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This does not actually address the 'this is ridiculously misogynistic' part.
If you're using societal context for ingredients, you've answered your own question there, really.
Exalted Questions Thread
- Thread starter Chehrazad
- Start date
This does not actually address the 'this is ridiculously misogynistic' part.
If you're using societal context for ingredients, you've answered your own question there, really.
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- Singapore
Well, welcome to creation.
No, because Exalted doesn't have such ridiculously mysogynistic assumptions about virginity in the setting, and also ew, god no.
eeeeeeeeeeew
Creation isn't misogynistic, that's actually a huge freaking thing about it. Please, read the damn books, please read the books, stop building your view of the setting on what people on the internet say and letting your internal biases and prejudices fill the caps.
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I mean, he's not wrong. Creation isn't intended to be misogynistic, but being that it's written mostly by a bunch of dudes influenced by modern culture taking inspiration from mythology, it ends up that way.
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I mean, like, when ever I think of Creation, I sometimes draw elements from Conan the Barbarian.
You know.... the virgin sacrifice thingy? The scantily clad beautiful women?
Hakazin
Serpent Admirer
- Pronouns
- She/Her
...No. Just... No.
In regards to the question posed, and acknowledging the already observed sexist origins of the Virgin Power trope, the answer depends. Is the usefulness of the sacrifice because of the cultural meaning, or is there some actual inherent value? And, if it's the latter, is the inherent value of the sacrifice coming from the loss of the virginity (in which case, I can't help you, because, as has been already stated, ew) or is the value from the new experience of having sex instead?
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Why would you say this, though? Why could the 'having sex' not be the operative element?
And this is completely off base. Because you don't bother to look at the themes or roots of the setting, or how it differs from the real world. You read posts on the internet, see "Conan inspired," and don't bother to look deeper, see what about Conan inspired it, or do your own reading. And thus you keep saying super inaccurate things.
This keeps happening. You do this over and over and over, and now it's actually getting offensive, instead of just kind of annoying. An entire thread had to be made because you won't read the books, but you want us to do your mechanical balancing and lore research for you. You're writing a fanfic for a setting you know nothing about, while talking like you authoritatively understand it ("Welcome to Creation" really?) Go actually read some of the books. Exalted: The Dragonblooded. The First Edition Storyteller's Guide. Manacle and Coin. Scavenger Sons, Games of Divinity. Learn about the thing you are apparently so interested in. It's got a lot of cool stuff, and you will definitely miss 90% of it just skimming a thread full of people who've read the books and are making in jokes and ancient references. There's archives of developer quotes about the ideas and themes behind the games, just waiting to be googled!
or, you know, keep asking random questions devoid of context and suggesting ridiculous sexist cliches from the worst part of the works Exalted took pains to try and avoid and completely miss the themes of the setting and the stories it wants to tell.
Frakir's brother
Goodbye.
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- The Sea of Trees
I mean, loss of virginity can be made to work for stuff,as long as it's spun the right way. Just virginity? No, worth very little to nothing. The transition from childhood to adulthood represented by first time having sex? That could be used.
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Hmm... but I remember a blurb in the part talking about passion morays, talking about how sorcerers use it to maintain their virginity for ritual purposes.
That's called "freelancer wrote a Standard Demony Thing". It happens, frustratingly.
*coughs*PLACESOFSIN*coughs*
It seems to me that like many things which can have significant social and political value, the loss of virginity might be very valuable in a platonic essence kind of way. Our modern concept of the irrelevance of the immaterial - things like the loss of virginity - is really a very boring storytelling conceit.
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....aw man. I thought it sounded cool.
The part about sorcery maintain virginity is not about "virginity is pure" its about " Sex is fun and if I as A sorcerer do not have fun I can get more power "
like how some sorcerer are not eating meat or drinking and all that as they try to gain weird oaths etc.
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I mean, there's room in the setting for virginity to have some manner of supernatural significance, in much the same way for any other state to have supernatural existence. You could imagine stuff like "being old" to be supernaturally significant in certain context, or "having traveled Creation" or "having spent your entire life in a single town."
