#birdwords

but the warframes themselves explore this too, a different flavor of people-transmogrified-to-objects: meant to be owned, used, exploited, discarded. in the beginning of the story we think they're just hollow weapon platforms to perpetrate our system-wide slaughter with. the sacrifice quest (which imo is warframe's writing at its peak) showed us that all (original) warframes were once people, and the reason operators can soothe them at all is because they're fundamentally the same. ballas rants about "taking away their pain" and i feel like that's the part most people focus on, but the part that i'm constantly gnawing on is WHY operators can do that.

well, because they're void-devils, right? take that a step further though: they're "void-devils" because they survived unimaginable trauma and came out the other side changed permanently, no longer considered human, with powers they struggled to control that got them thrown in cryo by a political power structure that decided they were too dangerous to rehabilitate... though not too dangerous to potentially exploit later!

the operator sees umbra's trauma and accepts it as not defining who umbra is. they see the person past the anger and pain and torment, and they reach out to that person and say, i know how you feel, i feel this way too. we were both broken by the same system but we don't need to let their hatred define us. we see these memories and we let them pass through us like leaves on a stream. they don't get to keep hurting us any more.

and then they stab (a stand-in for) the Entire Empire in the gut with a big sharp sword.

it's beautiful! it's showy! it's a narrative about taking back your autonomy by forming connections with other traumatized people that lived through hell just like you did! and then you get to gut the guy responsible like a fish. it was so fucking satisfying.

dagath, kullervo, dante, umbra; all the sapient warframes we've seen are deeply traumatized people, and despite the fact that they're quite literally faceless machines, they're treated with humanity and inherent dignity by the narrative.

we hear the warden tell kullervo's story. and we KNOW ballas is a lying liar who lies and says all kinds of horrible shit that's not remotely true about people ("you monstrous bitch" anyone?). if ballas is saying all this mean shit about kullervo's character, it's a pretty good bet that the opposite is true. so we immediately feel sympathy for the man/warframe in the cells, even when he's coming out and trying to kill us.

dante is described to us by someone who loved him as a scholar, a poet, a brilliant mind with a tender heart. he was corrupted by the indifference because he was looking for answers about the disappearance of a fellow scholar, someone he must have cared about. dante is a tragic figure, in the traditional sense: a hero brought to ruin by his own hubris. he's inherently likeable, or at least relatable, despite the very brief secondhand information we get about him as a character.

these are people, despite what the orokin in power would have anyone believe. the narrative takes the time to show us this, to show us that the orokin were wrong to violate their autonomy.

so you can imagine the wretched taste in my mouth when DE decided to give us that scene with uriel in the old peace quest. we are presented with nothing about this warframe as a person, just a single line about how he deserved it. and then the operator uses him/it as a weapon for their own revenge.

no matter how you slice it, this is just... wildly out of alignment with the previous 11 years of narrative!

if the uriel didn't deserve it, and is being wrongly persecuted, it would make sense for the operator to react with anger, and for uriel and the operator to work together for revenge against the party that wronged them.

but we're... not given any of this. the only line we get from anyone on the issue is adis saying he deserved it. adis, who up until this point has been presented as honest, straightforward, slow to anger, and deeply invested in the peace treaty.

why would he say this frame deserved its punishment unless it actually did?

so the operator going on a rampage and using it to shoot up the school at the indifference's coaxing is just. like okay i can accept it's not UNBELIEVABLY out of character for the operator (who has been presented as impulsive and quick-to-anger before!) but it's completely contrary to the This Is A Person With Dignity And Autonomy We Should Respect stuff we get from all the other sapient warframe narratives. instead he's being used as just. a tool for the operator's revenge.

ig we're just supposed to assume that he (uriel) had his own reasons to want to kill a bunch of noncombatants, and their goals simply aligned? in which case we have the operator gleefully murdering innocents in the pursuit of ganking ballas.

and like. all of this i could stomach as Developing The Narrative if it was... even vaguely addressed at any point. at all. the operator having a Dark Side episode here would be interesting if we actually addressed that as being unjustifiable and condemned it. instead it's presented as this badass, exultant scene where the villains are getting their just desserts!

the idea of killing innocents used to be treated as something the tenno explicitly didn't want to do. i know nobody plays defection, but the story there is these ex-grineer clones threw up the white flag, so we are going to go out of our way and put ourselves at significant risk of harm to escort them from the warzone and get them somewhere safe.

i loved that! it was good shit! protect the weak, defy the powerful. live out my personal fantasy of being a super-powered badass who could conceivably do something absurd like singlehandedly escort a fleeing migrant family through a militarized border to safety in a welcoming haven.

the solaris u quests are about helping a downtrodden worker-slave class confront their corporate overlords to win back their autonomy and freedom. (we go back to bodily autonomy here too btw. they are LITERALLY at risk of having their LIMBS AND ORGANS reposessed in payment for debt. and that's presented as UNDERSTANDABLY HORRIFYING and something the tenno need to stop immediately!)

another cool fantasy for the disabled, living-in-poverty author of this rant. hell yeah i want to threaten jeff bezos with one billion guns until he stops destroying the planet and killing people in pursuit of profit and ego!

now you've got me... shooting up a school? as The Literal Devil Warframe? gunning down a local eastern european military alongside foreign UN reps because we don't like how they're handling their internal crisis? chatting amiably with a ruling member of The Evil Empire Of Evil while he threatens to murder civilians under my protection? (the entire backslide into romantasy schlock is an adjacent complaint but certainly one for a different post.)

and according to the lighting, the score, the things people say, the lack of followup or meaningful analysis... this stuff is supposed to be cool and awesome and make me feel like a badass, i guess. how the fuck did you lose the plot this bad, DE?

like, i know it's because the creative director left for a different project and his replacement has wildly different goals and preferences in terms of storytelling. up to and including hiring a booktok romantasy author and immediately making her lead writer for this [checks smudged writing on hand] scifi ninja looter shooter. for some fucking reason.