#even the goddamn sentients are more or less motivated by a desire to have children and a family

[i-gwarth]

“Steve Narratives” or “Love as the fulcrum of Warframe’s stories”

Ok so I can’t have been the only one who noticed how… goddamn lovey-dovey and personal Warframe gets in its stories, compared to similarly epic sci-fi space games like Mass Effect, Halo, the many Star Wars ones or Destiny.

I don’t mean that it has romance in it. Those games have that too: love for your Bioware love interest of choice, or for the funny unicorn robot man, or between the space marshall and the psychic bug queen, etc etc. I mean to say that Warframe’s story seems to be about love, centrally. And not just one kind of love.

Hear me out: in Mass Effect, your romantic subplot is framed kind of the way it is in most action movies, as “the reason to fight”. Ideally, you’d want to kill the giant cosmic octopus with the Keith Szarabajka voice because he’s threatening your galaxy, and your galaxy has Tali’Zorah vas Normandy in it, whom you love. In another game you want to punch the glowy-eyed emo spaceman from the magic asteroid belt because he killed Cayde-6, who is voiced by Natahn Fillion, whom you love. In another, you want to bring down Nicely Bearded Space Hitler’s Terran Dominion and feed his ass to your space locusts because he killed Jimmy Raynor, and you just realized you still loved him one game prior.

Love as a motivation. And it’s always romantic love.

Here’s an incomplete list of all the contexts and kinds of love in Warframe:

The unexplained but rather credible love between a sentient, prophetic tower and an infested flesh golem-warrior with a glass theme. It motivated a cataclysmic self-sacrifice and the killing of a godlike being

The twisted, one-way love of the executor of the evil empire for a blind, motherly scientist. It motivated abominable acts of child soldier creation and the destruction of the empire, the genocide of a people

The controlling love of Frohd Bek for his son. It doesn’t amount to much more than a cute mission set but it was quite odd at the time

The peculiar bond between two twin warrior sisters who became Queens. Is it love? I don’t know, but it was strong enough to make them mighty on the battlefield, and impress itself an entire army of clones, identical but not brothers, to surrender themselves to them, in hopes of mirroring their connection

The love of a mother for her son, who only narrowly escaped the massacre of his entire civilization and grew up to become rich. He worked very hard to forget all memory of her and cast away the culture he’d grown up in, which he thought had failed to save itself, and her.

The strange and inhuman love that a malign, alien sentience has for the one he calls his daughter, who betrayed him

The deep and reverential love a young girl has for her culture, to the point where she would give up her own life in order to preserve their way of life, on the precipice of horror and disease

The love between a rich girl and a poor, clan-less poet. They ran away together, and ended up changing their entire culture and founding a great and prosperous settlement. Also, he became a fish.

The selfless and compassionate love that the greatest scholar of genetics who ever lived had for the helpless demon-children who blinded her, a love for which she died at the hands of the man who said he loved her

The programmed, forced and somehow still real love of a computer for his owner. It was planted in the mind of a monster and a murderer, and when he remembered his past life he cast himself back into his programmed oblivion for the sake of that love, rather than become once again the man he once was.

And, of course, the love of an impostor, and a spy, and a traitor for the army of child soldiers under her command, whom she was meant to destroy. It motivated the erasure of her entire identity and the betrayal of her kin

I jokingly call these “Steve narratives” only because I suspect the first ones date from before Warframe’s writing team was expanded, back when it was just Steve writing story in his spare time. They sort of set the trend for what followed. They seem to have an underlying threads of familial bond or strong love connecting them. And a lot of them also seem to involve visions and/or flashbacks.

In that context, The Sacrifice stands out. On the one hand, it centers around a monstrous act of torture: forcing the remnant of one man’s mind to relive a single, hideous memory, that of turning into a monster and killing his own son, over and over, forever. I would say that this is actually our main motivation in the story. The Operator doesn’t just go after Ballas to find the Lotus again. That’s how they start, but by the end they go after Ballas to deliver justice for this act of cruelty. And they specifically absolve Umbra of the guilt he was undoubtedly feeling after aeons of reliving the same murder.

Like... we knew prior to the quest that Ballas was a shifty-ass dude, but when it came to showcasing his cruelty textually, directly, in the game, DE went ”how can we work family and/or love into this and make it really hit home?” It’s telling with regards to how storytelling for this game is approached.

On the other hand, it reveals that ultimately, love is what ties Warframes and Operators together. I pointed this out before. When all the devices and technologies of the Orokin had failed, when the cruelty and malice that were their only familiar instruments amounted to nothing more than savage beasts, the Zariman children’s ability for compassion turned them into the most powerful force in the universe.

And that’s pretty neat idk

#the Solaris chain gang song has the words sons and daughters in it and I was like WELL OF COURSE IT DOES THIS IS PAR FOR THE COURSE BY NOW #even the goddamn sentients are more or less motivated by a desire to have children and a family #warframe #the sacrifice #ballas #excalibur umbra #gaming sauron #cheap literary analysis with Preda