Space Mum’s Future

Yesterday, I wrote about the Lotus, the being most Warframe players lovingly call Space Mum. I mentioned the three recent quests that all put the Lotus in a very dark, very scary place, casting a massive shadow of doubt on who she is, what she wants and whether she is acting under her own free will. But I never really considered any of the potential futures for the Lotus. The Warframe universe is a very strange place and all sorts of randomness could happen – after all, not everyone expected that Warframes are controlled by ageless children but are also made from humans…

Peculiar lore aside, there’s three main possibilities I can see in Space Mum’s future.

She’s still under mind control

It’s quite possible that the Lotus is still being controlled by someone, it’s just that who is controlling her has changed hands. In Apostasy Prologue, Ballas does something to the Lotus that makes everything flicker. The player sees this as Transference Static, the effect players see and feel when their space kid gets disconnected briefly from their Warframes. For the Lotus, it could have been Ballas taking over her mind. But Ballas eventually ended up stuck in a cave with his legs flopping around. He thought he had control over the Sentients, but he clearly didn’t.

But Lotus having her mind controlled isn’t that bad. That means we might be able to save her, or that she might be able to break free. Either way, Lotus will be able to see the light and switch over to our side, becoming one of the ‘good’ guys again. This, in my opinion, is probably the option the story will go in. As much as people are pissed off with Natah stealing Ballas away and running back home, we’ve had the Lotus for so long that I can see people eventually forgiving her and wanting to help her.

In fact, the New War would find us balancing massive battles with subterfuge, while we sneak in and break whatever is controlling Space Mum’s mind.

Ballas broke the Lotus

Another option is that Ballas isn’t mind controlling the Lotus, he just broke her and reset her back to factory settings. The Lotus, deep down being a Sentient named Natah, is of course going to go back to doing Sentient-y things if she’s gone back to the way she was. And, being a Sentient, that means wanting to destroy everything vaguely Orokin-related. Not just the Tenno but the Grineer, Corpus and Infested as well. And probably anything in the Void too.

To get the Lotus back though, we’ll have to appeal to her buried memories, get her to remember why she betrayed her fellow Sentients in the first place. Basically, we’ll have to put the Mum back into Space Mum. Or at least properly convince the Lotus that the Sentients might be blood family, but we’re her real family because we actually care about her.

I mean, of course we do. Hunhow and company only ever wanted to use Natah, no one actually loved her.

If this is the case, then I expect us to catch glimpses of Natah throughout the New War, with a cliche ending of Natah suddenly switching allegiances at the end to save us.

She was evil all along..

Of course, it’s possible that the Lotus was evil all along. Taking control of the Tenno was part of her plan, putting them to sleep and making them love her in order to make us all weak, to make us all hesitate so she can kill us. After all, in Chimera Prologue, Ballas spends a long time saying just how horrible and evil Natah is and how she manipulated Ballas and the Tenno into loving her so she could use them.

In fact, with Ballas being one of the last fragments of the Orokin (alongside the Tenno and what’s left of the Void), it wouldn’t surprise me if Natah saw an opportunity to finally finish her job and eradicate the Orokin permanently, she was just waiting for Ballas to show himself and give up more information that she can use.

Actually, we can take this further. She’s been using us from the start. After all, she uses us to keep the balance, to keep the Corpus and the Grineer fighting each other while protecting colonies that we never actually get to see and might not even exist. But really, our ‘keeping the balance’ is a ruse to stop everyone from getting stronger and becoming a legitimate threat to the Sentients.

All of this could accumulate into a flat out war across two solar systems, to the point that the only way to end it is to murder both the Lotus and her mother.

I don’t think this scenario will happen though. People like the Lotus probably a little too much. I want it to happen, but Natah being completely evil might be… too much trouble for everyone else.

But frankly, anything can happen in Warframe. For all I know, we could end up becoming the Lotus and Warframe suddenly turns into a resource-managing top-down strategy game.

That probably won’t happen, but this IS Warframe we’re talking about, a game where ageless kids control suits made of human flesh…