General Exalted Thread
I've always seen him as a pretty solid Marduk.
I'd note theres IRL lots of ways for Wrong Theory Right Action. Theres a lot of minor ills which largely amounts to "keep the patient distracted from doing something that'd more seriously aggravate their condition", for which a lot of placebo treatments do work.
Which in the case of the wandering womb treatment its well...pretty distracting!
Though I suppose in Creation its not entirely out of bounds for the Wandering Womb treatment to be effective as an invocation to Venus through pleasure and thus getting a return effect of improved health...
I'll cut you off here.
Yes, I do.
That being said, literally none of your examples are all that good. The reason the gods don't interfere with mortals in D&Dland varies from setting to setting, but in general, any world where Pelor could come down and interfere is also one where, I don't know, Vecna or someone could as well. Pelor may well be responsible for all the harm he could've prevented, but he is also responsible for all the harm he permits if he lets Vecna into the world, so that might just be a utilitarian calculation. The Maiar don't dare get close to the One Ring lest they create a new Sauron, which again might well kill more people than they could save. And ... I really don't see how "the Greek gods were assholes" is relevant?
The Sun, meanwhile, is unopposed, stupidly powerful, stupidly competent in a number of fields even before Glories and Perfection Beyond Imagining, and the legitimate King of Heaven. He has no such excuse. Even in your cases I'd still consider them responsible, I'd just understand that it's the best option they have -- but the Sun could, and therefore should, and therefore is not so easily forgiven when he does not.
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Yeah. I mean.... the Unconquered Sun is perfect beyond imagining. Great and all-surpassingly skilled. He automatically succeeds in any task he sets his mind to. He also doesn't have a lot of enemies that can harm him. The Yozis? Imprisoned. Neverborn? Dead. Fair Folk? Nothing to him. Dragonblooded? Hahhaha. Sidereals? hahhaha.
I mean, you can make an argument that he doesn't have to do anything.. but I don't buy it.
I mean, you can make an argument that he doesn't have to do anything.. but I don't buy it.
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
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oh boy oh boy oh boy is this another
m o r a l i t y o f t h e s u n
discussion? shit i am excite
...Okay that was a little condescending ngl but c'mon, these arguments all feel, like, deeply uncharitable towards the Big Glowy Boi and I feeeeel like @Exthalion is almost-but-not-quite nailing my opinion on this. Namely that: Sol Invictus is allowed to be...well, for lack of a better word, human. Him being flawed is only a damning thing if you think that he should, by nature, be infallible or, indeed, owes it to Creation to be infallible. YCMV but I'm honestly partial to the perspective that the dude's a broken down veteran in a lot of ways. A survivor of the Primordial War that saw untold grief and suffering in the name of liberation, that saw countless gods dead at the hands of furious makers and truly horrendous collateral. I mean for a guy who cares even a little (and there's plenty of reason to believe that the Sun cared a lot), watching your chosen die again and again and again in horrific ways is going to hurt. And then after? When you finally have your hard-won peace and you get to be the person that you've wanted to be for so long?
Seeing what your chosen, your children, made in your name?
Like I feel as if you're really not giving enough weight to how fucked up the First Age got. And how cutting away the Solars, how leaving Creation to the Exalted, to the victors is...a complicated, pretty nuanced thing that's all kinds of grey. The Sun's made questionable calls before, some more than others. And it's important to remember that the guy's oldest incarnations aren't exactly cuddly, peace-and-love type things. Dude was pretty okay with ripped out hearts on a Dragon King altar and that definitely says something about the man himself. But beyond that I mean?
Idk. To an extent it's the same kind of question of "what do you do when your kid's a self-destructive junkie"? What do you do when your heirs are so absolutely, catastrophically, fucked up that there's no real denying their cruelty and excess and there's no denying that they'd exploit every shred of your dignity, everything you have left if it got them even an iota closer to what they really wanted? It's hard to blame the guy for feeling betrayed and used. It's hard to blame the guy for turning his back on Creation and I'm not saying that it's an unambiguously correct decision but that it is a comprehensible, human and ultimately tragic one.
It's something that shouldn't have happened but you can see how things progressed to this point, you can see why it did.
