Talk:Lotus/@comment-66.50.50.229-20180808094930/@comment-2604:6000:FFC0:57:7DC4:B633:5687:CEA1-20180817103352

I'm probably putting way too much thought into it, but here's a Wild Guess: the angle they're going to go for is more that she's having the Sentient equivilent of a nervous breakdown over Rell, and Ballas (who is almost certainly his own pile of crazy behind his veneer of Orokin condescension, since he refuses to see meaningful difference between the Lotus and Margulis, to say nothing of the mental gymnastics he probably pulls to pretend his Orokin-standard assholery didn't have anything to do with Margulis' fate) is essentially an abuser taking advantage of her while she's vulnerable. Back during The Second Dream there was some dialog implying that Natah didn't just start being the Lotus when she decided not to kill the Tenno, it was a proccess she went through of removing parts of her own memory and practically rebuilding herself as a different person, because she isn't human. The dialog even implies that she herself saw Natah as a seperate entity ("Natah was the daughter, until I destroyed her. Now I am the Lotus, now I am the mother" if I've remembered it right.) Again, if she were human, the natural assumption would be to assume that this is a figure of speech, but since she's a sentient machine, it could be very literal. This also fits with a particular line from Hunhow: "They will say you are riven, and will want to reclaim you. I will not be able to stop them." It would seem that by her own admission, Hunhow is actually right about her fragmented state.

We never really see her react to what happened with Rell, which could be because we just don't see her in general... or it could be because we're going to find out that it broke her and we didn't notice because, like a functioning sufferer of severe clinical depression, she kept up an act of normalcy at "work" and around others until the clusterfuck of emotional instability finally became too much. If she were human, she might've just dissapeared to binge on icecream and netflix, but she's a member of a species of intelligent machines that have evolved seperately from their creators into almost Lovecraftian alien minds, so maybe she's now having problems remembering who she wants to be and has thus become more true to what she originally was as Natah. That would be a nice call-back: "Dream not of what you are, but of what you want to be." Bringing her back may involve reminding her that she wants to be Margulis. An important point made during The War Within is that the Operator did not consider anyone could hurt them through their Warframe; it would be fitting if the Lotus unconsciously made the same mistake and being damaged by learning about Rell was inevitable; if it hadn't happened with Rell, it would have eventually happened with another Tenno.

tl:dr the Lotus has indeed not become a true villain but she's also not playing a con on Ballas or the Sentients and will not suddenly turn on them at just the right moment to ruin their nefarious plans.