98.228.34.226 at 20:04, 12 June 2010

2010-06-12T20:04:20Z

Conversion script: link fix

2010-04-06T01:18:12Z

link fix

Conversion script: link fix

2010-04-05T08:08:28Z

link fix

Conversion script: link fix

2010-04-03T09:05:56Z

link fix

208-186-60-137.nrp3feld.roc.ny.frontiernet.net: *

2004-07-07T02:20:27Z

New page

This came up in the "Slam Lunars" thread, and I thought I'd comment
here. :)

For reference, I'm responding to the whole subthread, and not just the
person I quote.

**
> And as presented in them, Ligier and most of his
> buddies are really nice guys, when compared with
> Raksi.

It depends on your perspective.

Demons are "bad" for two reasons in Exalted. One of these reasons is
the same reason that Raksi is "bad" -- your morality is utterly
irrelevant to them. Even the ones that grasp moral relativism don't
give props to the human ethos, because they have no interest in doing
so.

This doesn't make them monsters like Raksi, of course. But at that
level, the difference between Raksi and Alveua is mostly, Alveua
doesn't *want* to eat people. The fact that *people* can find some
morality in her actions and not in Raksi's is totally irrelevant to
her; and if someone came to her and said, "I've discovered that for
every person you reforge, the weave of fate is forced to kill a
thousand children in agony," she'd look at you blankly. She'd still be
waiting for the point.

The other reason is that they're broken, of course. The Yozis very
much want to not care about people, for good or for ill, but it's
difficult to maintain superhuman detachment when the Exalted turned
you inside out, trapped you inside the bodies of your peers, and, as
the icing on the cake, short-sheeted your bed. The Yozis are hateful
because they cannot forget, and bitter because they cannot forget, and
probably distantly astonished that humans are somehow important enough
to make them care. All of them, from the Yozis to the First Circles,
are fundamentally damaged.

In a way, a good description for what they've lost is the capacity for
heroism. It's that thing that stands between Solars and most WoD
splats, that thing that lets you be grander than life without being
monstrous. Solars can still forge a utopia, although canonically they
won't. Demons don't have that option.

They can still be Raksi. (And worse.) They can still be *better* than
Raksi. But they can't be the thing that the people who complain about
Raksi would rather Lunars be. There's no healing for them as the world
of Exalted stands. And that's why you have the demons that are all
about pain and deceit and stuff---not because it's what they are, but
because it's the only direction they can go. They've lost their
protagonist slot, more severely even than the Abyssals, and the only
way to get it back is to be PCs in a really deviant game. :)

IMHO.

It's worth bearing in mind, when evaluating my opinion, that demons
for the Exalted setting are often written by people who are providing
antagonists or special effects, and their consensus is going to skew
demons towards more horrible stuff. Similarly, I often get assignments
that involve the swords & sorcery idea that summoning demons is freaky
and dangerous but basically okay, and that they're decent allies for a
sorcerer, so I'm going to skew towards making them, well, not so much
intrinsically evil as, well, lost, broken, and inhuman to begin with.
That makes me a good reference point for understanding
demons-as-things-in-the-world, but not so great for understanding
demons-as-antagonists.

← Older revision		Revision as of 20:04, 12 June 2010
Line 65:		Line 65:
	demons-as-things-in-the-world, but not so great for understanding		demons-as-things-in-the-world, but not so great for understanding
	demons-as-antagonists.		demons-as-antagonists.
		+
		+	----
		+	*Back to [[Thus_Spake_Zaraborgstrom]]
		+	----

← Older revision	Revision as of 01:18, 6 April 2010
(No difference)

← Older revision	Revision as of 08:08, 5 April 2010
(No difference)

@@ Line 38: / Line 38: @@
 In a way, a good description for what they've lost is the capacity for
-heroism. It's that thing that stands between Solars and most WoD
+heroism. It's that thing that stands between Solars and most [[WoD]]
 splats, that thing that lets you be grander than life without being
 monstrous. Solars can still forge a utopia, although canonically they

Thus Spake Zaraborgstrom/EvilDemons - Revision history

98.228.34.226 at 20:04, 12 June 2010

Conversion script: link fix

Conversion script: link fix

Conversion script: link fix

208-186-60-137.nrp3feld.roc.ny.frontiernet.net: *