First Age and Primordial War characters?

[Totentanz]

Except that Desus' behavior was far worse than simply beating his mate. Desus used his powers to force Lilith to have sex with him. Desus used his powers to force Lilith to have sex with other people. Desus used his powers to force Lilith to change her sex beyond her gender identity for his amusement during sex. Desus used his powers to make Lilith know he was having sex with other people without her being able to do anything about it. He's a treacherous, abusive serial rapist who magically gaslit his wife into accepting the abuse and convinced his society into ignoring it.

Desus is a dick.

Thanks for proving my point!

[hippokrene]

I'm going to disagree with 1980s or 1990s seeing spousal abuse as a flaw instead of downright villainous. During the 70s and 80s, you might be able to have the hero give a ‘hysterical’ woman a slap to get her under control, but wife-beating has been considered auto-evil since it became an issue in the 70s.

Being a drunk or adulterous has a long history as a flaw for male characters.Spousal abuse went from being a good thing to being a bad thing no one admitted was happening to being a bad thing people recognized.

Honestly, can you think of a hero from that era was once a wife-beater but reformed?

I actually wouldn’t be surprised if there were soap operas with that sort of storyline, but I’ve never heard any Exalted writer reference General Hospital or As the World Turns, and Desus doesn’t fit into the mold of a soap opera male lead anyway.

[Kallipolis]

Thanks for proving my point!

Maybe I misunderstood it, but I don't agree with what I saw was your point. I don't think the hostility to Desus could be chalked up to "forum shenanigans" or "shifting morals". Patriarchal civilizations have long covered up and dismissed domestic violence against women under the banner of "out of sight, out of mind", but those civilizations have also had ideas of public propriety and abstract discomfort with the notion of domestic violence that manifested in unwritten limits to grotesque abuse that would have shocked "civilized" men's morals. Desus' behavior would have been despicable even to Athenians, from what I would assume.

[TheCountAlucard]

I dunno, Desus is about as abusive as Edward, and Twihards love the shit outta him.

[AnubisXy]

In one of the First Age comics, it's evident that Desus beat Lilith into a miscarriage. I'm not that familiar with Twilight (I only ever read the first book), though I know there were some abusive moments. Did things actually go that far in the series?

[TheCountAlucard]

The first time Bella and Abusive Asshole are in bed together, he fucks her so hard that it literally knocks her unconscious, and then he keeps going while she's unconscious. When she wakes up, the bed is broken and she's covered in bruises.

Yeesh. And while he doesn't strike her, he often uses his superior strength to physically control her actions, which is another form of physical abuse. Additionally, more than once he's literally thrown her across a room.

Moreover, nearly everything he does with her is some form of mental or emotional abuse. Wikipedia's article for abusive relationships has this to say: "An abusive relationship is an interpersonal relationship characterized by the use or threat of physical or psychological abuse. Abusive relationships are often characterized by jealousy, emotional withholding, a lack of intimacy, infidelity, sexual coercion, verbal abuse, broken promises, physical violence, control games and power plays." About the only thing on that list he hasn't done is infidelity.

[Lioness]

Then you drop that character into the toxic state the forum was in after the release of Dreams (took a long time to make, physical books were literally falling apart, etc), and yeah, forum echo-chamber has made a guy that was intended to be a highly flawed anti-hero into the Snidley Whiplash of the entire First Age.

Or people were going by some of the very damning things implied or outright said in Lilith's write-up.

[Isator Levi]

Okay, so, this topic has taken a bit of a turn, and it has provoked some Thoughts in me. I'll try to approach them delicately.

Thoughts on domestic violence in real life... maybe later (suffice to say, unambiguously terrible).

Okay, so, as an issue in characterisation.

I think I can see what Totentanz is saying with that kind of detective character or whatever, although I would think that for the character to be palatable they would have to be somebody who recognised that their issues had made them into a threatening presence in the life of a loved one (preferably at a point very early on, particularly before it starts), at which point they voluntarily extricate themselves. I would find narratives of "redemption" to be better when there's a focus on rebuilding trust and respecting boundaries and letting the wronged party set the pace, including when that pace can be "stop, and then go in the other direction".

There can be something compelling in narratives in which we're not really supposed to sympathise with a main character, but that's a different issue. Although it can be a bit uncertain at times; I mean, are we supposed to sympathise with Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull? I've not seen it but... maybe, kind of? In the sense of a person with emotional problems and a social background that kind of conditions a sense of brutality. When it comes to roleplaying, it probably only suits a certain kind of experience; I could try it, although obviously I'd have to sound out who I was playing with.

Although I think part of the idea of that film was that LaMotta's violent disposition alienated him from everybody around him and undermined the gains from his boxing successes. There can also be something compelling in stories where the tone is amoral and nihilistic, where people can be brutal and destroyed for it or get away with it and it teaches us nothing. That's still part of Exalted's bailiwick (it would kind of have to be if the Flat Earth is supposed to be one of the biggest influences), but certainly kind of marginal and definitely not for everybody.

I saw the film biopic of Sylvia Plath in which she is played by Gwyneth Paltrow and Ted Hughes is played by Daniel Craig once, and there are instances of domestic violence that arise from their respective pathologies and the co-dependent nature of their relationship, I... think there's a measure of sympathy that could be had towards Hughes in that story, and... real life, maybe (although I recall the big blowout scene is more of a mutual bitter fight than a beating).

