and that's the New War wrapped!!!!! We love to see mum being victorious in killing her shitty fake ex!!!!! There is so much to chew on with regards to Lotus, Margulis and Natah in how those three characters overlap and the questions of identity they pose - Margulis was never Natah or Lotus, but Natah was made to mimic Margulis and shared her desire for children, which led to the birth of the Lotus as the mother of the Tenno, and so the Lotus wouldn't exist without Margulis and Natah. The three have become so deeply interlinked that it's not surprising that the Lotus ends up torn between all three with a head full of voices and not knowing how to feel whole, which heavily implies she's become a System of the three identities. It'll be interesting to see if that will remain relevant going forwards, and I hope it does because identity is a theme so thoroughly entrenched in the Lotus from the moment her nature becomes known.
The moment we learn about her past as Natah, her entire identity is brought into question and she's subjected to repeated violence from the men in her life because of it. Teshin starts the theme by initially deriding Lotus as an alias or a disguise used by a Sentient to manipulate the Tenno, which she immediately rebuffs, and is followed by Hunhow and Erra who 'mean well' but believe that Natah is sickened or broken or has been poisoned and manipulated by the Tenno, and that if they try hard enough, they can make her right again. Their actions come from a place of love, but its a poisonous nostalgic love that says 'you have to be the person we loved or we can't love you anymore' and they will resort to violence in order to get their way, failing to realise the damage they're doing by denying her autonomy or being able to rationalise it as killing an 'imposter' in order to preserve the memory they love. It's a refusal to love someone because they've changed or deviated, and so what should be unconditional love falters into conditional. Erra sacrifices himself to give her child a chance to save her from Ballas, but never gets a chance to make amends or apologise for the horrors he helped to inflict upon her or the violence he enacted against her, but Hunhow might still have that chance if he can put his pride aside and choose to love his daughter regardless of the name she takes or the role she plays, and if he can accept that the Tenno are her children that she loves.
And then there's Ballas, who was never Natah/Lotus' lover, but saw her as a means to get what he wanted - a Margulis he could control. Because whatever 'love' he has for Margulis was rooted entirely in his desires. She got the children she wanted and he became jealous of them for taking her love away, so he saw her killed for it - he gave her a chance to recant, to turn her back on the Tenno so he could have her instead, and voted for her execution when she refused. As Lotus said so succintly, she chose death over Ballas, and he could never let it go. So he takes Lotus, brainwashes her, uses her to get what he wants, and will kill her the moment he doesn't need her any more. And she still gets the upper hand in the end, using his Veil-induced vision of Margulis to drain him of her power, reclaiming herself and her identity at last. But she's changed. She's no longer just the Lotus or Natah, but both of them and Margulis to a degree. And while the men in her family struggled to accept how she changed, the Operator and Drifter don't. They don't tell her who to be. Instead they suggest picking one of the voices to lead the others, and they love and accept her regardless of that choice because she's their mother and they care about her. They want her to be who she wants to be, just as she wants them to be who they want to be.
I personally went with the Lotus because that was who she had always chosen to be in the beginning and was the one that people kept trying to rip away from her, and the Lotus has been a guide since the beginning. She seems suited to guiding the Natah and Margulis alters just as she guides the Tenno, though I'm sure there are cases to be made for the other options too.
She's such a phenomenal character though, really hope that that cosmic entity that's haunting me won't also cause problems for her :)
(someone please give her a holiday though, she deserves to chill on a beach with a cocktail)