The setting is a richer place when Farmer Six Grains somehow gets empowered by a sorcerer/god/demon/ancient Artifact to have the strength of ten men, but only so long as he remains in his village.
But there should be some kind of logic about what that state means, why its metaphysically meaningful to whatever the ritual/whatever you want to do, and ideally, interesting consequence to the setting in terms of how it shapes culture.
As others have suggested, you could imagine some kind of supernatural oath (maybe to a powerful God, maybe otherwise) relating to abstaining from sex in exchange for power. Maybe you "marry" the spirit, and are expected to remain monogamous, but the spirit has no interest in sex. Maybe making oaths in general is a source of power (with corresponding consequences for breaking them, Cú Chulainn style.
Having something be interested in virgins for no real reason just comes off as either pointless and juvenile, or fundamentally misunderstanding what Exalted is about (which is not directly, unquestioningly importing tropes from western fiction)
The setting is a richer place when Farmer Six Grains somehow gets empowered by a sorcerer/god/demon/ancient Artifact to have the strength of ten men, but only so long as he remains in his village.
But there should be some kind of logic about what that state means, why its metaphysically meaningful to whatever the ritual/whatever you want to do, and ideally, interesting consequence to the setting in terms of how it shapes culture.
As others have suggested, you could imagine some kind of supernatural oath (maybe to a powerful God, maybe otherwise) relating to abstaining from sex in exchange for power. Maybe you "marry" the spirit, and are expected to remain monogamous, but the spirit has no interest in sex. Maybe making oaths in general is a source of power (with corresponding consequences for breaking them, Cú Chulainn style.
Having something be interested in virgins for no real reason just comes off as either pointless and juvenile, or fundamentally misunderstanding what Exalted is about (which is not directly, unquestioningly importing tropes from western fiction)
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The sacrifice of a person isn't meaningful as a component for something unless they have some intrinsic esoteric value attached to them - the sacrifice of a dude who has a grand destiny is meaningful because you're cutting that destiny short. the sacrifice of a someone's first groupie is only meaningful if the character has a great deal of personal feelings towards them because the willing destruction of that bond for the solar is what's important.
Now, there's plenty of things out there that don't give a shit about esoteric stuff like that, they just like having people sacrificed to them. If they put complex restrictions on what they like being sacrificed, it's a personal thing. Sometimes it has a deeper meaning, sometimes it's just about seeing how many hoops they can make their supplicants jump through for their favor.
Now, there's plenty of things out there that don't give a shit about esoteric stuff like that, they just like having people sacrificed to them. If they put complex restrictions on what they like being sacrificed, it's a personal thing. Sometimes it has a deeper meaning, sometimes it's just about seeing how many hoops they can make their supplicants jump through for their favor.
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My serious answer about this, and with the standard "I don't know what's been done in 3e" caveat, is:
Exalted is a big setting, and a lot of people have been writing stuff for it, so there's examples of just about every good and bad idea you can think of somewhere.
There was a distinct effort from the beginning to make the setting not terribly mysogynistic. Exaltation as a thing is explicitly unconcerned with sex or gender. The most powerful nation in the world was ruled by a woman for a thousand years, a woman who was shockingly better than everyone else at everything. All her most likely successors are women. Dragonblooded dynasties and the Realm in general tend toward matriarchies. The ancient empire that existed in the glorious past was ruled by a woman. Five of the seven most powerful gods are women, and one of the other two is often a woman.
On the other hand, plenty of other places have been written as more classically sexist. The original Twilight Solar signature character was a woman whose sexist culture wouldn't let her be a scholar.
Additionally, the setting was constructed by a person with a very cynical view of history and a love of tragedy, and a desire to wallow in those things, so lots of horrible stuff exists in the setting because it's what you would expect to exist in a post-apocalyptic bronze age populated by uncontrollable superhumans and classically-inspired gods, so slavery exists, and is horrible. Beastmen exist, and are made in the mythologically obvious way. There are whole groups of attractive demons and elementals that are explicitly popular with sorcerers who want to summon a sex slave; there's a whole species of purple demon hookers with body-piercings who literally exist to be weird prostitutes. First Age Solars using their mind-bending powers to abuse their wives is a canon thing. Etc, etc.
