Dualism; Tenno morality; The Sacrifice
This one goes to @marikbentusi. Something they posted a few days ago got me thinking.
Spoilers for The Sacrifice follow.
I see a lot of people saying that “Tenno are true neutral” or that they’re “keeping the war going” and they’re “just as bad as the Grineer/Corpus/Orokin”. In this essay I will-
Aight so jokes aside y’all edgy fuckers are way off the mark. The Sacrifice seems built, in part, so that Steve can once-and-for-all dispel the idea that the Tenno are anything other than True Good. Let me elaborate:
The theory goes that Tenno are little more than mercenaries, upholding some vague and abstract notion of balance in the universe by killing bad guys, but not *all* the bad guys, and sometimes in ways that do more harm than good, all for that sweet sweet loot. And, in a way, the day-to-day gameplay might support that view… if you didn’t pay attention. Invasions seem to be the main source of this, given how we’re joining battle alongside the bad people.
But here’s the thing: the battle happens whether you join it or not. And joining it means you’re not letting any of the factions get too much of an upper hand over the other, thereby limiting the amount of damage they can do to non-combatants. It’s the lesser of a set of vast evils. And that’s the whole feeling I’m getting from the whole Grineer/Corpus conflict: it’s an intractable, constant background of war and misery fueled by resources so vast and populations so large that even the Tenno are collectively unable to stop it, for all their power. Not to mention the fanaticism of both sides means stopping the war would still be some kind of genocide.
Non-Invasion day-to-day missions are unilaterally centered around sabotaging some kind of critical enemy effort, be it technology or intelligence or simply numbers. I am assuming I don’t have to explain why hitting the enemy factions in those fields is good and generally helps beat them back from unprotected colonies like Cetus or Myconia.
Quests-wise, there’s even less support for the theory that Tenno aren’t good. Almost every action we take is born from compassion and kindness, be it helping an old couple of friends on Earth reconcile, helping an ancient and aching forest avoid incineration or putting to rest the traumatic memories of a rich man running from his past. We save kids and old people and traitors who dared stand against their masters. We save cephalons we might not even be allied with.
In TWW we go back to the Queens’ fortress, despite the proven danger of the Crone’s transference-cancelling abilities. And we don’t go back for a warframe we could rebuild at home or just count as an acceptable loss. We very explicitly go back for Teshin, who is in mortal danger with no hope of escape.
And The Sacrifice goes even further. As Ballas explains (and as he hinted in the Valkyr trailer), the Warframes are basically uncontrollable. Drugs, torture or coercion cannot make them obedient, owing to the intense, cruel trauma of their creation. The Tenno do not impose their will upon the frames, they do not magic away that evil. They form a compact, helping to ease their suffering in exchange for their power. The key of our day-to-day control of Warframes is in compassion and healing.
It’s very telling that in the cruel and merciless time of the orokin, who used oppression and torture as daily tools of their empire, all their methods of control failed, and their salvation came through an act of uncompromising, almost religious kindness.
“We find peace in our emptiness.”
The dialogue choices in The Sacrifce are written to point squarely away from the paragon/renegade duality present in TWW. All non-optional dialogue the Tenno has is caring, accepting of Umbra’s trauma and absolving him of the murder of Isaah. The optional parts are about how we use that memory, and the duality is much more about wrath or acceptance, passion or calm.
There’s a reason why the centerpiece of the alignment system isn’t Light/Dark, but Sunlight/Moonlight. Both are light. Both are good (because, yes, Light is thematically good in Warframe, with the opposite being associated primarily with the Sentients, beings of “profound Darkness”).
PS: One of my first thematic ideas about Warframe was about how all of the narratives are centered on love. Many kinds of love, from familial love to romantic love, unrequited love and even toxic, destructive love. That’s probably what I will write about next.
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