#the deep lore

[hamlet-the-dane-official]

Where does one get such a magnificent crown? The “Burger King” scrawled across adds such a subtle touch of elegance I must say.

thank you, kindly! it was my father's crown, you see! a gift once given to him in the beautiful city of hamburg! there, he was playfully declared the "burger king!" at least, that's how my mother tells it... i shall ensure that, once i am dead, this crown shall pass to you! you seem so keen to appreciate the finer things in life!

[lonefrontranger]

whatever other insights i may glean from this year’s tdf is the single consoling fact that bruno armirail honors the Rules and pins his number 13 upside down to let the bad luck fall out.

[chaehwa-archives]

My thoughts on Happy Together (2008)....Truly nothing could have prepared me for this movie. Less than a hundred people have watched it on Letterboxd, there are like ten reviews, and half of them are in French for some reason. It does have a very low average rating (majority are two stars or below) so I wasn’t exactly expecting a masterpiece.

If my calculations are correct, Kim Tae-hee was probably 23 or 24 years old when she wrote and directed this. How do you even land a job like that fresh out of university? I guess her short films must have earned her a fair bit of clout. Crazy that she was barely older than the main character and in charge of a feature film...anyway, to be honest, I expected the movie to reflect her age and be a bit on the amateurish side. That’s not really the case. The low ratings don’t reflect its actual quality at all. If I had to guess, maybe viewers didn’t like it because it made them uncomfortable or they simply didn’t know how to react to it. Because the marketing sets you up for a fairly typical romcom and then the opening scene is a college kid masturbating with her mom in the same bed with her and the insanity only continues to escalate from there.

Further confirmation that Kyung is KTH’s self-insert character: This is a horny movie. Old people sex, young people sex, problematic age-gap sex, incestuous mother-son overtones, incestuous mother-daughter overtones (mother-daughter erotic photography!!)...there’s a little bit of everything, and she is never afraid to make it weird. One of the most normal interactions between a parent and child in this film is when the main character buys her mom a dildo. Her gay dads somehow feel like one of the least transgressive elements of the story. (Yes this girl has a homoerotic relationship with her mom and two loving gay dads. What a life.)

On top of the very Kyung-coded sex toy subplot, there are plenty of other motifs that will be familiar to FR viewers: pet as metaphor, seedy nightlife scenes set in a host club (the main character’s boyfriend is kind of like a male Yeri prototype?), complicated intergenerational relationships (and uh polycules...), the past mirroring the present, and a very obvious precursor to the pool scene. It’s worth a watch just to play spot-the-connection because she is *not* shy about her particular fixations. It’s clear within the first few seconds that this movie came from the same woman who created Friendly Rivalry, and the moments of recognition are fun in and of themselves.

It’s also ten times prettier than it needs to be. I don’t know who to properly credit for how good this movie looks. Did she just get lucky and land a fantastic crew, or does she have an amazing eye for framing and visual detail? A little of both? Look at those shots! No two-star film has ever looked like that. The tasteless vulgarians of Letterboxd can kindly shut the fuck up.

I don’t want to overhype it because the plot *is* pretty contrived, and asking me to invest in not one but two straight relationships is a tall order. I found the parent-child relationships more compelling than the romantic drama, probably because of how weird and messed up it all is. You can kind of see the heartwarming approach she took with Seulgi and Heeyoon’s relationship competing for the same space with the otherwise cynical outlook on familial relationships that pervades FR, and those tonal changes can be...wild to say the least.

So while I would stop short of calling this essential viewing, it is a very fascinating glimpse into the mind that would go on to create Friendly Rivalry seventeen years later. And while I wouldn’t necessarily call it a queer film, it’s a clear indication that queer themes have always been present in her work since the very beginning of her career.

And I mean...the shots. Look at them.

Also there’s this woman who does nothing but smoke cigarettes, write erotica, and hit on her son. Iconic.

