Ever really think about crewmen?

[Circmfission]

This is a thought I've had several times and a thought I'm sure many others have had, probably even posted about on these same forums. Take a look back and look at the factions in warframe, look at how they work, who they are, what they do. We have the biggest enemy faction, the grineer. Mass produced mostly mindless clones subservient to their queens, who essentially exist to mine the resources out of the system for pretty vague reasons. There's the semantics of how killing grineer could be wrong considering their mental state and what not but I mean end of the day they're the most generic kind of evil force and also this game does have a quest where you kill an autistic child so it's not exactly the worst warframe has done. Then there's the infested right, evil space fungus. Extremely generic and once again evil concept, no real question why we kill them. Sentients are also just evil angry robots who want to kill all humans, totally generic black and white evil faction no semantics about it. What about the corpus though? I mean sure the big names like Nef Anyo and Alad V, yeah those dudes are evil, totally man without a doubt. I mean that's without question. But then crewmen? They're just like, amazon employees. These are just dudes working on what is essentially a space warehouse. The only difference is that instead of working for Jeff Bezos for financial reasons, they're working for Alad V for religious reasons. You really think each and every crewman is evil? I mean each and every grineer is by design, the ones who aren't get euthanized or run away to join steel meridian, they're considered faulty. But I mean, crewmen are just regular office workers, I mean yeah they have guns and what not but considering how many of the corpus weapons are "repurposed tools" or just standard issue self defense stuff it seems that it really just comes down to "The tenno are an ocupational hazard take these for self defense." Now like moas, ospreys, jackals and whatnot I mean those are robots, programmed for hatred and murder, yeah whatever. But then the just, amazon fulfillment center crewmen make up so many of the casualties in corpus missions and they're literally just employees. That's kinda messed up man, like I get the tenno are a not so subtle terrorist organization but really there's like not even any attempt to convey that "hey, those people with the funny rectangle helmets are just forklift operators and accountants"

[(NSW)Greybones]

Veso got ya thinkin’?

[(XBOX)C11H22O11]

5 minutes ago, SkeletonJehova said:

a quest where you kill an autistic child so it's not exactly the worst warframe has done

More freeing than killing

[Circmfission]

3 minutes ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

Veso got ya thinkin’?

nah I forgot about him. I was more just thinking of like what the water cooler talk must be like. "Yeah you hear about Tony in HR? Beheaded by ninjas, real shame"

[(NSW)Greybones]

Just now, SkeletonJehova said:

nah I forgot about him. I was more just thinking of like what the water cooler talk must be like. "Yeah you hear about Tony in HR? Beheaded by ninjas, real shame"

Haha. I definitely feel the pang at times as I’m moving through the Corpus Ship or Jupiter and Claw Execute some random guy working on a panel on the floor

[trst]

But the Crewmen aren't just regular workers given weapons to defend themselves their commander's property though. They're also their soldiers and military considering they're used to invade regions (Invasion Missions) and are employed on ships designed to kill (Railjack Crewships/Ramsleds). I'd say they're more like the soldiers who went through all the same training but are working desk duty while on deployment rather than "regular" people who're just given guns for defense.

What is perhaps the real tragic part of their faction is considering if Fortuna is a representation of how their entire society works. Every regular Corpus may be more or less forced into their position under debt and threat of being sent to Fortuna along with passing said debt onto their family.

[L3512]

15 minutes ago, SkeletonJehova said:

You really think each and every crewman is evil

An American?

The concepts of "good" and "evil" and overrated. If the grineer are cloned for fighting without thought can they truly be evil, and yet a corpus crewman that can choose is not?

A study of communist Russia, communist China and nazi Germany show the people "doing their job" can result in massive death tolls.

[Loza03]

25 minutes ago, (XBOX)C11H22O11 said:

More freeing than killing

I believe 'Exorcised' would be the accurate term, since he's effectively a ghost by the time you meet him. Honestly, the real evil are the people who ignored or discriminated against him that effectively forced him into that situation in the first place. I mean, as far as we learn, Margulis had no known motive for kicking him out. We've had no indication that he was unable to handle void powers (the comic displays him effectively using Void Beam and possibly Void Mode), he's polite and well-meaning, and Margulis clearly doesn't cave to peer pressure about who she's 'supposed' to like.

