First Age and Primordial War characters?

[hippokrene]

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

If that's a response to me, I don't think it really applies.

The idea is that Desus is portrayed as being an abuser and that it's meant to be an anti-heroic flaw in the vein of hardboiled heroes of pulp fiction. Edward, however, isn't portrayed as an abuser, and his treatment of Bella is meant to be a virtue in the vein of romantic heroes.

Desus fails because wife-beating isn't an acceptable flaw. Edward succeeds because ownership and domination is an acceptable virtue.

[Isator Levi]

I suppose the relevance of something like Raging Bull would necessarily need to acknowledge that it's a depiction of an actual person rather than a figure in a narrative, and that whether or not he's compelling there's a difference between going for a warts-and-all depiction of the actions of a real person and constructing a character whole cloth. Still, even within the range of characters, there are ones for whom some degree of domestic violence can work.

[Totentanz]

Thanks to Levi for his attempts to explain what I'm getting at.

My point is that the forum perception of Desus (he's a dick!) is both true, and it's uselessly reductive, to the point of missing the point of his narrative (and the point of Exalted).

Yes, Desus is a dick. He's also a hero, in much the same way that Achilles was a dick, and a hero (though not with the same brand of dickery). Also, Zeus is a dick (you raped a woman in the shape of a bull? WTF), but also a beloved, intriguing god figure. You can also apply this logic to any great many famous, "great" people in the real world.

The problem with applying this reductionist line of thinking, all too common in our reflexively-outraged 21st century culture, is that it inhibits a consideration of the overall narrative of the characters, and how they fit into their world.

Almost all the characters in Exalted are dicks. The Empress built and perpetuates an Empire that embodies (and exceeds) the worst aspects of Soviet Russia, the antebellum South, and ancient China. Every single Dynast is, to one degree or another, directly culpable in the rape, enslavement, and murder of millions of people on an ongoing basis, an atrocity that literally can't be equaled in our real world history. So, all Dynasts, over 90% of Dragon-Bloods, are dicks.

The Lunar Exalted, even as hinted at in Ex3, intentionally cultivate barbarian tribes, hone them into a weapon, and throw them at the Realm. They know most of those barbarians will eventually die. They know they will kill a lot of mostly innocent conscripts on the other side in the process. They exploit and manipulate the religious beliefs of these people in order to accomplish this.
Most Lunars are dicks.

Yep, it's a whole game world full of dickish, powerful people. If you stop at "This Exalt is a dick" you run out of compelling, interesting characters really fast.

Exalts are Mother Teresa and Mengele, Pol Pot and Patton. In some cases, they manage to push to both extremes at the same time.

My apologies for derailing this thread. Desus is to the First Age threads what Lunars are to Exalted.

[hippokrene]

It's possible that our "reflexively-outraged 21st century culture" mores simply blind us to the nuanced and powerful character that is Desus. I find it odd said mores don't seem to inhibit our ability to appreciate a host of other Exalted characters who also do things that should offend our sensibilities.

Alternatively, I'd suggest that the forum is able to handle all sort of horrific or distasteful behaviors from characters if those characters are interesting or useful.

[Erinys]

Well this went way off the rails from what I wanted to ask about. Are there any other named Primordial Wat vets?

Yep, it's a whole game world full of dickish, powerful people. If you stop at "This Exalt is a dick" you run out of compelling, interesting characters really fast.

This is true, but I think it's possible to go too far in the other direction and willfully ignore the problems. I've seen plenty of Realm apologia on this forum. But not Desus apologia. Maybe it's just that war and imperialism and slavery are less condemned in society than domestic abuse... except that can't be it because this forum community hails from many different societies with (presumably) different cultures

[Lioness]

Desus' entire role in MoEP: Lunars was to highlight that the Solar Bond wasn't always a good thing, his abuse of Lilith is pretty much his greatest legacy.

[Kallipolis]

"Reflexively outraged". Well, that's a new one.

Frankly, I think you're giving Desus too much credit, and you're using the narrative of Exalted to prop him up in a ham-fisted way. The Lunars create societies to throw against the Realm. The Scarlet Empress ruled over a breathtakingly exploitative empire. Chejop Kejak orchestrated the mass murder of the rulers of Creation. But why are those characters morally intriguing? Because (the lion's share of) the Lunars understand the grim reality that the Exalt-run empires of the millennia have all been abject failures, and they know that if humans don't fight for their own freedom, they'll be killed as chattel of failed empires. Because there are hints that the Empress wears a mask of iron and intrigue, and underneath it, she's tired and melancholy about the moral filth she has to wallow in daily. Because Chejop saw the horrors of the Solar empire first-hand, and has spent thousands of years attempting to wipe them out of Creation entirely; and in less than a year, he's seen their return as if he had done nothing in the first place. Chejop Kejak knows that for all his work and majesty, he's an old man who's failed in doing the one thing he's spent an eon doing.

