Warframes are actually people

[sh00chu]

Your theory is pretty well thought out, except you forgot about the Excalibur that Alad V dismembered in "The Profit" appearing to be a hollow shell.

 

[Leavith]

I came up with this theory OP feel free to look at it

https://forums.warframe.com/topic/609887-wake-up-warframe-a-lore-theory-spoilers-for-2nd-dream/

[VampirePirate]

It's been a known fact from the game's birth that warframes were once people.  There are plenty of clues that state that,and even the Devs on some very early devstreams specifically said that they were/are humans.  Just because the Second Dream happened, does not mean that this changed.  I think the Op has an extremely accurate guess, and probably closer to the truth than other theories I've seen on this forum throughout the years.

Got to keep in mind that warframe is not always about making sense.  They are plenty of things that are weird or ridiculous or silly, but I guess that is just DE's style with this game sometimes.

Now if the Devs come out and say, "No they are not humans or were-humans.  We changed that."  Then I'll believe it.

[EmptyDevil]

Disregarding debates on what can be carried over from Dark Sector being 4.5/10 canon, i would say this old thread is on to something in regards to the Warframes:

 

[Sixty5]

12 minutes ago, NinthAria said:

I don't know if I'm convinced they actually are (or were) people, but it definitely seems clear to me based on certain things (gender identifiers, different idle stances/animations, etc.) that they were at least based on people. They have too much personality to be mindless husks, in any event.

I do think that Warframes themselves have some small semblance of sentience on their own, we see it in Second Dream, and we see it in Valkyr.

5 minutes ago, Genitive said:

Except they don't have personality. True, you have hints of personality in descriptions, but that's it. You can say the same thing about a car - it's wild and cunning, whatever, but it's still a car.

It could be possible that some small hint of the person who became the warframe is left within them, manifesting in the mannerisms of the warframe, even when we are controlling them, a bit like muscle memory

[Lugmorius]

31 minutes ago, EmptyDevil said:

I have been thinking that the people the Orokin took that were mentioned in the Inaros quest, were used for Warframe experiments to serve as a base. They may have infected the individuals with Technocyte and applied other technologies to get working Warframe surrogates. Those surrogates would then be reproducible using raw Technocyte after initial testing.

This combined with OP makes me a believer. I kept thinking about why the heck the Orokin were taking people away. I was thinking maybe it was to take strong DNA for Grineer worker cloning. That would also explain why the Grineer are so degenerated now, because they have not had any fresh DNA for a long time.

 

But I like this new perspective, doesn't seem like as much of a stretch as mine.

[Sixty5]

8 minutes ago, sh00chu said:

Your theory is pretty well thought out, except you forgot about the Excalibur that Alad V dismembered in "The Profit" appearing to be a hollow shell.

 

My thoughts on the trailer remain the same as when I saw it. The metallic shell around the outside of the frame glows, and the fleshy interior is burnt and shown to be dark in comparison

[Camelslayer]

At the very least, we know that the Warframe is still, at the end of the day, a suit. And there's a meatbag of some form or another in the Warframe. While gameplay mechanics are obviously not something to look too much into when considering lore and story, they do have the Flesh resistance type. So there's something fleshy in that suit. What they are obviously has yet to be revealed.

Though the Technocyte Virus could be it- if it had something to do with the Warframe meatbags then it might also explain where the Infested came from, with Rhino's lore into consideration- an accident made by the Orokin.

But we obviously would need DE to clarify that.

[Lugmorius]

1 minute ago, Camelslayer said:

At the very least, we know that the Warframe is still, at the end of the day, a suit. And there's a meatbag of some form or another in the Warframe. While gameplay mechanics are obviously not something to look too much into when considering lore and story, they do have the Flesh resistance type. So there's something fleshy in that suit. What they are obviously has yet to be revealed.

Though the Technocyte Virus could be it- if it had something to do with the Warframe meatbags then it might also explain where the Infested came from, with Rhino's lore into consideration- an accident made by the Orokin.

But we obviously would need DE to clarify that.

