Thus Spake Zaranephilpal/YoziAttitudes
Nephilpal - 10/28/04 - 03:04 PM
Do you care about the germs in your intestines? Some of them help you digest food, and some of them don't really care about you and just suck out nutrients from your waste. Some are parasitic, and your immune system wipes them out whenever and wherever possible. I'd venture to say you don't think about them much, or when you do, it's because you have cramps or some other intestinal problem. That or you're reminded of them.
A germ can kill you. Fairly effectively, too. Especially if it is a virus tailored to wipe you out. Exalted are living weapons. From the Primordial perspective, they're germ warfare. Of course they won! We all know that. We know the Exalted beat Cthulhu with his own tentacles. So what? A lesser being destroyed a greater being because it was a better killer. That doesn't make the lesser being greater. If you die of the plague, your ghost probably won't regard the germs as superior beings, and neither will your surviving family members out in quarantine.
The Sidereal insight into fate availed [i]nothing[/i] against beings that push fate out of the way every time they act. The Sidereals could help plan things because they were good at planning things, but in no way did prognostication win the war. The Yozis remain incomprehensible glitches in the plan. Even the toenails of the Yozis are glitches in the plan who bend and warp the path of the future by their very presence. Sidereals have a lot of nasty tricks for beating on demons, to be sure, but that gets back to them being effective viruses. Lunars are savage, but so what? Mayhaps they understand the bloodlust of an Erymanthus better for being savage. How does that help them understand a Yozi? What on earth do Luanrs have to do with Gaia, except that Gaia uses their patron as a fuckbuddy? We don't know that Gaia cares about humans any more than the other Primordials, so much as her agenda didn't run counter to humans. When you start imagining her as genuinely benevolent and nurturing, you're anthropomorphizing her. You're in for a very, very nasty shock somehwere down the line. The only thing Gaia has been confirmed to love is Luna... and maybe the other Primordials insofar as she interceded on behalf on them to keep the Yozis from being massacred. Solars are all about perfection, which does make their powers closer to Primordials, but... that's like saying that a germ can disable my immune system using the same overall pattern of chemicals that my immune system uses to dispatch germs.
You're arguing that the Exalted defeated the Primordials, so they must have understood them. I'm saying that the two aren't connected. They couldn't understand the titans because the titans defy understanding and the purpose/well-being of the titans is counter to the purpose/well-being of people. The Exalted had the means and opportunity to triumph, not through understanding, but through power.
To drop my microbe analogy a moment, let's say you're the smartest, strongest and richest man on the planet. You think deeper thoughts than Einstein and Stephen Hawking combined and I could never ever see what you see, think what you think or be such a gloriously fit paragon of human life. But I catch you on the sidewalk, I pull out a gun and I blow your brains all over the street. Then I take your wallet. Did I understand you? No. But I have your wallet, and I had a gun, and that's all that matters.
So I reiterate my point. You can't understand them. You can't play them. You can certainly fake it, play a piece that is small enough and localized enough or wearing a mask of smallness to facilitate meaningful interaction. But that's all.
Elder Exalted are smarter than younger Exalted and stranger, too. That makes them vermin instead of microbes. They are no more equipped to understand than they ever were; they just have a bigger gun and a faster draw.
Charlequin wrote:
I don't understand how you can reconcile the concepts of heroism in the Exalted corebook with a picture of Exalts as very flashy thugs.
Nephilpal replied:
Why? Because I'm deliberately framing their actions in a context I do not personally hold, but which is closer to how these actions appear from the perspective that the Primordials are the only beings allowed to have free will and be in charge. If you're a human, then Exalted are supermen. They are radiant, smart, heroic. They come to liberate you, guide you and inspire you. They can overcome and destroy any monster, build an empire and terraform the madness beyond the borders of the world so you can grow crops there. They are wondrous, glorious, peerless. Being a human, I would so very much love to be one or at least pretend to be one.
But then, if I were a Primordial, I'd see things differently. You spread a picnic down and the ants come. They do that, those ants. Not to worry, you can squash the ants. But ack! Something is wrong! They have spiders and the spiders are biting you and you are helpless and now they are wrapping you in a cocoon and the ants are crawling all over your picnic and eating it and you can't do anything about it. Damn the bugs! Damn them all! You wish you could squash them, but you can't. You hate them. You hate them all. The Exalted aren't heroes, they're just bugs with nasty venom. They all need squashing or taming into completely harmless pets... yes, train spiders to kill spiders. That will show them!