[tinydooms]

I have been Dropping My Lore on my new colleagues, many of whom are college students working at the estate for the summer, and I'm beginning to realize that what is normal to me is vastly exotic and unusual to them. Facts about me that make them go O_O

I lived for six years in Berlin and then moved to England for grad school,

I've lived in Belgium, Germany, and England and traveled widely in Europe,

I was a teacher for twelve years and a music journalist (kinda) for five,

I speak reasonable French and even more reasonable German,

I sew a lot of my own clothes,

My older brother has a PhD in Gothic Lit and is a leading scholar in that field,

My other brother is a jazz musician and a psychopath,

and various other small things. And that's without mentioning that I am a writer. :-)

[bleaksqueak]

[atmosphericradar]

Analyzing the Timeline of the Tenno Schools

-- SPOILERS AHEAD! --

There isn't a lot of concrete information that Digital Extremes has released about the Tenno Schools (or "Ways") in Warframe. Here is what I know so far (as best I can w/ help from the Warframe Wiki):

Tenno Schools are martial arts disciplines. A School instructs a Tenno in a specific style of fighting, focused on harnessing Tenno Void powers in unique ways.

There is no mechanical restriction of Warframes or weapons for any School; a disciple of any Way may use any tools at their disposal.

The five Focus Schools are: Madurai, Vazarin, Naramon, Unairu, and Zenurik. Training in these Ways unlocks new Void abilities for the Tenno, as well as improvements to pre-existing Void powers. This training also unlocks various synergies between the Tenno and their Warframe, allowing each to improve the other.

The Rough Timeline of Events Preceding the Beginning of Warframe (pre-Vor's Prize quest)

Albrecht Entradi creates the Reliquary Drive, enabling spacecraft to make faster-than-light Void Jumps to arbitrary locations in space. The player reveals this history by reaching max rank with the Necraloid Syndicate. The creation of the Reliquary Drive inspires the Orokin Empire to embark on a project to colonize the nearby Tau solar system.

The Orokin Empire send terraforming robots to the Tau System, ahead of their primary human-carrying ark: the Zariman Ten Zero.

The terraforming robots defected while terraforming the Tau System, becoming the Sentients.

The Orokin Empire develop the Warframes using the Infestation. Ballas explains in his Vitruvian records during The Sacrifice quest that he created the Warframes to fight the Sentients, because the Sentients could control the combat robots the Orokin Empire would have otherwise used to fight the Sentient invasion.

The Zariman Ten Zero fails its Void Jump catastrophically. During The War Within quest, the Grineer Queen and the player's Tenno narrate the events of the Zariman Ten Zero incident: the adults were driven violently insane, and the children killed them to survive, ultimately leaving only the children alive on the Zariman. These children, who had been changed by their exposure to the Void, are now known as the Tenno.

Margulis prevents the Orokin Empire from killing the Tenno. In The Apostasy Prologue quest, the Lotus says that Margulis worked with and studied the Tenno (likely healing their trauma from the Zariman Ten Zero incident).

Margulis was killed by Ballas. Her work with the Tenno and their void-based abilities was used to develop the Transference process.

Ballas used the Tenno and Transference to control the Warframes.

The Sentients invade the Origin System. The Tenno, Warframes, and the Lotus fought the Sentient invasion known now as the Old War.

During The Prelude To War quest we see a memory of the Old War, where the Lotus confronts Erra on Lua with six Tenno by her side. At this time, the Tenno can be seen producing Void Beams without Amps. This void attack appears to be the same Void Beam as from Transcendence (the Operator's primary attack pre-The War Within quest).

According to the Shadow Stalker's Codex entry, after the Old War had concluded and the Sentients were defeated, the Orokin Empire held a system-wide victory ceremony in honor of the Tenno. During this ceremony, the Tenno simultaneously assassinated the Orokin leadership across the Origin System, toppling the Empire.

Note that the above timeline intentionally avoids talking about the order of events surrounding the Lotus. I don't believe straightening out her complicated timeline is critically necessary for talking about the Tenno Schools.

Evidence for pre-Old War Tenno Schools

I could not find any clear textual evidence of Tenno Schools existing simultaneously with the Orokin Empire, as of 2023.

It is possible that the five Focus Schools somehow evolved from pre-existing fighting styles which pre-date the existence of the Tenno. The Dax may have a martial tradition involving five methods of combat which was passed down to the Tenno, though there is no evidence to support this. It is also possible that an Orokin-era civilization or society had a spiritual or martial tradition which centered five methods of being, although that is purely speculation.

Evidence for post-Old War Tenno Schools

This is where all of the knowledge of the Tenno Schools in Warframe comes from, as of 2023.

The Tenno Schools become available after The Second Dream quest is completed. This quest reveals that the Tenno are children with Void abilities, Operators of the Warframes and not the Warframes themselves. This revelation opens up the Tenno Schools immediately. It is unclear if the Tenno know the Ways of these Schools innately. There is no direct evidence to suggest the Tenno learn of these Schools through some off-screen method.

