1)They were fighting in midsummer, when Winter is weakest. They were fighting in reality, where you cant wield excessive amounts of power without breaking reality; thats literally why Ferrovax stayed out of it. They were fighting during a major Outsider offensive, when most of Winter's resources were focused on defense of reality.
Ethniu was a Titan, and explicitly stronger personally than pretty much everyone else on that battlefield.
And yet she was vulnerable to a mortal wielding a Sword.
A lot of the Dresdenverse is rock-paper-scissors.
2)The Fomor are signatories because they arent really very strong. The Courts had trashed them before and they ran. Noone outside the Fomor even knew Ethniu was alive, and Ethniu preserved her power levels by staying away from reality; the moment she showed up, she began to eat the debuff that the White God had declared on any divinity that chose to stay active in reality.
3)In Exalted, even 3CDs generally needed significant effort to kill a city. It wasnt a trivial issue.
For Solaroids, citykiller attacks needed either Solar Circle Sorcery along the lines of Rain of Doom or Total Annihilation OR Exalted Craft for Thousand-Forged Dragons or Soulkiller Orbs or Five Metal Shrikes OR creative reinterpretation of Sideral Martial Arts OR elder Charms.
Mab's ability to fuck the globe with personal powers put her firmly in 3CD territory.
4)Mab, Titania and a bunch of others are true immortals, not just unaging but undying.
You can kill them with sufficient effort, but you cant truekill them outside specific conditions with regards to date and place.
They'll just come back. Pissed.
1) I did note that Mab was weak at the team, but you realize who
wasn't weak? Titania (it's midsummer! Mab's rival is at the height of her power!)
And Ethniu, without the Eye, took her out like a trashbag, and had enough muscle to do the same to Odin and the Erlking, and not even be severely damaged. That's not a good showing for these immortals.
(Also, even for being the strongest being on the field, Ethniu at most destroyed a few city blocks at a time, and needed to recharge afterwards. That's just not the same level of casual destruction I imagined for a cthonic Titan come again. That's less than a couple MOABs!)
Swords of the Cross are very much an exception, and it is weird that Knights of the Cross aren't a part of the Accords given their capabilities (but the Denarians are?!?!)
2)
How aren't the Fomor strong?
Why did they sign on to the Accords, when they
know about Ethniu juicing harder than anyone combined? (If Mab threatened them, they could've just laughed it off and gone their merry way. They already did pretty much that, given how they treated the Accords even when part of them. Hint, the first peace talks they attended did not end well)
You say Ethniu was eating a debuff, but again Ethniu with that debuff, without the Eye, was still enough to 3v1 Titania at the height of her power after being debuffed a third time with a waterfall straight to the head. Odin and the Erlking were literally afterthoughts to her at that point. If that's Ethniu debuffed, it doesn't matter that she's debuffed because she's still strong enough to wreck everybody else who'd threaten the Fomor into signing
3) I'm not denying Mab's supposed and never seen on-screen abilities to ice age the entire world isn't amazing. I'm just saying, that ability clearly isn't useful in a fight given she was in a fight for her life and didn't use it.
Similarly, I was focusing less on raw output of destruction of the Exalted and more the nature of their Perfect Defenses: namely, they're cheap for their buck and scale pretty damn high, compared to anything we've seen Dresden Files show.
Take the nuke example. Mab was wiped out nullifying one shot from the Eye of Balor, which she explicity said she used raw power to tank, because she ran the calculations and realized she had enough in the tank to block it once. Somewhat impressive to stop a reality bending attack in its track (somewhat weird when you look back and realize the aforementioned attack didn't ever do that much material damage, even in absolute terms), but one shot and Mab's out. Meanwhile, Exalted could take that shot head-on multiple times, or dodge it, or parry it, at only a relative fraction of their total Essence.
If Molly had to take the Eye head-on (once she gets the right charms), she could take it multiple times, and she could do it even if the Eye was 3x or 5x or 100x stronger. Mab, in any other circumstance, would've had to eat it straight to the face. Her defense was very much not a Perfect Defense in Exalted terms, given it was dependent on her having enough raw power to stop whatever's coming for her ass.
4) I'm not sure why this matters, given
A) it doesn't matter if Titania came straight back after Ethniu suplexed her, because Ethniu would've just done the same again and again. Being immortal and undying is great unless you're not the biggest cat on the block, because then you're just a punching bag. You being pissed about that means nothing when you don't have the power to
do anything about it.
B) Molly, funnily enough, has put "sufficient effort" into being able to kill immortals. The same amount of effort most Exalted would've put into killing demons or gods who were also true immortals. You know what happens to them when they fight an Exalted with the right Charms? They die. Immortality is great unless you're fighting someone who ignores your immortality.
Really, the argument I'm trying to make isn't take DF doesn't have heavyweights who can do super radical cool stuff. DF does have those!
I'm just saying, in a scrap, most people are going to start running out of power and subsequently dying if Molly starts throwing around MOABs or nukes around (getting them and finding a place to use them is the hard part). So while defending Chicago from Ethniu invading might be rough, if Molly were proactive and took a nuke with her to pay an Exalted diplomatic visit to the Winter/Summer Court/Fomor lands, we all know how that's gonna end.
Lotta radioactive (and
DEAD) fae/fomor. Including Mab and Titania.
Just to point out, large effects may not be more powerful than smaller ones. Like the difference between a heating pad and a blowtorch.
Both produce heat, but one is much more intense than the other, while being smaller.
Yeah, but we've seen on screen which is more intense. It's not the city block buster, I'll tell you that much. A nuke has a larger effect than the Eye of Balor (kinda sad to say), but it
also is a whole lot more powerful and intense. A nuke's aftereffects dont get washed away from like 60 seconds of a rainstorm, and a nuke also doesn't leave any survivors in the same way the Eye of Balor was surprisingly happy to spare anything that wasn't part of the Chicago architectural landscape. More people survived multiple firings of the Eye than, I can assure you, would've survived a Davy Crockett going off anywhere close by.