But from Rhino's lote it is clear that it was no accident. It was a long and grueling process of RnD to come up with a functional Warframe, I believe in one sentence the narrator says that he "rejected countless like it before". Not an exact quote, but it is along the lines of that.

[Camelslayer]

Just now, Lugmorius said:

But from Rhino's lote it is clear that it was no accident. It was a long and grueling process of RnD to come up with a functional Warframe, I believe in one sentence the narrator says that he "rejected countless like it before". Not an exact quote, but it is along the lines of that.

That's kinda what I mean, failed experiments along the way.

[Sixty5]

3 minutes ago, Camelslayer said:

At the very least, we know that the Warframe is still, at the end of the day, a suit. And there's a meatbag of some form or another in the Warframe. While gameplay mechanics are obviously not something to look too much into when considering lore and story, they do have the Flesh resistance type. So there's something fleshy in that suit. What they are obviously has yet to be revealed.

Though the Technocyte Virus could be it- if it had something to do with the Warframe meatbags then it might also explain where the Infested came from, with Rhino's lore into consideration- an accident made by the Orokin.

But we obviously would need DE to clarify that.

Expecting lore to come in a timley fashion was your first mistake.

 

The best we can do as a community is have a thread explode every once in a while and get a cryptic reply from someone who may or may not be on the lore team.

[Evanescent]

I would like to introduce the idea that the Operator bodies themselves could be surrogates as well, to house the consciousness of the Tenno. A body that never ages, that needs to be plugged into the transference machine to work and survive, and the fact that the Tenno actually never realised they were in Warframes, or surrogate bodies. Even if you forget everything shifting between bodies will strike you as odd because bodies are such a personal thing. You know every nook and cranny of it, and the fact that Tenno never realised the change could hint at the fact that they have given up the concept of maintaining a physical body for some time. So going by that line of thought, the Tenno are both energy beings as well as physical entities. 

In addition, I'd like to put forward the theory that the real, actual bodies of the tenno are infested and stored in the orbiter to be cloned and then fashioned into Warframes much like in Neon Genesis Evangelion they kept Lillith trapped and made the EVAs by copying it.

Edited March 17, 2016 by Evanescent

[Katinka]

1 hour ago, Sixty5 said:

 (plus removed stuff from old infested bosses "why do you hurt us, you are our flesh"). 

That's not been removed.  Lephantis said it to me last time there was an Infested Sortie.

1 hour ago, Sixty5 said:

Additionally look at Valkyr, the frame itself is tortured, and screams. No one was piloting it during that period, but the frame still screams, something inside it felt that pain.

How do you know Valkyr wasn't being piloted?  Maybe Alad taking the Warframe from it's cryopod booted up the transference and her operator felt all that pain.

[Camelslayer]

3 minutes ago, Sixty5 said:

Expecting lore to come in a timley fashion was your first mistake.

 

The best we can do as a community is have a thread explode every once in a while and get a cryptic reply from someone who may or may not be on the lore team.

I never said anywhere that I expected lore to come in a timely fashion.

[Plushy]

Eh... Uh...oh... I see what you're saying now. 

[Sixty5]

Just now, Evanescent said:

I would like to introduce the idea that the Operator bodies themselves could be surrogates as well, to house the consciousness of the Tenno. A body that never ages, that needs to be plugged into the transference machine to work and survive, and the fact that the Tenno actually never realised they were in Warframes, or surrogate bodies. Even if you forget everything shifting between bodies will strike you as odd because bodies are such a personal thing. You know every nook and cranny of it, and the fact that Tenno never realised the change could hint at the fact that they have given up the concept of maintaining a physical body for some time. So going by that line of thought, the Tenno are both energy beings as well as physical entities. 

I like that, it harkons back to my old theory of tenno being physical beings inside the warframes who's physical bodies slowly errode, changing them into beings of pure energy.

Also as far as the body switching thing goes, the best answer I could figure out was that Second Dream takes place before you build your second warframe, eliminating that particularly tricky issue

1 minute ago, Katinka said:

That's not been removed.  Lephantis said it to me last time there was an Infested Sortie.

How do you know Valkyr wasn't being piloted?  Maybe Alad taking the Warframe from it's cryopod booted up the transference and her operator felt all that pain.