 

In answer to OP's question, no, Crewmen are probably not evil in the same respect that Corpus higher-ups or Grineer are. But it would probably be inaccurate to call them innocent, either, since they DO ultimately have some aspect of free choice. We also know that unless absolutely necessary, Tenno do not approach civilian areas, indicating that most Corpus vessels are in part military or mercenary vessels.

[(PSN)haphazardlynamed]

Go fight Sargus Ruk, let him go thru his voice lines regarding the Tenno.

He's Not Wrong.

[Marvelous_A]

Unless they stop one-shotting me with high level Detrons I'd have to physically terminate their employment contracts.

[FURYDANCE]

this get me thinking, are those crewmen suits hanging on racks just suits or real people?

[xcrimsonlegendx]

I've been saying all along that the Tenno are the bad guys, or at least not the good guys in this story.

We really have no allegiance other than to ourselves. One day we're wiping out the Grineer by the ship-full, the next we're helping them kill the Corpus. We're hired thugs that will side with whoever pays the most. The Corpus researcher on Deimos upon our arrival isn't sure if we're there to help him or slaughter him, we're unpredictable. Konzu says we're trading his silver for red, because we're just there to kill whomever he chooses. The only time the Tenno get involved and do the "right thing" is when it involves another power threatening our superiority. We'll defend the system from Sentients to save our own asses but if anyone else wants help they need to pay. The Tenno might not be the "bad guys" since there are obviously bigger evils in play but they're nowhere near being the good ones either.

[(XBOX)Architect Prime]

I wanna know where everyone's living. 

[edit] I should clarify that I mean the in-game characters. 

[Sinekanter]

Tbh, I feel pretty bad when I kill the crewmen, who do the 'leaning against wall/sitting around' idle animation, because I feel like I am killing someone on their lunch break.

[GrayArchon]

The "Corpus Crew" Cephalon fragment on Venus says that Crewmen are "purpose-bred" and "indoctrinated into a ritualised and propagandist devotion to labour and work". We've seen that the Corpus are highly religious and ritualistic, and their hypercapitalist society is likely self-reinforcing. So while Corpus citizens undoubtedly have more free will than Grineer soldiers do, they still probably don't have a lot of options. Going back to the analogy of the Amazon worker: sure, they have a choice to not work there, but – a dude's gotta eat.

However, the Corpus directors are involved in some pretty bad stuff. Nef Anyo, Alad V, and Frohd Bek have all been involved in schemes that would have had catastrophic consequences for the entire System had they not been foiled by the Tenno, and Nef Anyo is still exploiting the Solaris to this day (and, if you listen to Alad V's broadcasts in the Gas City, he doesn't treat his workers much better). The Corpus Crewmen are serving their leaders, and they've been conditioned to follow them and support them (when Veso-R is talking to Alad V, he calls him "most gilded director" and "most lucrative and sagacious visionary").

So, the Crewmen are performing work that is Bad, and the Tenno are trying to stop the Bad Thing. What is there to do? Should the Tenno board the ship and have a conversation with every Crewman they meet, ask them to stop? There are millions of Crewmen or more, and they have almost certainly been exposed to negative propaganda about the Tenno – how they're inhuman, barbarous, "Betrayers", etc – so they will be trying to kill the Tenno.

Probably the best thing would be for groups looking to broker peace to do outreach work among the Corpus, try to win over the workers and get them to move away from the directors' projects. And if you read the bios of the Perrin Sequence crewmembers and look how some of them joined the Perrin Sequence, it's clear that Ergo Glast does exactly that. But it's slow work, and it's not what the Tenno are here to do. The Tenno are here to stop the immediate threat. If an Obelisk ship is raining fire on a civilian colony, it needs to stop doing that, and if there are normal men and women at the trigger, well – the fastest way to stop them is to kill them.

*shrug*

I'll end by qualifying – of course, this is video game morality. It's not super nuanced and should not be taken to apply to any real-world situation.

4 hours ago, Loza03 said:

I believe 'Exorcised' would be the accurate term, since he's effectively a ghost by the time you meet him.

Maybe more like assisted suicide, since Palladino, who claims to speak for him, insists that you do it, and Rell seems to accept it at the end. Although there's not a lot of clear communication going on there.

