hesitant to see the "amir breaking into the broadcast" bit of tennocon but "amir's doing nightwave" is actually the best possible version of the hex coming forward
spent a lot of time thinking about a good type of secondary to use with glaives because i respect the dedication to dark sector after all these years, because it's unique, and because i think it's very fun to differentiate my drifter and operator by playstyle, so drifter gets all the bows and traditional melee weapons while operator is using all the far-future sicko shit.
then i realized the tenet cycron and kuva nukor work with glaives and it was like oh! well. problem solved forever.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
why do the sisters of parvos have so much more energy put into them than the other adversary characters. like the liches are just kind of like "uhhh continuity and kuva make spooky things happen" and the technocyte coda is basically just "RONALD REAGAN CUT UP WHILE TALKING" meets warframe-standard infestation body horror plus boy band stuff (the music helps but it really characterizes on-lyne more than the coda, if that makes sense), and they both really ride on vibes more than anything else.
then i finally did call of the tempestarii and it's like oh did you think this was about granum parvos? did you think this was about sevagoth? WRONG. this is about vala glarios, and the fact the ghosts of her dead crewmates still haunt her!
makes me crazy that Sisters is capitalized in her dialogue long before we ever see her wind up in granum's void. sevagoth is ALREADY fighting back void manifestations(?) of her dead crewmates well before granum and his whole "oooh i always wanted a sister" business enters the picture.
and the shanty she imagines them singing explicitly links parvos granum to the devil and identifies his abusive tendencies!
There's a man on high
With the Devil in his eye
And a golden hand, I'm told
It can hurt you, it can hold you
He can kick you or console you
When you're sleeping in the cold below
Vala herself is explicitly protective of the Sisters and seems to identify them with her former dead crew:
Parvos thinks he's conducting the world's longest group interview to find his ideal business partner and backup. In reality, he's helping Vala build a family that can never be killed, because it will never stop growing.
and again, as mentioned, the Sisters and Vala get their own ominous sea shanty about a female crew casting off for the Void, never to return! it rocks!
it's warframe, so she might return one day or might be gone forever, but personally i'd LOVE to have vala return. maybe she can team up with some rebellious sentients in tau to backstab parvos there...
which reminds me. there's an interesting discrepancy in granum's introduction to the sisters.
My brother was a witless man. Happy as a hog, face-down in the trough. No thought of the farmer's axe. He was a brute above my asperous constitution. Yet he had not the will or the guile to let me guide that brawn. So… in my youth, I often imagined I had another sibling. A specter of sorts… A sister. And in my mind, she and I - oh how we would conspire… great schemes, risk-trades, rapacious plots. And should I ever find myself… back at the trough. Penniless. Betrayed. Rich, only in enemies… She'd be at my side, axe in hand.
Parvos clearly means "if the chips are down and I'm totally fucked, my sister will be at my side, ready to fight." But his initial metaphor is the hog and the farmer's axe, with the hog unaware that he is going to be slain and butchered. But in describing himself when he's down on his luck as "back at the trough," Parvos is identifying himself with the hog! in which case the purpose of his sister's axe when he's down isn't to fight alongside him, but to. Hm. Well, we'll see if that foreshadowing ever comes to anything, i suppose!
the protoframes thing feels really overdone to me already just going through the hex and round table, but if we really MUST keep doing it, and if the hex move around in the timeline in any meaningful way, they should absolutely make part of it that viktor got infested and then got protoframe'd (maybe not by entrati. make the indifference/rusalka do it somehow), alienating him from scaldra and leaving him with nothing but to chase the hex, who he blames for his condition, around the timeline forever. make him, idk, loki (pursues the hex, interrupts missions like the other assassin enemies, release alongside rework) or nekros (his shadowy legions can be their own enemy faction that's fundamentally just a black filter slapped on scaldra).
biggest and most insane waste of warframe 1999 is that they get neil newbon, astarion's VA, in the booth to voice a hot shirtless megalomaniacal egotist who complains about his meditation being disturbed and yells at his subordinates for bothering him about problems they should just throw paratroopers at. and then they do nothing with him??? his literal only role is to be hot and evil and yell at you from a tiny comms picture-in-picture on-screen. there's a rapier skin which is purportedly his personally commissioned rapier which he never ONCE uses in game to duel you dramatically. he doesn't even have the rapier! his only violence on-screen is roughing up a morally ambiguous gay grandpa during an interrogation, which is also his only actual full-body appearance in the game.
