I think the mythic and weird fantasy themes can perfectly work together, it's just a question of writing them properly. I have come to lean more 3e as time went on, but I'm gonna be real; I have some pretty persistent issues with how 3e handles things, just as I have them with 2e and 1e, and I think Exalted could really benefit from, as I've talked a little bit with
@Rook (and she has talked
far more about herself) about before:
- A style guide.
- A consistent art style befitting the style guide.
- Some core axioms and an identity for what it actually wants to be about.
- Immense amount of research into culture and myth, because God, does it need it.
Yeah,
I'm the one who's entirely fine with the Sun having been spending the years away at the Games of Divinity until some spark of excellence catches his eye and he Chooses a new Lawgiver. Because I feel it's perfectly appropriate for the sun to be a victorious war-god and sky-father, resting on his laurels after victory and playing away at games, while forsaking his duties as the Most High and King of Heaven. But I have, and likely will again, in the future argued for autonomous Exaltation process before, because as you say, it can support some pretty rad themes.
@ this and the thing it is addressing from last page and bearing in mind I have clear preferences for what I care about in Exalted as a game/don't much care for any specific editon (also please forgive my truncated typing, this is from my phone and Madrid is a sweltering stovtop early in the AM, and I am writing in bed):
Exalted has put its fingers in many figurative pies throughout its history and that does include a sort of speculative fiction of social sciences and the geography of people, such as the (un)ethical starknes of Manacle & Coin's socioeconomic portrayals of slavery or Blood & Salt's everything. Neil Gaiman has said that science fiction is foremost a literature of ideas, and this applies to that which is called the social sciences as well (loaded as such a term as science may be). So in that specific and limited sense I will always come to Exalted for a sort of science fiction.
That isn't to say you can't mix things up or blur the lines between scifi and fantasy, like they're somehow incompatible or even especially different. I just read a novel set in a secondary world (that may be ours) which featured, among other things: A genuinely evil empire; nonhuman races (the way elves are in genre fantasy) that can basically do magic; a story structure that for all its original and literary shape is quite knowingly archetypal when you put it all together - and it is genuinely building itself together in a mythic , Biblically awesome way.
It also contains intense adherence to classical thermodynamics, post-post-???-apoc technology, societies that regularly go literally communist (with implicit critiques of capitalism in the text), a prodigious amount of information about geology and plate tectonics that frankly makes your average scifi author look lazy, and a thoroughness in worldbuilding that actually makes it feel like there is a whole world, so many things - pertaining to economics and vegetation and political science - are accounted for.
It is also one perfectly coherent novel that manages to, seemingly effortlessly, waltz through scifi and fantasy at the same time to give a truly horrifying and compelling setting before you realize you are watching a mother
fucking Earthbend a magma-venting volcano shut after it was opened by a magic floating amethyst obelisk which had a small stone faerie inside it, itself produced by a hyperadvanced civilization thousands of years ago.
In short: Mash them genres together, texture, conceits, subject matter and all, together, as long as you know what it does and to what ends you are doing it. These things work fine together. You get weird shit that if done right will be perfectly coherent, eminently gameable, organically anachronistic and fucking rad.
Also read The Fifth Season you nerds it's great.
