When someone argues that fucking Jetstream Sam is a mortal, and moreover that to represent him as a Solar is "demeaning," Exalted has basically failed on a fundamental level.
I suppose my tone wasn't quite exaggerated enough for comic effect, but here we go: Sam's big reveal in the story is he's the dude who Somehow keeps pace with technological superhumans without the powers. That is his whole gimmick, his keystone denouement after all the shit he's put you through. So yes, taking that concept and inserting it into Exalted as "but really nah, he's a dude with superhuman powers" is kinda missing the point of that moment and character, because
of fucking course you can make him a Solar. You can twist just about
anyone into being a Solar wearing a funny hat if you don't care what that character was intending to be or say. But that's just not interesting at all, because "okay, they did something pretty cool, they're an Exalt" is the Default Assumption at work.
This is why "convert a historical figure into an Exalt" threads and the like got super-fucking-tiresome, because in the end it simply came down to listing names and what Solar Caste they'd be, because who would be anything else unless they were Fireburn Von Magmatube, hotheaded inventor of the rotary flamethrower? But then again,
inventor, that's gotta mean
Twilight, right? In media, this train of thought extends even worse to those things just too far outside the Solar aesthetic, because then Every shapeshifter, animal-man or Cheshire cat is a potential Lunar, every robot an Alchemical, every skull-painted edgelord is an Abyssal waiting in the wings, and so on.
Its both Obvious and Uninteresting because its not saying
anything worthwhile with the sheer array of options at work within Creation which are not "what Exalt-type color is their costume, and what do they do for a living." Blue box goes in square-shaped hole, everyone claps and feels super smart for this unforeseen and compelling insight. Why
can't someone just be seen as a suped-up mortal with cool gear? Or a godblooded champion? Or a ghost, or a fair folk, or an transformed animal in human shape? Why is the question when non-PC Exalts aren't onscreen always, "what are the other Exalted doing?" Any answer starting with "but its the title of the game" can fuck right off, because that's an intended reference to the
player party, not summarizing every story ever to be told with the damn thing.
Its a reductive and honestly
boring mindset which is more harmful to games than any amount of "wrong phrasing" misrepresenting portions of the setting, as though any/all problems with the game are the result of people not talking about it the
right way. No, the problem comes from attempting to boil everything down into the least engaging, most rote and dry "no shit" interpretations of any given thing, demanding it all be sorted away into the proper boxes and then getting fussy about how everything is so
codified and
sterile now.
If only Godblooded or ghosts were
cooler, maybe we should make an Exalt-type for that?