4 hours ago, Loza03 said:

Honestly, the real evil are the people who ignored or discriminated against him that effectively forced him into that situation in the first place. I mean, as far as we learn, Margulis had no known motive for kicking him out. We've had no indication that he was unable to handle void powers (the comic displays him effectively using Void Beam and possibly Void Mode), he's polite and well-meaning, and Margulis clearly doesn't cave to peer pressure about who she's 'supposed' to like.

This bugs me so much. I was talking to someone about this during TennoCon and I said exactly the same thing. It seems completely against Margulis' character (as far as we've seen) to reject Rell like she did (or rather, like we are told she did).

1 hour ago, FURYDANCE said:

this get me thinking, are those crewmen suits hanging on racks just suits or real people?

I think they're just empty suits, but when you enter Points of Interest in the Railjack missions (Freightlinker, Cyclops Array, etc) sometimes one of the suits will jump down and it'll actually be a person. Scared the s**t out of me the first couple times. Maybe they're all people?

57 minutes ago, xcrimsonlegendx said:

I've been saying all along that the Tenno are the bad guys, or at least not the good guys in this story.

We really have no allegiance other than to ourselves. One day we're wiping out the Grineer by the ship-full, the next we're helping them kill the Corpus. We're hired thugs that will side with whoever pays the most.

I won't tell you that your perspective is invalid, and there are certainly older elements of the game (some since removed) that point in this direction. But as of the Second Dream, it seems to me that the Operator, who is your character, isn't a bloodthirsty mercenary but is instead actively trying to fight for a better world. If you read through all the possible dialogue options at the end of the Second Dream, none of the Operator's voice lines indicate a negative moral alignment.

5 hours ago, SkeletonJehova said:

"Yeah you hear about Tony in HR? Beheaded by ninjas, real shame"

This is the funniest thing I've heard all day.

[NecroPed]

When I first played Warframe I thought that the Corpus were given helmets that muffled their voices to prevent you from hearing their cries/pleas to stop/to leave them alone etc. 

Also thought they were rigged up with suits that could physically control them and with the helmets muffled techy grunts hiding their true [lack of?] intentions. 

[GrayArchon]

6 minutes ago, NecroPed said:

When I first played Warframe I thought that the Corpus were given helmets that muffled their voices to prevent you from hearing their cries/pleas to stop/to leave them alone etc. 

Also thought they were rigged up with suits that could physically control them and with the helmets muffled techy grunts hiding their true [lack of?] intentions. 

If you paid attention to the Glassmaker's second crime scene, Nora Night mentions that the helmets serve to hide the Crewmen's identity so they are just another faceless worker. No individuality allowed.

StallordD had an old theory that the Corpus Crewmen were controlled by some sort of mind-control gas that was pumped through their suits, but this is just a fan theory, and I'm not sure if he even still thinks this. But he mentions it in some of his older lore videos on YouTube.

[NecroPed]

6 minutes ago, GrayArchon said:

If you paid attention to the Glassmaker's second crime scene, Nora Night mentions that the helmets serve to hide the Crewmen's identity so they are just another faceless worker. No individuality allowed.

StallordD had an old theory that the Corpus Crewmen were controlled by some sort of mind-control gas that was pumped through their suits, but this is just a fan theory, and I'm not sure if he even still thinks this. But he mentions it in some of his older lore videos on YouTube.

To be honest I'm not great with remembering all of Warframes lore. I need to go through it all again from the start because its all a blur to me now after like 8 years. 

I'm sure if I went through all the lore I'd think differently. It honestly hasn't been on my mind until I saw this post. It was just kinda my first impressions of the corpus way back when I started. 

[(PSN)robotwars7]

formatting would really help here.

9 hours ago, SkeletonJehova said:

We have the biggest enemy faction, the grineer. Mass produced mostly mindless clones subservient to their queens, who essentially exist to mine the resources out of the system for pretty vague reasons. There's the semantics of how killing grineer could be wrong considering their mental state and what not but I mean end of the day they're the most generic kind of evil force a

Grineer aren't all totally dumb: sure, many of them don't know science and rely on the few that do like Dr. Tengus and Tyl Regor, but even the lowest rank clones can show the ability to think on their feet, even in the midst of battle. we saw this with Kahl in the New War cinematic, who came up with a self-sacrificial plan to destroy the Condrix on the plains; most Grineer would have just charged at it blindly, but kahl was smart enough to sneak past an outpost, pick up and use a foreign weapon (Corinth Prime), and continue his plan knowing he would die in the process. this courage and quick thinking is why even Vay Hek had to show some respect to this otherwise unremarkable grunt.

