Thus Spake Zarasheppard/DevilsBargains
- Foxcalibur:
- The correct answer to "when I rise to bladdah bladdah you can still have blow and hookers," is to say "keep your blow and hookers, thank you, I don't want any part in your revenge." Even if that means you DIE, then and there, it's the right answer. The Yozis drive a hard bargain, but you don't have to take it. All you have to do is resist one extreme: to serve hell.
Why?
What good does refusing it serve? Creation has no YHWH, and the closest thing it ever had to that is now the Demon City. There is no Baby Jesus who you will make cry by listening to a demon. You have no afterlife in heaven to look forward to when you die, no matter how good you are, just lethe and reincarnation or a grey half-existence in the Underworld, which itself can only lead to lethe and reincarnation or the far worse Oblivion option.
The Exaltation the demon is offering you is going to go to someone.
The story of Fauste, and its themes, which you seem to adore so much, is tied into a big whole mess of other things, and Exalted's position as a narrative and as a set of assertions is basically "Fauste is just something the Church tells people so they'll keep tithing and doing whatever the priests say." Just like Exalted, as a game line, takes the position that "Heavy is the head that wears the crown" is first and foremost something kings say to keep the lowly peasants from aspiring to kingship, and if there's any truth to the statement, that truth is not the reason why kings like to say it.
Rebelling Against the Yozis
If you swear loyalty to She Who Lives In Her Name and then spend all your time making a big empire in Creation, you are rebelling against her. She wants you to crack her out of hell and then get out of the way.
The Incarnae just wanted their Chosen to stay out of the Jade Pleasure Dome. That's not a huge deal when the Exalted had all of Creation to play around with. The Yozis want a hell of a lot more from the Infernals than the Incarnae ever wanted from the other Exalted. That's why the Infernals might rebel when the other Exalted didn't. ---
Two Types of Villains
The Yozis are a type of villain not often seen in action movies.
In action movies, you will often see the sort of villain where everything goes right for them up until the very end. This is so normal that we assume every villain works like that. Sometimes they're written very well -- Hans Gruber in Die Hard, for example. Other times, they are written badly -- most Bond villains. But it's very normal to have villains who are going to succeed right up until the last minute.
That's not the Yozis.
The Yozis are another type of villain. They're the type of villains where things start out going well for them, and then the protagonists get involved, and the villains' control of the situation starts to slip. This makes them nervous. In their nervousness, they start to make mistakes. These mistakes make them more nervous, and they start to get panicky and desperate. In becoming panicky and desperate, they become more dangerous -- not because they're going to succeed, but because they'll begin to take courses of action they wouldn't have previously considered.
If you've read Thud!, by Terry Pratchett, the Yozis are the dark dwarves. If you've seen The Dark Knight (and this is a particularly good example about Infernals in general, but not particularly topical to this discussion because we're talking about the possibility of not-evil Infernals), the Yozis are the mob bosses and the Infernals are the Joker. The Joker kicks the mob bosses in the balls because they did not know what they were doing -- they were scared and desperate and so they made a mistake.
This sort of villain also shows up in crime fiction a lot, you know, the kind where the bad guy seems smart and on the ball at the beginning, but by the end he's holding a gun to a hostage's head while standing with one foot over a very long drop, surrounded by police who are pointing guns at him and saying things like "It doesn't have to end this way."
More to the point, this is what happens in real life to plotters who start to lose their grip on their plots. The Yozis aren't the Exalted. They don't get to drag their genre protection around behind them. For the Yozis, Exalted begins in media res -- by R.Y. 768, they've become very desperate. They haven't been winning for a long, long time.
It has always been presented that the Yozis aren't dangerous because they're going to escape Hell. They can't escape Hell. They're fucked. They're dangerous because they can't accept that they can't escape Hell, and in their attempts to do so, they might burn the world as a side-effect.
Their portrayal is not limited to this, and includes aspects of the Yozis as Hans Gruber, because it's understood that a lot of people will want to run them as masterminds about to succeed up until the last minute, so there's support for that. But Hans Gruber is not the portrayal of the Yozis that arises naturalistically from their place in the setting.