luckily he gets a way WAY meatier role elsewhere in the game, with a lot more dramatic heft to it. voicing this fish:
there's a lot of moments in the KIM where i feel like the drifter reacts sort of inappropriately by sharing a mega fucked-up high fantasy duviri trauma in response to someone sharing a more ordinary everyday trauma, sometimes explicitly as a "hey man bad shit has happened to me too" move. it's not even always the wrong move from a writing perspective i think the game just doesn't really have a good grasp of how slimy it can feel.
but as a result i think it's REALLY good when the game lets the same thing happen in reverse.
eleanor! these are not the same thing! the drifter is alluding to their sibling being dead, possibly in a way that feels like their own fault given that they grew up in spaceship derelict lord of the flies. and depending on how you want to read it, possibly ultra-super-mega-dead across all timelines due to the man-in-the-wall deal or something. you threw your brother's break-up in his face in a shitty way that a normal person WITHOUT telepathy could easily do!
anyways this is why eleanor is my favorite KIM character so far.
tbh i think they tried too hard to confine the body horror elements of the frame stuff to eleanor in the KIM chats so that every single conversation doesn't descend into "so being turned into a flesh robot from the inside-out feels...bad," but it actually helps everyone make a lot more sense. like i find everyone in the KIM very narrowly focused on their own issues by the nature of the structure (again, only helps the 1999 AIM vibes), and that works a lot better for me with eleanor constantly bringing up the hell of having her body transform into this. like yeah no wonder you're a little annoyingly myopic at times, your body is transforming into a nightmare, that's totally fair.
huge ups to warframe for being the only game I can think of that quotes James Baldwin
AND it's a thematically fitting quote from nothing personal, which gels with the game's overall themes. Amazing! the cavia continue to be my favorite syndicate yet.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
usually i don't really like scythes in video games because i think they just look a little silly (it's a fairly specialized tool! actually cutting anything with it requires a pretty specific motion!) but i do like the anku because a warframe is basically just a human-sized giant robot and at that level of power the idea of a "weapon" kind of breaks down. the anku follows one of my favorite design principles, which is "well shouldn't a giant robot's weapons just be like...really heavy/sharp bits of metal that it can accelerate to ludicrous speeds to bring a large amount of force to bear on a single point?" like aside from the blade folding down (a detail i hate rip) it looks like you stamped the whole thing out of a single piece of metal
like a scythe weapon is kind of silly but a warframe SHOULD have a weapon that's just "a couple pointy bits and flanges and a place to hold it, because you can jam this into someone's face far harder than the finest craftsmanship could really help with." the weapon is just a tool to transform certain types of motion (in the scythe's case, circular) into kinetic force, and all it actually needs to be able to do is withstand the force the warframe can bring to bear (which is why the folding/locking mechanism is stupid but whateverrrrrr). and you can tell this is true for the anku because it primarily deals puncture damage rather than slash; you're not cutting people with the scythe or the tail ornament, you're driving the tip into their skulls.
below the jump is just pictures of giant robots weapon and me going "wow cool robot".
other things it reminds me of (i think of them as "newton's second law" type weapons)
barbatos/barbatos lupus rex's giant fucking mace
gundam kimaris's lance (really the cavalry lance is a perfect example of this historically too, of course, since its job is to transform the entire enormous weight and acceleration of a knight on horseback into a kinetic force payload applied to a specific single spot)
the dainsleif railgun from IBO. IBO was great for this generally because it understood that kinetic force is more than sufficiently devastating for giant robot combat. all the lasers and shit are just for show, really, once you've got colossi of steel six stories tall bringing all their weight to bear. the idea that the terrifying and internationally-banned WMD you hear about throughout the series is just a mech-portable "rods from god" system is soooo good.
astray's ship-sized katanas
dragon slayer from berserk. not a mech weapon but in many ways the og.
it's a shame that because everything around the moon stuff is necessarily vague (i hear the constellations stuff touches on briefly but not in a clear way) and we had very little about the religion before 1999, there's never really a chance for the game to grapple with the fact that natah disappeared a god. like the moon is lua, worshipped as a sacred entity in dualism, and the lotus yeets it into the void. obviously by that point dualism was formally long dead, but the extant references to it in the origin system make me think that surely must have been a major event