So I guess that's my issue in a nutshell basically, I feel like you're kind of blasting past all possible complexity in the question of "how much does the Unconquered Sun owe Creation, what is Creation entitled to demand of him" in favor of a pretty simple, not-nearly-as-interesting "he can theoretically do X, therefore he should and because he doesn't he's a monster". I mean the guy was literally a slave y'know? It's hard to fault him in general for not being super keen on taking up his old job for the sake of people who've abused his trust in the past and the power he gave them and generally don't give a damn about him and just want him to Solve Everything For Them. I'm not saying the guy's happy, even, as he is. But I think saying "he deserves his rest" shouldn't inherently be met with derision.
- Location
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Thing is, he's not resting. If he was hibernating in a cosmic cave somewhere, I'd be sympathetic to him.
But he's squatting on the throne of Heaven, letting Yu-Shan go to rot, and setting a shining example of self-interested corruption to the lesser gods. He is actively making the world a worse place.
That quote doesn't actually support your earlier statement. There's a big difference between DK culture being insular with a nihilistic streak and near-universal stalkerhood being a deliberate choice. The Sun would not, in fact, be going against the wishes of his worshippers if he did something to help them.
But he's squatting on the throne of Heaven, letting Yu-Shan go to rot, and setting a shining example of self-interested corruption to the lesser gods. He is actively making the world a worse place.
That quote doesn't actually support your earlier statement. There's a big difference between DK culture being insular with a nihilistic streak and near-universal stalkerhood being a deliberate choice. The Sun would not, in fact, be going against the wishes of his worshippers if he did something to help them.
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
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- He/Him
"Yeah, fuck this ex-slave for trying to be happy, the parasitic monster."
I mean, who exactly's your go-to replacement here? One of the other (equally as complicit) Incarna? One of the hungry, hyper-corrupt bureau heads? The secret conspiracy who fucks up half the time and is probably playing most of it by ear? The other secret conspiracy who fucks up half the time but insists it's all part of the great plan? The Solars ('cause that went so great the first time around)? How about Gaia who fucked off to the Wyld for a pack of smokes a few thousand years back and hasn't really shown her face since? Sol Invictus didn't single handedly fuck up Yu-Shan, sure he set a pretty shit example but, as I've said before, it's hard to completely fault the guy and ultimately driving the whole place into the ground was very definitely a group effort. On top of personal failings and sloppy patchjobs being magnified and badly strained by the stresses imposed by the Contagion and Crusade and millennia of entrenched dysfunction and cronyism in general.
I'm not saying Sol Invictus's hands are clean, but rather that fingering him as the source and sole root of the problem is kinda badly misinterpreting a lot of stuff. While implicitly positing a solution that really isn't much of a solution at all 'cause it's hard to see how any other immediate option wouldn't be just-as-bad-if-not-worse. And in general not being especially sympathetic to what no-shit is a pretty fucked up situation the guy's in.
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How did you get that out of my post?
Obviously the guy's got his traumas. I don't wish him ill.
And he's not a monster, just a lousy person. Put him in a room with twenty mortals, probably one of them is worse than him.
But no matter how tragic your backstory, it doesn't excuse misruling an entire world.
...
Actually, what exactly do you disagree with me about?
I feel like we might be coming from a pretty similar place here, but you're approaching it like a bitter argument.
Ideally nobody.
If we've gotta have a dictator, I guess I'd go with the Sidereals. They're at least trying. And there's a bunch of them, with regular turnover among their ranks, which dilutes the dictatorship a bit.
Seems a bit beside the point, though. Other people being just as bad doesn't make the Sun's behaviour any better.
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
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- He/Him
I mean "a shining example of self-interested corruption to the lesser gods who is actively making the world a worse place" reads pretty unambiguously my dude. Saying "but I didn't straight up call him a selfish monster" is bit thin when the implication is pretty- like pretty naked. There's not exactly a lot of nuance involved when you say he's "squatting on the throne of Heaven and letting it all go to rot" while he does nothing but enjoy his spoils. And so I took it to pretty heavily mean that he is, if not the source, then the main component of the problem. Or at the very least the most responsible and most worthy of condemnation.
