Where Did People Get The Idea That Tenno Betrayed The Orokin?

[Maou]

I've always thought that we were called betrayers cuz when the infestation became uncontrollable, we tennos fled and went to sleep, leaving both the grineers and corpus to fend for themselves.

[DrakkenKall]

I was under the impression that the Tenno are individual citizens from the Orokin age, that it refers to a period of time and a specific cultural movement rather than a race, species or faction. I think of "Orokin" the same way I'd think of "Renaissance". It's not that anyone or anything is Orokin, that person, place or thing is from the Orokin period.

 

It seems to me that sometime after Dark Sector the Tenno became established as an organization, either by Hayden Tenno himself, or in his honor. Sometime after that, the Orokin Age began. I assume that this is about the time that humanity ceased to exist as we know it. You can definitely trace the Grineer and the Corpus back to baseline humans, but the point at which they diverged from baseline humanity and the Tenno is nebulous. The corpus may actually be the last baseline human beings left.

 

At some point, something happened related to the Infestation, sending the Tenno into stasis and ending the Orokin Age. I would assume that since Hayden Tenno turns into something like Excalibur due to exposure to Technocytes, that the Tenno basically harnessed and made use of a controlled strain of Technocytes to create the Warframes and the Orokin architecture. The gnarled, twisted vines in the Orokin architecture and the growths in the Orokin derelicts seem to support this. There was probably some catastrophic failure in containment, a new strain of Technocytes or something of that nature. I can't quite speculate on how the Grineer or Corpus came to exist in the wake of the Tenno, though they must be derived from remnants of baseline humans. They likely slipped through the cracks, expanding and coming into their own after the fall of the Tenno.

 

The Grineer don't seem to be human anymore, in the same way that 40K's Space Marines aren't quite human anymore. They're cloned so many times, and so heavily augmented that they just aren't Humans. I couldn't tell you where the shift occurred, but it's happened somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of years between "now" and Warframe.

 

As I said before, the Corpus may be baseline humans, as they aren't really seen outside of their space-suits. They don't seem to be augmented, they just use robotic assistants. I wouldn't make too much of an ethical fuss over it. We're Tenno. If we're still human underneath the frame, we're a separate faction from them. Humanity has a way of finding a reason to kill others over ideological differences. So you can justify to yourself why it's alright for you to slaughter them. Alternatively, Tenno are no longer entirely human under the frame, we're melded with our frames and you are an Excalibur, Frost or Nyx. In that case, Humans are no longer the protagonists of this story. You can kind of draw your own conclusions. We may well be a race of anti-heroes, which makes for quite the interesting narrative. Many times in sci-fi the augmented or posthuman forces are the bad guys, but here we play as the posthumans fighting against baseline and augmented humans. It's interesting, if nothing else

So... yeah. I'd say that it's not that we've betrayed the Orokin, it's that the Orokin era is over. It ended with the Tenno moving into stasis in order to avoid whatever catastrophe was coming. There are still remnants of the technology, but it's been hundreds of thousands of years since we entered stasis.

This is probably the most concise presentation of the lore to date. and honestly it makes some of the most sense of everything i've seen so far. 

Also this struck me as dead on with my interpretation of the available "lore"

 

 

 

[RedDirtTrooper]

You have to figure, the corpus view themselves as the inheritors of the Orokin era. They hold the largest portion of their high tech infrastructure and, like the the Grineer, they're descended directly from the survivors of the Orokin Age. From their point of view, the Tenno probably are betrayers.