The common element there is that moral complexity arises from characters who are forced to choose between two bad decisions. Moral complexity arises from characters who are self-aware, and know that they're doing something they would never have otherwise chosen out of necessity, or that they've morally failed in some way. Desus doesn't have those characteristics. He cheerfully stabs opponents in the back when coming under a banner of peace. He abuses people who can't defend themselves against him. And he doesn't do any of these things out of necessity. He does them because they tickle his fancy. Desus has no more self-awareness than a bag of rocks.

To examine Exalted as a literary text, Desus doesn't take the role of some kind of Byronic hero as you're making him out to be. Rather, Desus is the miles gloriosus, a buffoon. He uses his (magical) charms to boast, brag, and beguile people into thinking he's far more than what he really is. The chain of events he and the other First Age Solars set into motion are complex, but he isn't complex. In many ways, Desus exists as a symbol of how far the Solars had fallen in the First Age, turning from majestic heroes of Creation into a pack of squabbling, petty losers with laser-guns.

Desus is a dick. Such a dick that the Unconquered Sun withdrew the tianming from the Solar Deliberative and tacitly gave the go-ahead for the Usurpation.

[Gonzo]

I'm very sure that Ai, the first owner of the Crimson Bow, fought the Primordial War.

[Isator Levi]

I'd suggest that the forum is able to handle all sort of horrific or distasteful behaviors from characters if those characters are interesting or useful.

Yeah, I mean it's just not helped by his Dreams write-up, because there's really not anything there. Y'wanna talk about characters with agency... Desus is a character with no agency; I have no insight into what his decisions are or ever have been and what about his personality informs why he should have made them. Off the top of my head, Uncle Sugar is a character who probably has less wordcount devoted to him than even Desus' truncated write-up to make room for his ridiculous, incomprehensible Charm list, and is portrayed as habitually selling his own children into slavery, and he comes across as a vastly deeper and more interesting character than Desus ever was.

our reflexively-outraged 21st century culture

Some people are reflexively outraged by things, to be sure (although under the circumstances I can't generally fault them for that), but I'm inclined to view things more in terms of people giving a lot more scrutiny to issues and how they're reflected in our entertainment; to the extent that this produces a lot of criticism, I think that's more a matter of a lot of that entertainment turning out to be wanting. It's like the matter of increasing diagnosis of mental disorders; it's a lot more likely that medical techniques and applications or more widespread than there being some factor resulting in more people having disorders. This is also why a lot of such discourse has developed lines about it being okay to like problematic art. Hell, there are time when I would prefer to not see problematic trends and devices, if only because it can be a bit distressing to start seeing those kinds of things everywhere you look and have them start to hang over things you like (albeit not necessarily to the extent of disliking them). With Desus, though, it partially looks like another problem to me; I look at the degree of exaggeration that developed around the character in discourse, and I see less outrage and more appropriation of details of a character into something that people could turn into a big target for their characters. I could honestly suspect that part of developing the Silver Prince into the ghost of Desus was trying to pander to this.

But not Desus apologia.

Without wanting to go into too much detail, there have definitely been people who expressed certain forms of this, mostly in the form of various kinds of victim blaming for Lillith.

[Jen]

Well this went way off the rails from what I wanted to ask about. Are there any other named Primordial Wat vets?

Does Merela, Sun Dragon and that Hell's Warlord guy count ?

[Ghosthead]

I get the impression that Desus, as a character, is a product on the one hand of a both sort of disassociation of Solar Exalted as being skilled from being powerful, where he feels a lot like a character who is actually unskilled and clumsy yet succeeds anyway because Charms, and on the other of of exploring that it would be interesting if the Solar Exalted of the First Age were in a position to always win or triumph despite being tactically stupid and terrible.

If you had him doing what he was doing through a system that felt more like social skill, and where he actually needs tactical awareness to be a smooth operator, he might be more interesting. And if you don't provide this, it can feel a bit just like Superdickery without the humour, where a character is just getting away with cartoonishly awful things not through any particular charismatic devilish cleverness but just fiat power.

I prefer characters with a bit of moral complexity to them really, and who have self awareness and are hard to simply call good or bad. On the other hand, there are certainly a fair few successful novels, some even considered by more than a few as having the most compelling characters in fiction, where the central character is simply a socially manipulative sociopath. And those depend on having a character who feels like he is taking audacious risks or using absolutely adroit skill, and who is not in total control and faces risks and complications he must overcome, and getting us to buy into his actions and his mental state.