Haven't done the sortie yet, I just remember J3 Golem spamming me with that.

Having the original Valkyr Operator feel the pain doesn't explain why MY valkyr also reacts to that pain/looks like that. The non-skinned valkyr we have is the result of the blueprints we retrieved from Alad's place after dealing with him. 

[Katinka]

Just now, Sixty5 said:

Having the original Valkyr Operator feel the pain doesn't explain why MY valkyr also reacts to that pain/looks like that. The non-skinned valkyr we have is the result of the blueprints we retrieved from Alad's place after dealing with him. 

Your blueprints are based on the only recoverable Valkyr model, including the Corpus modifications.  Why we all get anger fuelled powers in our copies I don't know but that's a separate issue not exclusive to this topic!  It could be some kind of genetically imprinted memory that we now all share but that only requires the frame to be organic, which I think we can all agree on, not necessarily a modified person.

[Krion112]

This has pretty much been my running theory since I assumed the Tenno controlled the Warframes from beyond the 'frame itself, which was then proven to be true.

To expand upon this, I'd also say that the Tenno does not directly control its Tenno; it only clears its mind of the madness brought on by the Infestation, therefore allowing it to focus its own personality into a more rational creature. I thought it was even established that the Infestation doesn't necessarily control its victims in a conventional manner; it just sort of drives them mad until a mass of them gain a collective consciousness through a pheromone-like system of nanites, so therefore, you could easily make the Warframe a loyal servant or proxy by clearing its mind of the madness, in essence restoring who it was before being Infested.

Plus, transference obviously has some other role than providing a Warframe its powers. Tenno Specters can use abilities, and the primordial Rhino from the Rhino Prime lore was used Rhino Charge and Iron Skin without a Tenno, suggesting Warframe powers are separate from the Void energy of the Tenno.

 

And then, I can't remember what it was, but something gave me the impression that the Infestation reuses the minds of its victims in new bodies, like literally preserving them in the nano-swarms to go on to infect and embody more victims. If this is true, then it would explain Warframe blueprints, and how we can now build Warframes without human bodies; it's like a schematic stored in a biomechanical data storage cloud, and essentially the Orokin just took that data and made a way for our foundries to replicate it by just simply taking already infected material and additional components, and forging them into a new Warframe.

Think it was the Ancient Synthesis lore, but even if it's not that case, I think that'd be an incredibly interesting way of explaining it.

 

Dunno, just my eleven dimes and two pennies.

[Evanescent]

1 minute ago, Katinka said:

Your blueprints are based on the only recoverable Valkyr model, including the Corpus modifications.  Why we all get anger fuelled powers in our copies I don't know but that's a separate issue not exclusive to this topic!  It could be some kind of genetically imprinted memory that we now all share but that only requires the frame to be organic, which I think we can all agree on, not necessarily a modified person.

Ah but for a memory to persist there must be a consciousness to perceive!

[Lugmorius]

15 minutes ago, Evanescent said:

I would like to introduce the idea that the Operator bodies themselves could be surrogates as well, to house the consciousness of the Tenno. A body that never ages, that needs to be plugged into the transference machine to work and survive, and the fact that the Tenno actually never realised they were in Warframes, or surrogate bodies. Even if you forget everything shifting between bodies will strike you as odd because bodies are such a personal thing. You know every nook and cranny of it, and the fact that Tenno never realised the change could hint at the fact that they have given up the concept of maintaining a physical body for some time. So going by that line of thought, the Tenno are both energy beings as well as physical entities. 

In addition, I'd like to put forward the theory that the real, actual bodies of the tenno are infested and stored in the orbiter to be cloned and then fashioned into Warframes much like in Neon Genesis Evangelion they kept Lillith trapped and made the EVAs by copying it.

Oi, this makes sense. If you think about it, if the operator did not know about transference before the Second Dream, then the operator must have had a body that they kept switching in and out of suits with, or else it would have been "oh, time to link to a different warframe now." No, it was "time to switch suits now."

[Silvus-Sol]

"We built a frame around them, a conduit of their affliction."

