#warframe thoughts

You know that dream project magnum opus you've got in the back of your head? The one you daydream about, the one you'd make if you had infinite money and time, with all your favorite things in it, with endless potential to add more stuff you like into it? The one you know would be completely unrealistic and would probably die in production if you ever tried to really get it made?

This is a great way for me to discuss lore, buckle in my Anonymous person! Also thank you, you are my second question ever and these are super fun to do! :)

*Spoiler warning for most of the game *

First off, yeah totally. Were I in the operator’s shoes I’d be incredibly pissed. Hell I’d be pissed that my alternate gets to have an adult shape. Especially considering the shear timescale that they’ve both been alive, even with the time they were asleep.

What I think you are forgetting/or downplaying, though is that the op is not a normal person. Like at all. And this was by design on the part of the Orokin

They are a double conditioned* human shaped, mental health soother/combat pilot of a metal and human flesh suit that contains a broken mind other than their own. They are compartmentalization manifest.

I’m going to split this up into two halves now. Plus a bonus third.

Prior to being put to sleep at the end of the old piece:

They were, one of if not the, pinnacle example of what a Warframe operator could be an do and were thus, assigned as an ambassador.

At that time they knew they weren’t their Warframe, had a body with its own void powers, and were fully aware of all the trauma they suffered onboard the Zariman. Yet, they were disciplined enough to the point of having helped develop Taurons strikes.

All of this comes from the five focus schools and just how much conditioning they’d gone through. The fact they snap at the end of the Old Peace shows just how much pressure they were actually under.

I bring all of this up because, even when they knew they had a body, they were still excelling as a prime example of what a good little soldier the Tenno were supposed to be. A weird pseudo monk/therapist war machine where their sole job most of the time was keeping a mind intermingled with their own soothed all while controlling its mutilated body to slaughter thousands.

And again, the MC Operator was such a good example of this they were used as a diplomat.

Obviously it wasn’t perfect though. As we see at the end of top, they do snap and that just isn’t allowed. So the entire idea of operator specific void training is just scrapped.

In favor of!

The dream! Which is round two of conditioning. Now, obviously they did something but we don’t know exactly what. This resulted in all the Tenno being put in pods on the moon and hadtheir memories stripped from them.

This seems to have been not entirely successful depending on the maturity of the Tenno pilot.

As we know from Jade’s promise logs that at least in Jade’s case their operator couldn’t handle it. To my understanding this is post all the operators being placed in their pods.

All that said it seems like, as far as we know. The next time the operator wakes up they are just a thing. An operator, not a human just something that can pilot frames. In most cases this looks like just one frame.

They are now, in essence, war machines. They do what they are supposed to while “calming” the remnants of the mind of the bio mechanical former human that they are possessing. All while being led and having their conditioning be reinforced by the Orokin. They are tools that keep other tools in check.

There is no way in hell this wasn’t depersonalizing. It also seems like in most cases this resulted in the Tenno themselves thinking of the Warframe as their body. Remember, MOST warframes did not retain any sentience just fragments in pain. I think a lot of people don’t put two and two together, that all the lore we hear about the “Warframes” and their feats are actually about the operators that had lived in those frames post the fall of the Orokin. Of course they saw the bodies they were given as their own after inhabiting them for untold centuries before falling into the coma that is the MC state prior to the start of the game.

(As a side note this gives a very horrify implication to Valkyr’s operator’s fate. Either they reawoke recently (or had spent thousands of years as the pre valkyr warframe) and were then capture by Alad V and tortured to the point they fused then changed their frames powers from the pain of vivisection.)

Now on to round 3. When the MC Op wakes up at the beginning of the game they don’t remember shit. This begins the unintended third conditioning of them. They are the only operator we see operate multiple frames and up until the get through the quests to get their body, (Something that probably took, a good amount of time in universe before it even happens.) they’re just this thing. A thing that protects humans for the Tenno faction. (I know though I might be another type of cephalon called an operator prior to doing the second dream quest.) By this point, they are so skilled at “soothing” warframes that it’s unconsciously done.

When they do get a body it had to have been so jarring. Here they were, a thing with a purpose, receiving orders from Natah and then that is stripped away to reveal they are more, they are one of the humans they protect, one that has been essentially sacrificed, just like the warframes themselves, in service to the remaining remnants of humanity in the solar system. At this point they’re then confronted with the realities of what they are by umbra, and what they’ve been doing, up to this point unconsciously to their warframes.

After this point they are active remembering their conditioning from their first conditioning by relearning their focus skills. All while also learning they (the Tenno from the Zariman) are volatile void things in the shape of humans.

By the time we get to the new war the operator is so full of conditioning and half remembered conditioning from so many sources all telling them to put everyone else above themselves. Hell multiple people including Teshin and Ballas compare us to an animal. (This might be misremembering)

But through all of this the operator still genuinely cares for others, even if that was by design.

Then they learn they were the one who made the deal with Wally.

You read it in the email they send to the drifter right before 1999. The operator thinks this is entirely their fault and they reiterate that they are steadfast in this belief.

Which finally leads me to my point!

I don’t think the operator is jealous because of how much ingrained training/conditioning/experience thinking they didn’t have a body, that they can fall back on. To the operator, the drifter is part of the humanity that they have to protect from their mistake, one that was also tortured for an untold amount of time by Wally for refusing the deal that they accepted. Something that they now see the horrible ramifications of and consider their fault. I think this is why they are so gung ho on going into the trauma machine to relive the rebellion. To the, it is now their duty to try and set things right any cost, because for most of their thousands of years of life the very least important thing that matters is them.

Tdlr:

The operator was built different by multiple years upon years of conditioning multiple times via amnesia into a therapy war machine that considers themselves as the lowest priority and others well-being’s their highest. This importantly includes the drifter who they see as someone who was tortured by Wally for not taking his offer. An offer and all its consequences that the Operator now feels are almost solely their fault. To them the drifter receiving friends and learning to move on from what was done in duviri is a good thing as that fulfills what has been conditioned as the number one reason for their existence in the operator’s head: protecting their allies.

That is, in essence my take.

This doesn’t stop me from being angry on the operator’s behalf! Especially given what happens in the old peace and now again in Jade shadows constellation to a certain peepaw :(

Spoilers for making warframes ig?

He's been living in my head since I did the "1999" sketch of Baron a while ago