[Zelbinnean]

I'm very sure that Ai, the first owner of the Crimson Bow, fought the Primordial War.

Though the line in Oadenol's of "his bow slew many Primordials" was clearly written by someone who had no idea what a Primordial was in the Exalted context :P

[Isator Levi]

I get the impression that Desus, as a character, is a product on the one hand of a both sort of disassociation of Solar Exalted as being skilled from being powerful, where he feels a lot like a character who is actually unskilled and clumsy yet succeeds anyway because Charms, and on the other of of exploring that it would be interesting if the Solar Exalted of the First Age were in a position to always win or triumph despite being tactically stupid and terrible.

From where do you get that impression?

where a character is just getting away with cartoonishly awful things not through any particular charismatic devilish cleverness but just fiat power

awful-ful-ful-ful-ful-ful

[Totentanz]

Desus is a dick. Such a dick that the Unconquered Sun withdrew the tianming from the Solar Deliberative and tacitly gave the go-ahead for the Usurpation.

Yes, you have proven yourself capable of pushing out onto the internet what has been said well over a thousand times by denizens of this forum and numerous other sites dedicated to Exalted. Congrats. None of that changes that Desus is also a hero, and that pretty much every Exalt NPC is a dick of one level or another (by your definition). I don't consider myself morally able to judge which atrocities are worse than others, or what mitigates mass enslavement, murder, and rape, as you do. To me, a slaver is a slaver, and a murderer is a murderer. I don't mentally let any of the Exalted off the hook. I just don't allow that to truncate a complex character narrative to "dick."

However, Sol turned his face from Creation when the Hierophant claimed to have Sol's support on something without consulting him first. He took his god's name in vain.

" I get the impression that Desus, as a character, is a product on the one hand of a both sort of disassociation of Solar Exalted as being skilled from being powerful, where he feels a lot like a character who is actually unskilled and clumsy yet succeeds anyway because Charms, and on the other of of exploring that it would be interesting if the Solar Exalted of the First Age were in a position to always win or triumph despite being tactically stupid and terrible.

If you had him doing what he was doing through a system that felt more like social skill, and where he actually needs tactical awareness to be a smooth operator, he might be more interesting. And if you don't provide this, it can feel a bit just like Superdickery without the humour, where a character is just getting away with cartoonishly awful things not through any particular charismatic devilish cleverness but just fiat power." --Ghosthead (Haven't figured out how to multi-quote effectively yet on this thing.
.

Pretty much, yes. Solar Charms are intended to represent magic as a refinement of superlative skill. Desus is so smooth nobody can see him do wrong. However, the mechanical nature of his Charms simply denying people the ability to think certain things, or to do things, makes it feel a lot more like Dominate in V;tM. That power is supposed to engender a sense of horror at the loss of control. So, between the poor write-up and the crazy-powerful ( and possibly poorly-written Charms) the feeling is all off.

Ironically, I think he would be seen as more "smooth" and "charming" if he failed once in a while (and didn't immediately punch the unconvinced character afterwards).

[Kallipolis]

Yes, you have proven yourself capable of pushing out onto the internet what has been said well over a thousand times by denizens of this forum and numerous other sites dedicated to Exalted. Congrats. None of that changes that Desus is also a hero, and that pretty much every Exalt NPC is a dick of one level or another (by your definition). I don't consider myself morally able to judge which atrocities are worse than others, or what mitigates mass enslavement, murder, and rape, as you do. To me, a slaver is a slaver, and a murderer is a murderer. I don't mentally let any of the Exalted off the hook. I just don't allow that to truncate a complex character narrative to "dick."

"The common element there is that moral complexity arises from characters who are forced to choose between two bad decisions. Moral complexity arises from characters who are self-aware, and know that they're doing something they would never have otherwise chosen out of necessity, or that they've morally failed in some way. Desus doesn't have those characteristics. He cheerfully stabs opponents in the back when coming under a banner of peace. He abuses people who can't defend themselves against him. And he doesn't do any of these things out of necessity. He does them because they tickle his fancy. Desus has no more self-awareness than a bag of rocks."

Desus is a dick. Desus continues to be a dick. Desus is such a dick that after his death, he didn't fall to the Underworld -- he reached an apotheosis of dickishness and ascended to Yu-Shan to be crowned as the god of dicks and reign forever in the Celestial Hierarchy. His dickish portfolio includes puppy-kicking and stealing candy from babies, and every day, Desus looks down on Creation and bestows his dick blessings on all officious, supercilious little people who would practice dickishness in his name.