[Lore] What is the difference between Bosses and Liches/Sisters?

[Dairaion]

This is starting to bug me at this point. Are they all functionally the same. presumably the bosses are trapped in a form of continuity, except for Vor who became corrupted because of his contact with the Janus Key?

Liches and Sister are the same except they somehow have warframe powers and we can kill them right? 

[(PSN)Unstar]

By bringing up Continuity, I'm assuming you're asking why bosses are still around after you defeat them in Assassinate missions?  Like how you beat Alad V, but he somehow survives and has further narrative in later quests?

As far as I'm aware, there's no official narrative for how that works.  There's no indication that it's anything like Continuity, though, as that is something of a lost art that very few would have access to.  My interpretation is that it's just like Saturday morning cartoons, where the villains always get away so they can come back next week.

Though I suppose you could make an argument that the Tenno aren't especially great at confirming their targets are dead?

Edited August 29, 2023 by (PSN)Unstar
hopefully a better reply

[Dhrekr]

9 minutes ago, Dairaion said:

presumably the bosses are trapped in a form of continuity

Continuity? You think that the Raptor robots are in some sort of Continuity? Why?

[Zahnny]

I choose to accept that the Assassination fights are non-canon unless specifically referenced/stated by another instance in Warframe.

It might not be correct, but it's the easiest way for me to wrap my head around it.

[trst]

Without an actual answers all we can assume is that assassination missions canonically only occur once and/or the bosses escaped and survived somehow. Like after you fight Vor the first time he escaped to Ceres and he does "die" in that second fight only to be resurrected by his Void Key. But farming their nodes would be non-cannon as their reaction/story plays out the same every time.

Regarding Liches I'm pretty sure the whole idea behind them is that they're somehow affected by our mercy kill (they talk about some "poison" we're responsible for) and are then augmented somehow by Kuva (possibly going through continuity)/Specter Particles. And regarding them we see their entire lifespan between "surviving" out mercy kill, surviving every encounter, and finally dying to/recruited by us in the last encounter. Trading them however is likely entirely non-cannon.

[PublikDomain]

If you wanted a functional explanation, when your Operator dies the game just switches to a new timeline where they didn't. That's what the little cutscene is in TNW or TSD or the other quests where you can "die" as an Operator and you fall through the Void. Eternalism and whatnot. Similarly, every time you kill a mortal boss that's just you killing them in that timeline. The next time you kill them is just the you in a different timeline where things played out a little differently. That's why you can destroy Profit Taker over and over again or kill Nira a hundred times. That's why you can kill Alad both before and after he became Infested or disappeared during TNW. Vor, Liches, Sisters, and other Void-related entities are different, because they do more or less the same Eternalism thing we do using their connection to the Void. They can canonically come back over and over again, but once you completely sever that connection they can't anymore. None of this is entirely canon but it works.

[(PSN)Unstar]

17 minutes ago, PublikDomain said:

That's what the little cutscene is in TNW or TSD or the other quests where you can "die" as an Operator and you fall through the Void.

Tangent, but I thought that the moment in The New War where you see a bunch of you "dying" before finally seeing the Drifter and Operator shake hands seemed to imply that the Drifter and the Operator are the only "you" left across timelines.  Do you have a different interpretation?

[Genitive]

59 minutes ago, Zahnny said:

I choose to accept that the Assassination fights are non-canon unless specifically referenced/stated by another instance in Warframe.

It might not be correct, but it's the easiest way for me to wrap my head around it.

We just KO them and they pretend they are dead. Unless they're robots.

Although it would be better if every boss was like Vay Hek and had some sort of escape cutscene or something.

[PublikDomain]

46 minutes ago, (PSN)Unstar said:

Tangent, but I thought that the moment in The New War where you see a bunch of you "dying" before finally seeing the Drifter and Operator shake hands seemed to imply that the Drifter and the Operator are the only "you" left across timelines.  Do you have a different interpretation?

