Day 24: Scaldra - Character redesign

... look who it is. (Fullbody below cut)

(NOT NIDUS PROTOFRAME)

DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR

As an example how the inhabitants of Duviri are not real characters, just templates:

Remember the guy we have to save from the Dax? Even when we save him, he keeps the shackles around his hands. He stays captured, even when we rescue him. Because that is his role. He is not a prisoner. He is *the* prisoner and he always will be. He also says something like "Isn't it strange how things always work out?" Of course they do, because this is a child's fantasy. This character was created to be saved and saved again, giving the child the feeling of being a hero. It has to work out, if not, the fantasy collapses.

The guy who challenges us to a Kaithe duel looks exactly like the driver of Acrithis carriage. These are two people looking exactly the same, because they serve the same purpose, they are riders, they tend to the horses.

As much as it may cause issues later in life, putting people into categories is important for children; otherwise they have trouble understanding the world, they can't work with fine nuances yet. You can actually easily observe this when asking children of different ages to sort toys into boxes. At first all blocks are blocks, then they may be sorted based on color and later based on their shape.

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[Spoilers!]

The houses obviously are just wall parts of the Zariman, arranged to look like settlements/towns. The same goes for many of the harvestable plants, that also mimic Zariman design elements (especially noticeable with the cactus-like Ueymag, that has an unnaturally symmetrical shape, mimicking the often repeated tuning fork-shape).

Duviri has multiple bioms, plains, snowy mountains, a desert, but they are all way too small to exist naturally.

All this paints the picture of a world created by the mind of a child, who might have never seen anything else but the inside of a spaceship. They might have never seen other architecture, so all houses have to look like they were ripped straight out of the Zariman's structure. They know that mountains and deserts exist, but they do not understand their scale, so they become just one more small piece of Duviri. Just like cartographs back in history they fill the unknown of their world with set pieces and the skeletal structures found all over Duviri lend themselves for a comparison to this "Here there be dragons" mindset.

Children build and recreate what they know all the time to learn and better understand it, but also to express their wishes and creativity. This gives the idea of a child, confined in space, wishing to get to be somewhere else, visiting the places they have heard of.

We get to see quite a few rather large settlements in Duviri, but the amount of houses and people does not seem to match. In general, only very few people seem to be roaming the streets. This is not an adult doing extensive worldbuilding, this is a child with a lot of building blocks but very few dolls building a world on which they can project their emotions and memories onto.

Most of Duviris normal inhabitants are just decorations, not existing to be characters, but because a town "needs to have people in it". They are not defined by who they are, but by what they do- and what they do is react to the player, sit around, talk and cower in fear when enemies approach.

The simple shapes of the buildings are very close to the concept of real life building blocks. Paedagogic toys often are simple, to allow for easy handling and more creative freedom.

The theme of death is also omnipresent. Every animal resembles a carcass build from metal plating and even the Dax enemies are skeleton-like, the Gladius' helmets lower part even resembling a rabbit skull. We obviously know how the story of the Zariman ended and the skulls and bones might be just an indicator of potential danger, but what if the skeletal design of Duviri's inhabitants are not supposed to indicate not (just) death, but an infinished state? They are walking skeletons, yet missing a skin, their shape, just like the fractured bodies of the townspeople, not fully formed out in the child's head. Since the townspeople are humanoid though, they look more finished, while all the child might have ever seen of sheep, cats, dogs, horses and owls could have very well been just pictures in a school book, maybe next to a diagram of their underlying anatomy (after all, one of the few things we get to experience of the daily life on the Zariman, is school).

Just a small analysis I wrote a couple months ago. [Spoilers for Heart of Deimos] I love how Xaku's background story is a reflection of the Entrati family's situation. Of course, there is a direct connection between them and the family, as Xaku is composed of three Warframes that were asigned to the Entratis, but there is also a more emotional connection.

Let's put it into simple words, to compare: -> something is lost to the Void -> as a result of that, something breaks -> through another's influence, broken parts become something new, damaged and changed, but whole again

Xaku: -> the three Warframes were lost to the Void -> they broke while in the Void -> they were fused back together (either by the Void itself or some other force) into Xaku, a broken Warframe Entrati Family: -> Albrecht Entrati is lost to the Void -> Mother's grief over loosing her father breaks her family apart (definitely there were other factors, but this seems to have been the main catalyst). -> the Tenno helps them grow back together as a family. They are damaged, emotionally and physically by the infestation but seem to slowly become a unit again.