So my disagreement is mainly wrt my point of "hey the Sun is actually pretty sympathetic and as a character has a lot of shades of grey" getting spiked into the ground with your "actually he's just a comprehensive fuckup and nothing could excuse his neglect" response
. Like I'm not going to bat over the honor of a fictional character, but your post 100% sincerely came off as pretty surprisingly hostile to the point as a whole without much give or leeway.Idk, it definitely counts for Something when it's, as I said, a group effort that wasn't caused by one person/entity and can't be cleanly solved by swapping out one person/entity. So "who else would have the job if the Sun didn't" feels like a pretty relevant question if you're positing that the dude is the main source of the rot and needs to be removed or reformed for things to be repaired.
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Eh.... I just wish he'll crack down on the corrupt censors. Would help quite a bit.
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That implication wasn't intended. He's not truly evil or the main problem with Heaven. That said, the lack of give or leeway you saw in my post was intended.
There's not really much ambiguity here, and while there is some nuance it doesn't change the basic situation. He's unambiguously a crummy person. But there's a wide distance between a bad person and a monster.
Morally speaking, he's not special; I would say more or less the same things about countless other gods, if we were talking about them.
Like most characters, he's sympathetic enough if you look at things from his perspective. Everyone's got excuses, and most people have pretty good ones.
I'm not.
Bad examples here.
Both times the Valar intervened militarily in Middle Earth they broke the world pretty badly. Beleriand no longer even existed after the second intervention. There are very good reasons they are loath to intervene again.
Those old men you deride were Maiar, of the same type of spirit as Sauron. Just with more restrictions on the use of Power.
I'm making no pronouncements on the rest of your argument.
But this was a terrible example, since the situations are not comparable.
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Part of the reason why Perturabo's pretty popular in some circles is because he ticks a lot of boxes associated with autism spectrum disorder, in particular the idea that someone can crave affection and recognition with no idea how to ask for it leading to an approach of "if I do my job well enough someone has to notice". Lashing out at people is less forgivable, but I've also seen people on the spectrum break things in frustration.
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I will say that I agree with this part, but my ultimate outcome for "who is the Sun?" is that he's... well, he's what people I know can end up becoming. Being compassionate, being moral, being concerned with others, all of that carries pain and stress and pressure, because you have to wrestle with serious questions and try to figure out how best to help people and suppress your own personal desires for the good of others.
Sol Invictus didn't want to be the guy who's always holding the bag when things go wrong, but the Solars failed and the Sidereals failed and the mortals failed and goddamn everybody failed, and kept failing, and fucking hell why does he have to be the only one who can save the world, why does he have to pull Creation's ass out of the fire every. Single. Fucking. Time?
Eventually, it gets to you. Eventually, the strain of trying to be a good person, of carrying the world on your shoulders, becomes too much to bear. You have to set it down, just for a minute. Except your own compassion won't let you, because while you're sitting around you can hear a million children being slaughtered by some genocidal dictator in the East, and see a good man's betrayal being plotted in the North, and it never stops it never fucking stops, the world is just an endless chain of horrible things getting ready to happen and there's no way to make it sit down and shut up and give you five minutes' peace.
So you learn to strangle that altruistic voice inside you, choke it out so you can rest, just for a little bit. You feel numb and empty and you know you'll feel horrible about it later, but you'll feel horrible no matter what you do, so you'll take your peace where you can get it. Every time, it gets a little easier. Every time, the world gets worse and the workload piles up even more.
By degrees, you start suppressing your humanity more and more, seeing your own conscience as an enemy to be suppressed and opposed and pushed out of sight. Haven't you done enough? Can't the rest of the world fend for itself without you there to play nursemaid? It's not so much to ask, is it?
You deserve this.
And then one day, you wake up and realize there's nothing left but silence where your soul used to be; the voice of humanity has finally, finally died, and you realize what you've done, what you'll continue to do, what can never undo. Drown the pain in whatever you can, block everything out and try to forget, let everything slide into decay and entropy and just do whatever you have to to get through the day. You're miserable and broken and empty and hollow and damned, a corpse that walks, rotting from the inside and there's nothing you can do, nothing you can do, nothing you can do. Say it until you believe it. Say it until you don't feel like a liar. Say it until the words break down and all you hear is white noise, as empty as your world has become.
You deserve this.