This is not about finding reasons to be okay with domestic abuse, mind. More like... trying to examine a range of narratives. Maybe also articulate a picture of domestic abusers other than them being monsters, even if the best attitude regarding them is "needs to stay away or be kept away from people they could hurt, at least until some serious behaviour modifications have been taken in".

Okay, so, how does this regard Desus?

I don't know; maybe nothing should regard Desus, since at the time games are set in he would be dead for more than a thousand years. Maybe if Lillith was still viewed as his mate and her issues still stemmed from hurts he had inflicted on her?

I suppose right now I'm focusing more on precepts for what the Exalted in the Time of Tumult are like, so if nothing else maybe Desus could be used as a shorthand.

...

I don't know. I've been sitting staring at this computer screen for the last five minutes trying to think of somewhere else to go with this, and I just can't put words together.

Now I'm thinking of stories in which a couple or a bunch of friends or a family is together, and it's a happy occasion and everybody is laughing and smiling including a character whom I might know or suspect to be a bit of a bad 'un, and the framing draws me into the same kind of emotional response as some focus character, that sense of "sure, whatever else they've done, they're not so bad; this life can be happy". Then something goes wrong, there's a shift in the mood of the harmful character, some dangerous words or tone comes in, maybe another character tries to revive the good vibes or stop the bad person and gets shrugged off or overrulled and it just... even if it doesn't end in actual violence, it manifests in the scenario, the relationships.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is the idea of... yes it's going to be possible for there to be Exalted who are physically or emotionally harmful to people in their lives, and there can be a range of portrayals around that, and maybe they can be there without consuming the whole narrative.

Really, with Desus... I look back at the write-up in Dreams of the First Age and it doesn't really consume the whole narrative (although it does a bit more for Lilith), but that's partially because it's... kind of empty. Spends several paragraphs saying remarkably little about what he does or what he's like. I guess that's the kind of scenario in which nuance gets lost, since a stand-out detail spreads out to fill the void.

So I guess if there was ever a character in a relationship with abusive tendencies in future it would help if they had a personality.

[Isator Levi]

Or people were going by some of the very damning things implied or outright said in Lilith's write-up.

The whole thing with the two of them is just weird. The write-up for Desus just gesticulates vaguely at the idea that he's kind of mean and people also love him and he gets good publicity by doing... things, and also wastes our time with a paragraph telling us about how he's basically apathetic politically (while also sometimes communicating hidden agendas?), while the one for Lilith is almost entirely about the idea that he tries to completely control her life and personality... You've got one that says basically nothing and another which makes the entire character about this one extreme thing, and the two hardly seem to actually interact with one another. How in the hell do you go from "Desus is casually sadistic and has never had an impetus to restrain himself" to "Desus strictly controls her relationships, what powers she does and doesn't have (especially to keep her from doing stuff to escape from him) and has outright programmed some responses into her"? Bad enough that it's gross, but it's also terribly sloppy.

[Murcushio]

As far as veterans who survived to the "First Age"... Lilith the Lunar,

I don't think that can possibly be right, because if Lilith were a Primordial War veteran then even with anagathic intervention she ought to be long, long dead by the Time of Tumult. Lunars do not live to be 5,000 years old without something like the Peaches of Immortality or that Hearthstone that makes you immortal. Ingosh Silverclaws only made it to like 3200 and he's supposedly the longest-lived Lunar ever.

I don't think there are any Primordial War vets left by the Time of Tumult. Even Kejak didn't Exalt until after the war.

[Weimann]

About Desus, I think the social media sphere needs to get better at acknowledging multiple readings of the same entity. "Desus is a dick" is a well-established, well-argumented reading that I don't dispute. This shouldn't hinder other readings to occur, even readings that do not touch on, or do even contradict, the established ones.

[Isator Levi]

Lilith has never been written to have fought in the Primordial War, no.

[Isator Levi]

Regarding the matter of echo-chamber: Totentanz made a good point, but I still recall a time at which forum discussion of Desus defaulted to the idea that he was some kind of casual serial rapist and murderer, not only somewhat cruel and sadistic bit outright sleazy, and at its most extreme the idea that he couldn't so much as walk out his door (or at least go on one of his quests) without doing something brutal to somebody (this portrayal was also evident and rather prominent in TV Tropes entries), and it's really about as evident in his write-up or anything else about him as the idea that Sidereal policies for acquiring the newly incarnated amount to brainwashing. Hell, if it wasn't for a particular phrasing in his Virtue Flaw and a specialty in seduction, I would be inclined to assume that he has Lillith and Bright Shattered Ice and nobody else. Whatever the merits or failings of the portrayal of his relationship to Lillith, it's at least fairly consistent with the idea that he's dangerously obsessed with her.

[Solar]

There was a guy who killed Adrian's first fetich and transformed her into Adorjan

Marus, I want to say? He had some sort of Demon Wrecking Shout.

[Isator Levi]

if Gunstar Autochthonia can be extrapolated from for info, then the Magnus may have been around as well

The Magnus is featured in Ink Monkey's material, so as far as Second Edition goes his existence was at least canon. John would write him as talking about witnessing the imprisonment of the Yozis, so he at least imagined the guy as having fought in the Primordial War.