9 hours ago, SkeletonJehova said:

also this game does have a quest where you kill an autistic child so it's not exactly the worst warframe has done.

that was a mercy kill. Rell had spent an incalculable amount of time singlehandedly preventing the Man in the Wall from entering the physical world. it had come at the cost of his body and his sanity, yet despite suffering so much he continued to battle MITW, and once his fight was done, all he wanted was to be put to rest. there are  MUCH worse fates than death in the warframe universe.

10 hours ago, SkeletonJehova said:

Then there's the infested right, evil space fungus. Extremely generic and once again evil concept, no real question why we kill them.

I'm hoping that with Infested Liches, we might learn a little more about the Hive Mind itself. they want to consume everything, but from what I can tell the infestation see themselves as perfect beings with immortality, just like the Orokin, who created the Infestation. they way they speak (once translated) makes it sound like becoming infested is not a painful, horrifying procedure, but one of enlightenment. of course, we don't know for sure, and thankfully Tenno are immune to the Infestation so we won't have to find out lol.

10 hours ago, SkeletonJehova said:

Sentients are also just evil angry robots who want to kill all humans, totally generic black and white evil faction no semantics about it.

Sentients had a reason to kill the Orokin: they knew the Orokin deliberately designed them with a weakness to Void energy, known as The Flaw. they were suppsoed to die to the Void's energy if they tried to come back from Tau, but instead they lived, at the cost of their fertility. as it turns out, Sentients really liked the idea of having kids, and were so enraged at the prospect of never being able to reproduce again that they declared war on the Orokin, thus starting the Old War.

I think most creatures and people would be a teensy bit angry if they got the snip without consent: reproduction is one of the the primal urges of all creatures, along with eating and defending oneself.

10 hours ago, SkeletonJehova said:

But then crewmen? They're just like, amazon employees. These are just dudes working on what is essentially a space warehouse. The only difference is that instead of working for Jeff Bezos for financial reasons, they're working for Alad V for religious reasons. You really think each and every crewman is evil?

pretty much, and they are workers first, soldiers second. Corpus only fight in self-defence or when ordered to by a superior: they have no desire for territorial conquest, unless it is financially profitable. they'll kill for money, but they usually prefer to get money through non-violent means like extortion and selling Proxies. they are also indoctrinated to only understand Corpus Doctrine: Neptune, the Corpus Homeworld and home of Corposium, founded by Parvos Granum, has "indoctrination temples" where this occurs.

10 hours ago, SkeletonJehova said:

I get the tenno are a not so subtle terrorist organization but really there's like not even any attempt to convey that "hey, those people with the funny rectangle helmets are just forklift operators and accountants"

one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter, because perspective is a thing: even the worst atrocities committed by a group can be justified if you believe it was committed as part of a greater cause.. we certainly aren't good guys and the New War is conveying the point further, with how the Sentients are referencing Biblically-accurate Angels, and we are literally referred to by them as Devils, and as a Demon by Helminth. 

while it is pretty messed up that we are basically killing armed workers, that's how war is: the soldiers on the frontline don't deserve to die, but they often do. Veso and Kahl definitely succeeded in reminding me - and others it seems - that the faction's troops really are people, not just mindless horde of clones, and how desensitized we are to them as Tenno. 

[Loza03]

4 hours ago, GrayArchon said:

Maybe more like assisted suicide, since Palladino, who claims to speak for him, insists that you do it, and Rell seems to accept it at the end. Although there's not a lot of clear communication going on there.

Honestly, nobody in that quest is in a good state for clear communication. I'm surprised anyone said anything at all.

5 hours ago, GrayArchon said:

This bugs me so much. I was talking to someone about this during TennoCon and I said exactly the same thing. It seems completely against Margulis' character (as far as we've seen) to reject Rell like she did (or rather, like we are told she did).