Regular people inside the Warframes? Possibly but probably not. Why? Because your average Joe didn't have an affliction to be housed. Nor would a normal human have have any feasible link with the Void or an Operator for Transference. The Orokin were known to use clones (Grineer) and I've always wondered if the Warframes were created using a clone of the original Tenno that exhibited those powers. They would clone the Tenno, then build the frame around that clone. This process would likely merge the clone and the frame into one being. This could be what confused Alad V, as there was no clear indication of where the Warframe ended and the "Tenno" began.

Once the prototype was made, they could then make custom versions for each Tenno. A DNA sample could be mixed with infested tissue and put into the various Warframes. This is why the Operators can link so well with Warframes. Because it is in a sense, them. It is also why the infested get confused.

The reason why Warframes are not fully sentient could be twofold. The Orokin could have designed the first clones for minimal independence/higher brain functions in order to let the Operator dominate it's mind. Also, Warframes have been puppets for nearly all of their existence, normal sentience has never been a part of their reality.

This also explains the "hollow" Excalibur. It was just the outer part of the Warframe, no infested surrogate had been placed inside and fused yet.

Edit: I changed things up a bit. Removed Operator clones in lieu of infested surrogates built with Operator DNA as it makes more sense for that to be made in the Foundry.

Edited March 17, 2016 by Silvus-Sol

[egregiousRac]

49 minutes ago, D6.Nordenfelt said:

I had kinda similar speculation before SD, but now I think what inside of Warframes is just biomaterial, synonymous to human structure or image. Oro wanted to see Tenno avatars looking more humanised, it explains anatomical details such a female breasts or male groins (lol). And now we have two frame variants who looks not anatomically correct: Inaros, who looks more like living dead, or Strega Trinity with defected tiny legs. I just want to say one thing -- Warframes is just projection of Orokin ideas. So, anthropomorphic look is just Orokin engineers wish, but nothing more, IMHO.

Look at the inside of an infested crewman sometime. They are also just meat and they are undeniably mutated humans.

This isn't Human-in-a-Suit, this is Warframes-are-Humans. They are a combination of a host and the virus, sculpted with care to produce the desired result.

 

My interpretation of the SD revelation is this: You play as a warframe. That warframe is a distinct entity. There is consciousness, there is power. SD depicts you lifting to a second level of consciousness, to understand that there is a controller. Up to this point, as far as you knew there was one entity. Now there are two. It is simply a greater understanding of the universe.

Edited March 17, 2016 by egregiousRac

[taiiat]

54 minutes ago, Obviousclone said:

Didn't the Orokin design the Warframes based on the fighting style of "the old ways" (of gun and blade)?
Their design was probably influenced by ancient fighters that existed long before the orokin era

due to fighting an Enemy where technology itself was unable to be used - meaning primitive ballistic Weapons and blades being the only possible choices.

chosen out of necessity, not as an ideal inspiration.

[Evanescent]

2 minutes ago, Silvus-Sol said:

"We built a frame around them, a conduit of their affliction."

Regular people inside the Warframes? Possibly but probably not. Why? Because your average Joe didn't have an affliction to be housed. Nor would a normal human have have any feasible link with the Void or an Operator for Transference. The Orokin were known to use clones (Grineer) and I've always wondered if the Warframes were created using a clone of the original Tenno that exhibited those powers. They would clone the Tenno, then build the frame around that clone. This process would likely merge the clone and the frame into one being. This could be what confused Alad V, as there was no clear indication of where the Warframe ended and the "Tenno" began.

Once the prototype was made, they could then make custom versions for each Tenno. Each would be cloned and those clones put into the various Warframes. This is why the Operators can link so well with Warframes. Because it is their mind, their body, their Warframe. It is also why losing a Warframe is a big deal. They are not easy to produce.

The never said what the "conduit" was made from now did they?

[D3monicWrath]

Warframes are Tenno faction, used to be few now there is all this new lore with factions, you decide, however lately lore suggests that lotus was one evil in the old war, maybe one day they will have a flashback event where you get to play as a tenno in the old war and get to use a ancient exclusive tenno, whatever the case is Warframe moves in mysterious ways