The artwork has always featured a lot of naked women, often for very thin or nonexistent reasons.
And this has been going on for 17 years, by now. Our culture, and what constitutes acceptable ideas about female representation, has shifted pretty dramatically in that span. So a lot of the above stuff was edgy and daring back when it was printed, and got praise for that at the time, but has aged poorly. You see the same thing in other White Wolf source books, where they were partly differentiating themselves from D&D by being darker and sexier instead of safe and family-friendly.
Basically Exalted's setting is a hot mess, and depiction of gender and sex roles in it is no exception to that hot mess status.
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- Gladstone, OR
It's important to note as @Phigment established that White Wolf products in general were transgressive against both gaming trends and cultural norms of the time- and applauded for the maturity with how those transgressive themes were handled. Not all of them aged well, and not all of the people today writing for the line or consuming it as fans are equipped to do anything with it. I know I'm not- I just do the best I can.
The point i'm trying to make is that Exalted deliberately tried to tackle uncomfortable themes and topics, and to make them fun and engaging. Sometimes it swerved too hard into 'freak the normies' shock value writing- or how some of the writers were starting to use the setting to express and canonize their own personal preferences.
I want to stress though that WoD and Exalted were as much about Themes as they were Events or Allegory. Sometimes even moreso. The Realm isn't supposed to be a 1:1 pastiche of imperial china and decadent rome- we just call it that because it's an easy quick soundbyte to actually express the concept in brief discussion.
The fundamental reality is that Exalted is so big, that trying to discuss it becomes a job unto itself as you have to establish canon vs headcanon, referring to which book where under which author and who knows any number of other things- even before 3rd edition was released, people were tired of it. Before Sufficient Velocity emerged, people were tired of it. Most people had given up on Exalted as a game simply because there was no way to consistently discuss it without devolving into arguments about how broken it was or how there was no room for variance- an assertion I definitely saw but personally cannot believe.
I'll curtail my usually 3e screed here- but the point I'm trying to make is that Exalted was meant to be transgressive, to have unvarnished looks at realistic, plausible consequences of it's heroic fantasy setting. To be a political game, not in the sense of a random Exalt being a stand-in for some real-life politician, but to be about the science and philosophy of politics, of power itself. Exalted- like any game really but this game more than any I'd really ever known except maybe Eclipse Phase- relied on critical thinking and a player's willingness to engage with the material beyond the surface level.
But as I say this, I want to stress that transgressive is not about shock value or freaking out the readership- 2e had it's fair share of doing that and doing it badly. Transgression is all about recognizing the environment the movement is in and then showing how it's trajectory is running at-angle to it. The 'transgression' of 1e and 2e to a lesser extent was that it chose to make a setting based not on arbitrary fantasy tropes, but historic precedent, sociological concepts and anthropological trends that we see in our own histories. That slavery is awful and exploitative and under a given circumstance mind-numbingly profitable. And for no other reason is it employed. Everything else is post-hoc justification for it's existence.
Exalted is transgressive in the sense that there is no intrinsic value of a person in Creation- compared to that of any number of Chosen One settings or 'The Soul is the most unique and treasured magic' tropes you see elsewhere. I've said before elsewhere that the value of a person in Creation is their history. Without that you're just meat and will. It's transgressive because at a thematic and conveyance level, it took fantasy tropes like 'The Chosen One' and recontextualized it as a mythic lottery for heroism.
The point i'm trying to make is that Exalted deliberately tried to tackle uncomfortable themes and topics, and to make them fun and engaging. Sometimes it swerved too hard into 'freak the normies' shock value writing- or how some of the writers were starting to use the setting to express and canonize their own personal preferences.
I want to stress though that WoD and Exalted were as much about Themes as they were Events or Allegory. Sometimes even moreso. The Realm isn't supposed to be a 1:1 pastiche of imperial china and decadent rome- we just call it that because it's an easy quick soundbyte to actually express the concept in brief discussion.