Yep. IMO the Operator has become a singularity. All yous are you, and you can freely be any you you want to be. All of the dying yous are also you, just the yous that are dead. So instead of dying, you just become a you that's not dead. The Tenno do this subconsciously, which is why the Tenno never lose and never die. They just naturally favor timelines where they are victorious. The player Operator learns to jump timelines intentionally and stops the cycle of death, becoming superimposed with the Drifter who is also you. For example, at the end of TWW the Operator and Drifter are talking to Natah and neither is shown on screen at the same time:

Spoiler

 

They're carrying on the conversation as one person, because they are one person. They're both there at the same time occupying the same space. One of them is there, but blink and now the other one is there. But they didn't change, they were always there.

Edit: and that's how I think future content will be handled. Instead of making complete duplicate scripts for both the Operator and Drifter just in case you've picked one or the other, they'll have one script and the two characters will switch back and forth. The Operator will say a line, then after the camera cut the Drifter will be there to deliver the next line. They'll bounce back and forth like that. Doing it that way would just be more practical to implement, so I think the lore will follow along.

Edited August 29, 2023 by PublikDomain

[(PSN)robotwars7]

3 hours ago, (PSN)Unstar said:

Though I suppose you could make an argument that the Tenno aren't especially great at confirming their targets are dead?

I'm seeing a whole lot of people in this thread who must not spend a lot of time on the Kuva Fortress; there's literally a room where you can see Lech Kril inside a capsule, fully armored and comatose:  which tells me that Grineer leadership just make clones/doubles of themselves, with identical augments and when one dies, another is released: of course you can argue it's not the *same* person but from a military perspective, this is a perfect solution as killing a commander causes great disruption to any military, but if the commander is replaced entirely by a clone, or a double intended to throw off assassins is killed instead, the chain of command remains unbroken.

it's even easier with the Corpus since most of their bosses are proxies that can just be rebuilt over and over again: Jackal went from beign a one-of-akind prototype to mass production and now they even appear in the undercroft of all places!. infested are much the same, though technically Lephantis is supposed to be SUPER old, so shouldn't be easily replaceable, but then again the infested tend to mutate rapidly and can replicate forms so who knows.

there are some exceptions: Vor's first fight where he gets cut in half, destroyed is a "canon" event, and after that he becomes Corrupted Vor. Sarge is a placeholder, but you could literally put anyone of the same height and build in his suit and nobody is any the wiser lol. point is, all the factions have their ways of remaining a serious threat, even when their leaders are killed.

[(PSN)teopropide]

The real answer is "who cares, rule of cool". We don't even play things in chronological order, like when you play the quest Natah (Uranus) Alad V already has an Infested scar on his cheek, you discover why only on Eris. So the chronological order is: Jupiter Alad V (except Ropalolyst and Disturb) -> Eris Alad V -> Uranus Alad V -> Jupiter Alad V (Ropalolyst and Disturb) -> New War Alad V. What a mess. 

With this in mind, you can safely guess maybe you're REALLY killing for good your average Sargas Ruk, that node is simply chronologically after every other event with Ruk involved.

Liches at least have an in-game reason to act like this.

[Alguien]

12 hours ago, (PSN)robotwars7 said:

which tells me that Grineer leadership just make clones/doubles of themselves

I mean, they are a literal army of clones, that get indoctrinated/programmed while growing in tubes, even something like their loyalty to the Queens is straight-up part of their genetic code, so is not that unbelievable.
Don't think we should downplay the Grineer cybernetics also to explain how some of their named characters survive, Vay Hek himself almost got eaten alive by Ghouls and he survived as little more than a head in a heavy armored platform, and even his eyes got replaced with cybernetics

[0_The_F00l]

I have some head canon to justify their existence ,

Grineer bosses have clones of themselves with memory implants , vay hek actually has an "escape" animation so don't have to worry about him.

Corpus proxies ... Are proxies , they just build new bodies for themselves,

No name bosses with just designations just get replaced ,

Alad V has access to resurrection tech ,

Infested just grow new bodies ,

 

So liches have access to kuva and have partial continuity options.