Charlequin wrote:
My issue is that I find one-dimensional beings which can only be dealt with through violence to be drastically at odds with the game of Exalted as I understand it. Exalted is about the clash of epic heroes -- the tragedy of one hero falling to another's blade, the smell of victory over another as great as you, the holy wars and ten thousand year rivalries launched over a single rose. A villain who can't speak (at least not from conviction), who can't love, who can't hate -- victory over that is hollow. It's not epic, it's not heartwrenching or exalted (in the lowercase-e sense) or anything. It's just pest extermination.
Nephilpal replied:
The world of Exalted is big enough to hold the variant ideologies of the Exalted, even though the ideologies themselves aren't big enough to do so. The utopian Solar empire dream has no room for backroom muckety muck bureaucrats who pull the strings, nor does it extend to tribes of howling barbarians gnawing at the infrastructure. It definitely can't exist alongside the broze epoch "good enough" Realm of the Dragon-Blooded. But as divergent and contradictory as these ideologies are in their ultimate scope, they have a basic idea in common which is what you identify as the basic theme of Exalted as a game: heroes can make the world a better place for its inhabitants. The akuma plan isn't really the akuma plan. It's the Yozi plan, which says "All of you are wrong. The setting is wrong. The universe is wrong. The war ended wrong. We made this. We should be in charge. Now, stop rebelling. Get off my damn picnic and give me back my Gameboy, you damn, dirty bugs!" Now, the problem with this philosophy is how extreme it is. It leaves no room for compromise, except in the short term. A Yozi can help a Solar overthrow the Realm through the proxy of an Infernal Exalt, but the Yozi is doing so because political instability will help it seize more power. In the end, do not harbor any illusions. It wants to enslave you, make akuma of all the Exalted and crack the world so it serves the Primordials more thoroughly than the Yozis currently obey the Exalted. The Yozi plan IS drastically at odds with the game. That's the whole point. If the Yozis win, it means that the heroes are beaten and heroism itself is beaten. If the heroes win, it will be by ensuring that the fate of those stupid enough to give themselves to the Yozis does not befall the world. If you're upset that the akuma perspective isn't fun to play, I understand that, because I wasn't aiming to make them playable unless you had very exotic and somewhat twisted tastes. If you object because it's philosophically at odds with what you believe, then good. Oppose them. Destroy them. Meet these wretches on the field of battle and dispatch them, for they are abominations against absolutely everything you stand for. When you kill an akuma, you are striking a blow against a monster that wants to enslave you and make you into something like that... hollow, broken, obedient. You can call that eeeevil if you want, but it isn't. It's a fundamentally incompatible ethos, which is very different indeed. From your view, that may be pest extermination. From the Yozi view, every Exalt killed is pest extermination. We can't live with them. We can't share with them. We can't play nice with them. They want it all, and that means our freedom and self-determination, too. We want to have self-determination. Hostilities ensue. It is simple. It is profound. It is Us vs. Them. It's ugly, dirty and at the end of the day, beating an akuma is only heroic because you trimmed the claws of the world-gnawing dragon so that it can't hurt you as badly.
Charlequin wrote:
The difference here, I suspect, is that I'm not arguing this on a cosmological level, but on a game design level. I can easily grasp the cosmology in which the entire structure makes sense (and have played in games that use it, or a close variant thereof) but I find it to be an actively unhelpful element of the Exalted setting, because it creates entities that actively interfere with what I consider to be the game's core thematics. As such, I prefer the interpretation of the cosmology -- supported by what was canonically available to readers before the Players Guide -- that doesn't inject morally null beings into the universe.
Nephilpal replied:
And again, I say that they are not morally null. Far from it. The akuma are the most moral beings in the universe, the ultimate exemplars of sainthood. When the Primordials are always right, then beings who always obey them never sin. They have ascended to such moral supremacy by doing what is expected of all beings: unconditionally surrender to the creators. Again, I say I do not agree with this. I find it offensive. I find it evil. But I'm a human being who is quite biased in favor of a humanocentric (or at least human-interested) existence. I don't want to be a puppet. I find that an abomination. If I were a Primordial, no doubt I'd feel differently.
Darzoni asked:
What do Infernal Exalted believe in?
Nephilpal replied:
That the Primordials are always right, no matter what they command or do. The state of sin and evil and wrongness is in direct proportion to the degree that anyone deviates from the will of the Yozis.
Darzoni asked:
What goals do the Infernal Exalted have as a result of their beliefs?
Nephilpal replied:
Everything and anything that stands in the way of the Yozis returning to power is an abomination which must be converted or destroyed, until the world is in a state of rightness and harmony by operating to Yozi dictates.
Darzoni asked:
What tools do the Infernal Exalted have to accomplish their goals?
Nephilpal replied:
All their original powers, plus everything that has been invested into them and all the cool toys the masters can give them.
