Batman is a Solar though. Mortals flat out are not gonna pull off being Batman in Exalted. Odyesseus, sure, But Daredevil is a street-level hero, and hes' also unworkable as a mortal. Blindness is ruinous if you're not an Exalt with Charms to negate it. You're not gonna do well fighting large monsters like Geralt does as a heroic mortal, either, save maybe as a Sorcerer with the alchemy origin.
Guts has a damn daiklave, he has blatantly superhuman strength. Lelouch has a hyponotic eye power or whatever it was. All of these people are "human" supposedly, but by the standards of Exalted, no, they're more than mortal.
The issue here is that Batman's mortality is a pretty fundamental part of the character. You can't make Batman a Solar and say "that's Batman" any more than you can make Batman someone with, like, a mutant power of fear and darkness. A key part of the character at his inception and in most of his most popular conceptions is that he's fundamentally just a dude whose obsession drove him to feats that anyone else
could hypothetically accomplish, but would never do because they lack his fire.
I think there's an issue here which is that Batman as a single character who both does street level stuff in Gotham and is legitimately threatened by a dude with machine gun umbrellas also throws down with literal gods, but this is an issue with internally inconsistent worldbuilding on DC's part, and translating it to Exalted just makes it break more. Most batman stories are about the former rather than the latter. Even in the latter, a key part of Batman's role in the Justice League, frequently, is that he is the team mortal (in a way that other actual mortals on the league are not, which kind of reinforces my point). He's the dude who needs to think of these clever plans and tricks because he can't keep up with the Gods he deals with.
That's something that doesn't translate well to Exalted. That's okay, not all things needs to. Not all existing heroic figures will translate nicely into an arbitrary system of categorization. Insisting that they must be an Exalt of some kind undermines the setting by making it seem like basically every heroic fantasy character is an Exalt, leaving there no room left for mortal heroic characters in Creation.
Like, Daredevil is absolutely workable as a Mortal. Give him a five dot Background in blindsight or something that's way more expensive than the comparable vision-granting Charms. Or a Martial Art that does that, since it's already part of his backstory. The fact that you immediately jump to this idea that there's no room for a mortal Daredevil in Creation kind of makes my point for me. If there's no room for one of the most low-level street superheroes, whose power is a single gimmick and a lot of training, whose villains are almost exclusively just guys with money or a cool weapon gimmick, then there's no room for any kind of meaningful heroic mortal in Creation.
Geralt, similarly, is a heroic mortal subjected to a series of rare and expensive (and frequently lethal) alchemical tests devised by legit actual sorcerers, who (by the standards of his world) is a really skilled swordsman trained with a lot of lore about the weaknesses of the monsters he fights and some good combat thaumaturgy and alchemical bombs and such. In Exalted terms, he has a small Mote pool from those experiments, a lot of Occult and Lore that lets him plan out his fights to take advantage of enemy weakness, a lot of trick gear, some Thaumaturgy, and a few combat Charms more expensive and less effective than anything Exalts get. Those aren't super unreasonable to give to Heroic Mortals—in fact, that's basically a worse version of most kinds of 2E godblooded. Geralt's also someone who really kind of does fit into Exalted in a lot of ways, and the setting is weaker off if there aren't Witchers (or something equivalent) wandering the Threshold plying their trade
Guts and Lelouch are pretty similar. They're guys with one or two gimmicks that really set them apart from their peers. Guts' story (like Batman, explicitly rooted in his human nature AFAIK, maybe they made him an angel or something later on) is often very small scale, the enemies he frequently fights and nearly dies opposing beneath the notice of a combat-spec'd
starting Solar. Lelouch's story is closest to Exaltation, as he literally gets a supernatural power, but it very much isn't an Exalted power. His gimmick is that he's super smart, always had been. His power is that he can mind control people. His intelligence is never framed as supernatural in nature—in fact, we see a number of other characters of comparable intelligence in the anime who don't have any kind of supernatural powers. His mind control ability gets more powerful over time, but it's the only gimmick he gets.
The Exalted, especially Solaroids, are extremely
broadly powerful. They're superhuman at everything almost by default. They become obviously so if they've invested even a little bit into a field, as they easily leave behind the most skilled humans with barely any effort.
Most of these characters are not that. They were never written to be that. Their stories are not that. By saying that Batman is a Solar, rather than that Batman's role in the JLA shows how a Night might contribute in the context of a large Circle, you create this idea that Batman is off-limits as a heroic mortal archetype. Batman is ideal heroic mortal archetype in a lot of ways: he's a mortal in a world of gods and monsters who refuses to give up, figures out ways to level the playing field in nearly any way he can, and then regularly perseveres through cunning, strength, and raw willpower.
This is the kind of character that makes Creation more interesting, and makes games within it more fun. Why is this a problem?
