Autochthon's sickness defines Autochthonia by dooming it. The whole setting is shaped by the resources scarcity brought about by his disease. If Autochthon can be cured without basically playing another game, all other concerns are dwared by this, and your players ask you why they're bothering engaging in magitech espionnage against a rival nation when they could be fixing the world.
But if they can't, then there are a thousand things to be doing in the long, long timeframe before the apocalypse really kicks in.
Creation has a thousand dooms, so yes, you can have many "Save the world from Threat X" plots. Autochthon's sickness isn't that. It defines its setting in a way the Neverborn don't.
No, their narrative space relies on 'you can't cure Autochthon,so let's instead play out the drama and conflict arising from the backdrop of his grandiose decay and slow death.' If you want to cure him, you have to rely on ST fiat to open the seal and basically start playing a different game, which most STs who set out to run Autochthonia will be unwilling to do.
This is all great and stuff but the problem is that by excplicitly pointing out that their is a cure and it exists in a certain direction that means that all this grandiose film noir struggle against entropy stuff is
the biggest idiot ball in the entire setting.
Their is a solution to Autocthon's illness. It's Solar. The only right and correct action is breaking the Seal, finding Solars and fixing Autocthon. Everything else is entirely overshadowed by the fact this is possible and you're not doing it. Because you are idiots.
It would be like if, say, in the real world we could solve global warming by just going to Mars and flipping the Climate Fixing Switch. Yeah, getting to Mars is hard. But frankly, if there was a big button on Mars that fixed the environment it is basically the only thing we should be doing as a species.
And you could claim the Autocthonians don't know this. But that's not important. Because
we the audience know this. Thus while I'm sitting around playing out Ghost in the Shell; communist aztec robot version, it will constantly be in the back of my head "Nothing Majority of Seven Sections does matters because all this fighting void cults is meaningless next to the fact she could be breaching the seal, finding Solars, fixing the entire world and rendering this plotline pointless."
It's the
anti Yozi's can't escape problem. By offering a solution to what is supposed to be an intractable problem you render the problem... tractable. And thus the action of not solving it into wasted effort.
It's like how the existence of the Redemption rules for Abyssals destroyed the conceit of the Great Curse. Oh great, now we explicitly know how to actually fix the Solar Exalted. We can just turn them all into Abyssals, then redeem them, and the Great Curse is gone. Is this risky? Yeah. Will it work? Yeah.
Why are we not doing this?
Once again, the comparable example would be "why are you bothering with your petty squabbles with the Realm when you could be fixing the world?"
But the trick here is there is no fixing the world. You can't actually solve the major problems of Exalted in the long term, only hold them off indefinitely. This isn't the equivalent of Dragonblooded being selfish in the face of a world falling apart due to inevitable forces. This is the equivalent of their being a Save The World button and the Dragonblooded not pushing it because... well, the idiot ball.
Yes, you can houserule it out. But that's stupid and you should never have to do that. The book should offer some explicitly non canon options for perhaps maybe dealing with Autocthon's sickness or it being intractable regardless of what you do. In other words it should have been dealt with exactly like the possibility of the Yozi's escape. "By default no, nobody will ever cure Autocthon. But here are some potential plot hooks if you want to run that plotline anyway with some justifications why some other Assembly hasn't done this before now..."
