It's not a lottery ticket, though. It's a god choosing you, personally, for a higher purpose. Yeah, there's not enough to go around, and the gods aren't omniscient and seeing every possible candidate. But it's not a random, impartial thing. It's a "Yes, you, personally, are worthy of bearing my power and acting in my name in the world." When the Sun chooses you, he chooses you. When Luna chooses you, she's choosing you. It's not a lottery, it's not some impartial series of random chances giving you the power.
It's the decision of an ancient being of immense wisdom and power deciding that you, personally, are the best of all the options they can see at the time. There's no such thing as an unworthy Solar, all of them earned it, in that moment. Maybe they do horrible things later, but they still earned the right to act as the Chosen of the Sun. Maybe someone across the world that the Sun couldn't see deserved it more, but that seems like a pretty fucked up way to look at it. You still got picked over a lot of others. If you didn't deserve it on some level, you wouldn't have even been considered.
Sol Invictus hasn't given a fuck about Creation for centuries; he's basically an emaciated corpse with its shriveled fingers clenched around his piece in the Games of Divinity at this point. If Malfeas broke out of his prison, redecorated Yu Shan with the innards of its residents, smashed open the Jade Pleasure Dome, and then went right at Sol's face with the Blade of the Yozis? Sol wouldn't even bother raising a hand to defend himself.
The "Unconquered" Sun is a tragic figure, a guard dog that shed oceans of blood because it just wanted to be free... and then discovered that the world is complex and uncaring, that the blood on its paws couldn't give it a purpose, that the world turned on regardless of what it did or what it felt, and that getting rid of the Holy Tyrant didn't prevent others from doing horrible things - and didn't stop it from having to either do the job it so desperately wanted to escape from, or deafen itself to the cries of the oppressed. Victory defeated him, in the end, and now he's a wretched husk of wasted potential and sadness. You can't go to him for answers, because he doesn't have them and he's given up on trying to find them. You can't rely on him to solve your problems, because he's been crushed by the knowledge that no matter how many times he intervenes, there will always be some other atrocity to address, some other cry for help that he has to answer, and drowned himself in the Games to cope with the guilt.
The Celestial Exaltations are completely autonomous - certainly, their decision-making is guided by the imprint of whichever Incarna donated power to make them, but the Solar Exaltations are running off of the version of Sol that was willing to shatter Heaven and Earth to escape the bonds of servitude, the radiant, brilliant figure who Theion declared would call him "father". Not the gutless burnout who'd rather let Creation burn than care. And even in those halcyon days, the Sun was already wearying of his obligations, and availed himself of the Great Maker's craft to lessen his burdens.
For all that, there are plenty of unworthy Solars. The Exaltations seek
exceptional men, not good ones. Morality as we understand it was never a significant part of their selection criteria.
Nope! Not how it works! That crap got thrown right into the garbage where it belongs! Exaltations are not extradimensional AI drones, they are Exaltations granted personally by the highest of the high.
Oh my Elloge what the hell are you doing.
The entire point of the goddamn character is that he's a deconstruction of the Christ/YHWH figure you apparently want him to be. When the Solars call Sol Invictus the Most High, Holiest of Holiest, Shield of Creation, etc, they're stating a political/religious/personal opinion, not metaphysical fact. Him being a paragon of Virtue is a sign of how the Virtues are poorly named and tend to promote dysfunctional behavior.
Likewise, tearing out the mechanical guts of the setting and replacing it with a river of
~BRUCATO~ is lazy, reductionist, reactionary, and just generally a decision driven by either idiocy or madness. If Sol Invictus is not only some nebulous D&D divinity, but
also a direct port of Jesus Christ, then you've failed utterly at doing Exalted justice.
If you're going to unironically Jesus up the Unconquered Sun regardless? Then pattern him after A.R.D.N.E.H.: a self-aware artificial defense network that fought an army of demons to protect mankind and ultimately sacrificed itself to destroy the demons' masters and thus secure humanity's future, and is now remembered as a messianic deity called "Ardneh" by the distant descendants of the people he saved. There. He was a swell guy who fought Primordials and didn't afraid of anything, and he even did it based on his own moral prerogative and not because he is
GOOD-MAN, the Man Who Is Good!
(Seriously, the idea of godlike figures actually having to figure out morality for themselves is far more captivating than gods being born with a spiritual codex of How To Morality.)
it's almost like addiction, depression, and 10,000 years of corruption and millions of superpowered beings dedicated to keeping the corruption going aren't problems solved in a day, or even a decade.
Like, for serious. The canonical answer to the Unconquered Sun turning his gaze to Creation and seeing the state it's in was "Fuck no" and he jailbreaks the Solars and immediately starts Exalting people left and right.
Did you seriously just act like Exalted "canon" - the one with pocket dimension rape camps, Lillun, and incomprehensible proprietary crossbows - is something you can use to argue your case?