This is true, although there is one line that might indicate a possible solution.

"You Orokin! So perfect on the outside but your rotted!"

The clear, and probably intended interpretation is that Margulis has 'seen past the veil' of Orokin corruption, but a slightly... less pleasent way to think about this is that she just cares about what's 'on the inside' and may be just as stuck up about some form of 'internal' beauty. Something which Rell, being an autistic individual, may not have fallen into. I mean, we only really have the Tenno and Ballas's words to go off, since Lotus seemingly got her information from them, and they're pretty biased towards her being some perfect angel.

Having said that, it's probably not the case. The quest does also have Lotus give that sputtering "I don't believe you", which may be foreshadowing to indications that Margulis knew about a certain Man in the Wall.

[Fallen77]

Simply consider that concepts like good and evil don't really apply, we're at war with those factions, and killing from a higher moral ground is not a thing at war, life is not that simple.

And really ? Killing grineer could be seen as bad because they're technically mentally deficient ? Really ? We're not killing them because they are mentally deficient, we're killing them because they have opposed interests to ours, and because they shoot at us on sight.

[CephalonCarnage]

5 hours ago, GrayArchon said:

and they've been conditioned to follow them and support them (when Veso-R is talking to Alad V, he calls him "most gilded director" and "most lucrative and sagacious visionary").

No different to "Comrade Dear Leader", or "Ayatollah" (means "miraculous sign of God") or any other "you is boss" honorifics our societies have set in placxe to divide the peasantry from the ruling classes.

 

What I find more interesting is the lore suggests that the enemy are all worthless clones, or worthless clones or robots and thus mass murder of them is perfectly fine. You're not shooting people after all. But then the same lore introduces the greyer areas that these clones are actually people.

There's a set of books by C J Cherryh where some far flung colony uses clones for labour (as they have a severe shortage of people) - one book from the perspective of this colony describes the clones as children to be cared for and looked after while they work for you, the other books that deal with the perspective of original Earth descibe them as identikit hordes of biological robots, and the fight is one of ignorance and ideology - both fighting from their own perspectives.

 

We want things to be black and white and easy to understand, but the world never is. And none of us are the good guys we think we are - hence Twitter being what it is :)

[CephalonCarnage]

53 minutes ago, (PSN)robotwars7 said:

Sentients had a reason to kill the Orokin: they knew the Orokin deliberately designed them with a weakness to Void energy, known as The Flaw. they were suppsoed to die to the Void's energy if they tried to come back from Tau, but instead they lived, at the cost of their fertility. as it turns out, Sentients really liked the idea of having kids, and were so enraged at the prospect of never being able to reproduce again that they declared war on the Orokin, thus starting the Old War.

Not sure that's true - they only got the infertility thing when they came back to kill the Orokin. Pretty difficult to be Lotus and Erra's dad if you can't have kids.  I thought the sentients came back to kill the Orokin to prevent them from hopping over to Tau and messing that place up as much as they had the origin system. Perhaps the sentients are the good guys after all, returning to rescue the citizens from the Orokin, and their teenage demon murder machines :-)

[SneakyErvin]

Good and evil is just in reality grey and defined by the viewer and which side he/she is on. Here, a crewman is simply an enemy, just as a cloned grineer. I mean we've seen it through history and we've also seen the very definition change in the eyes of people based on certain actions or relations. The crewmen certainly arent evil, but they are still "soldiers" within an enemy faction. And that is the main reason we should disregard if they really deserve death or not, because they are designated enemies.

Rommel for instance. WW2 tank commander on the german side. He wasnt good or evil, but he was a soldier in an army under a man most saw and still see as an evil madman that had many other evil madmen on his side, from grimping propaganda twats to insane doctors. Rommel was simlply a professional soldier following orders, as he would have done under anyone. In the end he died trying to do something good and heroic in the eyes of many, be it his enemies or the common man then and now. He planned an assassination of the madman in charge in order to end the war but got found out and executed (forced to commit suicide). 

It all just goes back and forth through history regarding who is good or evil, in the end killing simply comes down to who is at war with who.

[RazerXPrime]

13 hours ago, SkeletonJehova said:

a quest where you kill an autistic child

You talking about Chains of Harrow? Rell aint dead.