The fundamental reality is that Exalted is so big, that trying to discuss it becomes a job unto itself as you have to establish canon vs headcanon, referring to which book where under which author and who knows any number of other things- even before 3rd edition was released, people were tired of it. Before Sufficient Velocity emerged, people were tired of it. Most people had given up on Exalted as a game simply because there was no way to consistently discuss it without devolving into arguments about how broken it was or how there was no room for variance- an assertion I definitely saw but personally cannot believe.
I'll curtail my usually 3e screed here- but the point I'm trying to make is that Exalted was meant to be transgressive, to have unvarnished looks at realistic, plausible consequences of it's heroic fantasy setting. To be a political game, not in the sense of a random Exalt being a stand-in for some real-life politician, but to be about the science and philosophy of politics, of power itself. Exalted- like any game really but this game more than any I'd really ever known except maybe Eclipse Phase- relied on critical thinking and a player's willingness to engage with the material beyond the surface level.
But as I say this, I want to stress that transgressive is not about shock value or freaking out the readership- 2e had it's fair share of doing that and doing it badly. Transgression is all about recognizing the environment the movement is in and then showing how it's trajectory is running at-angle to it. The 'transgression' of 1e and 2e to a lesser extent was that it chose to make a setting based not on arbitrary fantasy tropes, but historic precedent, sociological concepts and anthropological trends that we see in our own histories. That slavery is awful and exploitative and under a given circumstance mind-numbingly profitable. And for no other reason is it employed. Everything else is post-hoc justification for it's existence.
Exalted is transgressive in the sense that there is no intrinsic value of a person in Creation- compared to that of any number of Chosen One settings or 'The Soul is the most unique and treasured magic' tropes you see elsewhere. I've said before elsewhere that the value of a person in Creation is their history. Without that you're just meat and will. It's transgressive because at a thematic and conveyance level, it took fantasy tropes like 'The Chosen One' and recontextualized it as a mythic lottery for heroism.
You realize this is entirely counterproductive to what you're trying to do, right?
Like, if you're trying to make the world less misogynistic, keeping "weird porn fics" in their own special marginalized category is pretty much the exact opposite of what you want to do. It is, ironically, exactly the same sort of thinking that produces nonsense like "virginity matters". You're saying that stories are only worthwhile, only pure, if they don't have explicit sex in them, or only have the nice family-friendly kind with lovers in the missionary position.
Sex is. Stories about sex are. If we want to we can make more of it than that - but it shouldn't be any less.
That being said...
Ultimately, as @Shyft says, people aren't special and souls aren't special. You could talk about anything else she has an Intimacy for and unless it's Defining or something, I really wouldn't rate it more than a relatively minor exotic component, any more than, say, gossamer is. Twilight Healing is sorta impressive, but it doesn't really "bleed over"; unlike an Exaltation it doesn't actually make the rest of your soul any more special - whereas, like, a Solar Exaltation is so ridiculous that even after the First Age Solars died their ghosts became monstrously powerful bullshit Deathlords. Ironically I think an Evil Piece would matter more...
Anyway, yeah, the unfortunately kinda depressing answer is "not a lot, (meta)physics doesn't care about people." You maybe could do something with "specialness to the Exalt", but that's very shaky and ST-defined.
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- Singapore
Maybe a boost to the Exalted using the artifact?
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- Gladstone, OR
if we're gonna talk about 'virginity'- basically you have to treat it objectively and accept that in Creation, everything can be magically potent. That is to say, anything/everything can be useful somehow to some kind of ritual procedure. Because... that's how it works here too. Someone figured out how to make tiny silicon wafers into logic gates that accept electrons at specific points and do cool things with binary code to let me type this here. The same logical analysis of the world that let the me type on these magic thinking boxes is the same thing that says eye of newt, virgin blood and the tooth of a lion can bind a demon for a year and a day.
in Creation, ritual and symbolism are grammar and syntax, it's just as logical as any language or even programming- but it's aesthetic is fantastic. This is not meant to be license for grinding, un-fun rational industrial magic, but the fact is that if you try to hide magic behind unknowable secrets, you make your readers look dumb, and you look dumb for trying.
