Talk:The Second Dream/@comment-108.87.117.137-20151206233208/@comment-98.25.224.250-20151207153312

The way I interpreted it is that the Warframes themselves are capable of very limited autonomy (like the Rhino Prime codex entry, our chosen frame tearing out War from its chest during the Second Dream quest), in essence, a very primitive, unthinking animal. The Tenno is the true mind, able to control any of them at will.

This is a bit of a stretch, but I posit that the Prime Warframes are the adult survivors of the Zariman, twisted by some combination of Infestion and the Void. These would be the original frames (the "brothers" of the Rhino Prime frame codex entry that were experimented on by the Orokin scientists). From there I would speculate that the experiments done on these Prime frames would allow the Orokin to imperfectly duplicate the process, resulting in the non-Prime Warframes to be mass produced and piloted by other Tenno.