A player can switch between the Ways of each School at will. When a Tenno changes Ways, they lose all of the abilities granted to them from their previous Way. The only exception to this is when you "unbind" certain abilities from the School, allowing your Tenno to keep the unbound power regardless of which Way they are currently practicing.

This implies that the Schools are like martial arts schools: only a master of one style of fighting can benefit from trying to mix-and-match with other styles on the fly. That said, there is nothing stopping anyone from practicing many disciplines; just fight with discipline at a time for maximum effectiveness. Note that there is no hard evidence in the game to suggest that Tenno exclusively have Void powers from only one Focus School. It would seem that any Tenno can have powers from any School, so long as they train in the proper Ways.

Tenno Clan Dojos have many tools for combat training, and even a specific room for sparring. It is unknown if the Tenno Dojos act as a major training ground or place of learning for the Tenno Schools in-universe.

I have found no evidence for Tenno-aligned humans without Void powers practicing the Ways of the Focus Schools.

I have found no evidence to suggest that The Man In The Wall has any influence over the existence or Ways of the Tenno Schools, or any influence over the specifics of how Void powers manifest.

Conclusion

Based on the evidence I have gathered, it seems as though the Tenno Schools are a post-Orokin-Empire creation. It is unlikely that the Tenno Schools were adopted from a separate pre-existing culture. Two options for the genesis of the five Focus Schools are supported by the text:

One or several of the earliest Tenno to awaken from cryosleep were the ones responsible for creating the five Focus Schools. The Void powers, abilities, and synergies are split between the Schools because of differences in combat philosophy first and foremost. Secondarily, it may be difficult for an adolescent to manifest or control all of the Void abilities from all of the Schools at once, and separating them into smaller practices keeps things manageable.

Something inherent to the nature of the Void separates the powers and abilities of the Tenno into five groups. The philosophies and combat styles of the schools follow from how the powers cluster, or perhaps the headspace a Tenno needs to be in to access that cluster of abilities.

Nothing about the Tenno Schools prevents their use by Tenno who do not have the ability to perform Transference unassisted. In addition, a Tenno School does not require the use of an Amp. Because of these two factors, Tenno Schools could have been active during the Orokin Empire era. It's possible that the Tenno Schools originate from techniques (therapeutic or supernatural) developed by Margulis during her time working with the children of the Zariman, though there is no evidence to support this theory.

Additional thoughts under the cut!

Non-Focus Tenno Schools

While I posited that such a thing could exist, there isn't a lot of evidence for non-Focus Tenno Schools. Below is a list of things which could be or could have been Tenno Schools separate from a Focus, depending on your interpretation:

"The Old Ways": A mysterious and nondescript collection of Tenno fighting techniques which seem to date back to the time of the Orokin Empire. Teshin is fond of speaking of "the Old Ways" when training Tenno, and is likely trying to impart lost knowledge of those "Ways" onto the Tenno. The flavor text in the Nikana mentions the Old Ways. The flavor text of the Glaive also mentions "dating back to the first Tenno", connecting to the Nightwave mission "The Old Ways".

The Stalker and his Acolytes: Neither the players nor the Stalker himself is sure if the Stalker and/or his Acolytes are Tenno. The Stalker is described in his Codex entry as holding the rank of "Guardian" during the Orokin Empire, and is never identified as a Tenno or even as a Warframe. Although neither the Stalker nor his Acolytes use any void powers, if they are Tenno their general immunity to Warframe abilities and unusual powers could be indicative of a Tenno School unique to them.

Non-School Tenno Organizations

Tenno Schools are fighting disciplines. They characterize what techniques a Tenno uses to fight, but not why they fight or what causes they fight for. A Tenno Clan, for example, is not a Tenno School. The Clan is made up of many Tenno, whom may all individually practice combat styles from one or several Schools. Below is a list of things which very likely aren't Tenno Schools:

The Six Faction Syndicates: Steel Meridian, Arbiters of Hexis, Cephalon Suda, The Perrin Sequence, Red Veil, and New Loka. They may be major political or philosophical groups within modern Tenno society, and they even have their own weapons, but they do not teach combat methodology.

The "exclusive order of Tenno assassins" mentioned in the flavor text of the Karyst.

[criticalsucc]

being trans is like,

physically i have a dick but SPIRITUALLY i have a pussy

but also spiritually i still have a dick