Thus Spake Zaranephilpal/OnTheEbonDragonAndVirtue

Hark said:
Umm, you can very much achieve that with a charm, and that is exactly why I love the charm Masae Mateo. It forces you to be that loser, it's not logic though you might try to justify it like that.

Nephilpal said:
You're not getting it. I'm not arguing that it doesn't result in the desired behavior. What I'm saying is that it arrives at the desired behavior in a way that is cool rather than pathetic. "Sweet, I'm tranhuman evil!" looks all slick and shiny and hot. It's the sort of Charm you yearn to buy because it makes you powerful on your own terms.

The Ebon Dragon doesn't get to be cool for being wicked. Everyone else is playing with their high-rated alternative lifestyle Virtues and he's the guy who fails at all them simultaneously. He exists on the human plane of what failure at Virtue means. It's more extreme for him, because his failure is more extreme. It doesn't make him weak. It doesn't make him less dangerous. But it makes him a failure. If you are trying to find a way to make the Ebon Dragon's philosophy cool in its own right, you're doing it wrong. He doesn't get to win at his own game. He gets to lose at the Sun's game, but he has the power to make other people lose worse and that's all he wants, really.

He doesn't get to channel anything for anything. He doesn't ever get a boost to run away or stand by his principles. It is never worthwhile for him to bother caring about you. It won't help him. Look at his Excellency. I wasn't being figurative when I said that Virtue is poisonous to him. He hates it. He hates it in every form, every manifestation, every philosophy. He wants it all torn down. he wants all Virtue exposed as inadequate to make any difference, as a tangled mess of hypocrisy and delusion. He wants people to look at everything they believe in--whatever that is-- and despair because he's made sure they can't have it. He is trying to make the game not even fun to play.

Nephilpal said:
Everything else in Exalted is written around the assumption that you are awesome. An Abyssal is an awesome killer. A Solar is awesome awesome. A Lunar is an awesome feral protean thingy. You "win" Exalted by being awesome, by using your skills to advance your goals.

The Ebon Dragon isn't playing the same game as everyone else. The design logic behind his magic is not predicated on being awesome, but on his ability to deny others their awesome and make them feel bad for their awesome. The Ebon Dragon isn't trying to win. He's trying to make you lose. He's trying to make the game stop being fun for other people. That's his win condition. He has fun entirely at the expense of others. He has no redeeming qualities at all. He's not a hero. He's a villain, through and through.

At his core, the Ebon Dragon doesn't want anyone else to get to play Exalted, because he actively hates the idea that people get to be cool and win. When you take his Charms, you're taking some of that mentality into yourself. That's a sharp 180 from everything else in the game. In the wrong hands, a Fiend is an immediate game-wrecker, because he has a magical incentive is to actively ruin everything that everyone else wants to do for the lulz.