I've talked this out a lot for my own craft revisions, but the more important part is that what matters is Auspiciousness or Provenance. 'virginity' isn't special without cultural context, but in Exalted/Creation, cultural context is itself metaphysically meaningful- you can use cultures to change demense aspects, after all.
At a mechanical level,, the most important 'sacrifices' that we understand outside of specific callouts like those Drowned Eyes in Oadenol's or whatnot is this: You can get something like 3 motes for a shed HLs of blood, and you can get awesome, awesome return on investment by sacrificing mortals with Essence ratings- depending on your interpretation of the rules, that means mortal People or Mortal Animals. The example is in the 2e book about the one shark wargod of the west who in his writeup describes the sacrifice procedures- which can be taken as precedent for Everyone Else.
in Creation, ritual and symbolism are grammar and syntax, it's just as logical as any language or even programming- but it's aesthetic is fantastic. This is not meant to be license for grinding, un-fun rational industrial magic, but the fact is that if you try to hide magic behind unknowable secrets, you make your readers look dumb, and you look dumb for trying.
I've talked this out a lot for my own craft revisions, but the more important part is that what matters is Auspiciousness or Provenance. 'virginity' isn't special without cultural context, but in Exalted/Creation, cultural context is itself metaphysically meaningful- you can use cultures to change demense aspects, after all.
At a mechanical level,, the most important 'sacrifices' that we understand outside of specific callouts like those Drowned Eyes in Oadenol's or whatnot is this: You can get something like 3 motes for a shed HLs of blood, and you can get awesome, awesome return on investment by sacrificing mortals with Essence ratings- depending on your interpretation of the rules, that means mortal People or Mortal Animals. The example is in the 2e book about the one shark wargod of the west who in his writeup describes the sacrifice procedures- which can be taken as precedent for Everyone Else.
Here's a newsflash: Not everyone likes sex shoved in everything. Not everyone wants to think about fleshy bits squelching in their epic fantasy game. There's times and places for weird sex shit. There's, in fact, a sister forum dedicated to it. "I don't want you to jam sex where it wasn't before" is not, in fact, a sign of prudishness or sexual repression. It's a sign of having mastered this basic societal concept called boundaries. You see, when you randomly drop into a thread that isn't about sex, and start asking about the material value of virginity for your story on a porn site, it's uncomfortable. It's oversharing where not asked for, it's bringing sex in where it wasn't invited, and it's generally the move of someone who doesn't give a crap who they disconcert with their disregard for basic social norms.
But, hey, you're the guy who called me a fucking anti-vaxxer because I don't agree with you about magic systems. Probably shouldn't be surprised that you're once again making personal attacks because someone approaches fiction in a way you don't like or don't understand.
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- Pronouns
- She/Her
Or maybe Kaiya said none of those things and you - for some reason - decided to spontaneously invent them out of a simple turn of phrase because everything is incredibly unchill for some reason. Furthermore, whether or not sex should be in everything is a far more complicated position than that, that is really not something we should be discussing in an Exalted Questions Thread; asexuality is an orientation that is also marginalized, do you think asexuals would agree with you that there should be more sex when society is already so full of it? No, obviously not.
More importantly, as previously mentioned, Kaiya never said anything about purity, family-friendly sex, missionary position, that they should be marginalized or that virginity does matter. So like, maybe don't do that in the future and discuss what she actually wrote. Personally, I'm of the opinion that @Kaiya responded a bit brashly to the question, which is to say whether or not the virginity of whatever priestess with some sort of healing thing - I don't know, I don't really care either - could be used as a crafting ingredient. Personally I feel that as long as you get a good story out of something that doesn't accidentally or intentionally marginalize or offend groups by creating perverse incentives, I'm pretty inclined to say "Sure, why not? Please don't turn this into something creepy, though." As @Shyft says, everything in Creation can have some form of potency, and I don't think this is any particularly different, as long as it is handled mindfully and by people with an idea of what it should mean and how it is to be understood.
I suspect that in this context, it's probably neither, but as I said; I neither know, nor do I really care.