The Sol Invictus that was, the figure of hope and power, only exists within the souls of the Lawbringers. He failed, but they can succeed. They are the future, and he is the past.
Objectively speaking, yes, but from the perspective of creating as many opportunities for as many different stories as possible, I like the censors just the way they are. As the censors are pretty much the sole means for Heaven to directly bring the hammer down on the Terrestrial Gods, the censors looking the other way for anyone who slips them enough ambrosia means that you can have the whole overarching system for how Creation functions, while also allowing the Terrestrial gods to, in practice, do whatever they want/can get away with.
This means that the (non-ronin Sidereal) Exalted PCs can be doing things with Terrestrial gods —whether as allies, contacts, or antagonists— without having to factor Heaven into the equation, and that a given culture's interaction with the divine is allowed to differ from the Chinese/Japanese norm.
At the same time, the censors can bring down the hammer, so if you don't want to punch gods in the face directly in your game you can.
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this example would be fantastic if it did not contain the sentence "real-world religion"
did you know that there are many different approaches to evil across literal thousands of religions
and some of them don't even have a concept of evil
thus being inapplicable to this
thus making it a): a bad example and b): a misapplication of the epicurean problem of evil to all real-world religion and not just christianity
for example, in zoroastrianism, evil is straight up held to be weaker than good, god is not omnipotent and evil was not created by them and finally evil can and will be defeated by good deeds and good acts
which is, you know, completely in opposition to this assertion of yours
Or for reasons that only they understand, and possibly for reasons that only they understand at that precise moment;
Personal example, If I had a spare sledgehammer I'd have cracked that cement block out front into pieces months ago, it's uneven geometry offends me and therefor it needs to be destroyed.
As true as this is, I have no idea why you're quoting Exthalion to make this point.
There's also those faiths/mythologies where "evil" exists because if the ability to do harm unto others and generally do bad things wasn't present in the world, then the world as people generally know it wouldn't exist. The Aesir's conflict with the giants began because Odin and his kin slew Ymir, because if they hadn't then the world would not exist. Had the Annunakki not killed their parents, then neither they nor the world would exist.
Hell, Creation is a perfect example of such; the Exalted and the gods revolted against the Architects of Reality, straight-up murdered a bunch of them, and maimed, lessened, and imprisoned the survivors. The Exalted butchered entire species and civilizations for opposing them. Creation is a world or corrupt or indifferent gods and tyrannical Exalts because they committed atrocity upon atrocity to make the world that way, instead of it being a world of slaves and prayer cattle.
Whether this is better or not is a matter of opinion. I'm sure that if you asked the Lintha, to take just one example, they would readily and vigorously agree that Sol is evil incarnate and should be overthrown, and things were way better before the Divine Revolution.
Hell, Creation is a perfect example of such; the Exalted and the gods revolted against the Architects of Reality, straight-up murdered a bunch of them, and maimed, lessened, and imprisoned the survivors. The Exalted butchered entire species and civilizations for opposing them. Creation is a world or corrupt or indifferent gods and tyrannical Exalts because they committed atrocity upon atrocity to make the world that way, instead of it being a world of slaves and prayer cattle.
Whether this is better or not is a matter of opinion. I'm sure that if you asked the Lintha, to take just one example, they would readily and vigorously agree that Sol is evil incarnate and should be overthrown, and things were way better before the Divine Revolution.
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Because I misunderstood what he said. I should be allowed to spontaneously lose my basic reading comprehension and violently castigate people for things they haven't said.
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I take medication for OCD, trust me. I get it.
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"That which you knowingly permit to occur, you are just as responsible for as if you had done it yourself" is a great argument for a character in the setting to make and a very boring one to make OOC. Who cares if TUS is "moral" or "good" or "evil" or not? He's not real! The only people who should care about whether he matches any particular standard of mortality are the people for whom he is real.
(As for the stuff about the DKs, I would rather players not know enough about the history of the DKs - let alone know enough with any degree of certainty - to be able to make that kind of precise judgment.)
(As for the stuff about the DKs, I would rather players not know enough about the history of the DKs - let alone know enough with any degree of certainty - to be able to make that kind of precise judgment.)
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Hey guys. Something from @Elagusto
Characters:Gildempru the Gastronomic Alchemists - exalted official wiki - mirror from archive.org