Quote Originally Posted by This be Richard View Post
I'm actually pretty comfortable with this level of awfulness from first age solars. I guess, when I talk about what's "cartoonishly evil," I'm referring to things that seem silly even within the context of Exalted... which, I suppose, doesn't encompass very much. Evil for evil's sake and not much else. I should probably throw that qualifier out.

But I like the idea of it not coming out of malice so much as an increasing disregard for others. What I'd really prefer to do is have a gradual slide, where some heinous acts are perpetrated early on for important reasons, but less and less cause is required to justify horrible things over time until, finally, clothing made out of sundered souls (which I really like, by the by) becomes perfectly acceptable so long as it's more attention-grabbing at the next party than the gossamer dress that whatsherface got from the fair folk in exchange for a small city of innocent mortals under her domain.

Call me unimaginative, though, but I have a hard time coming up with much in the way of crimes that outstrip what is possible in the real world. Which I don't think is a problem unique to me, given how little the writers of the Infernals book could come up with to make evil things evil beyond making them super rapey.
Rape is overused as an evil trope by a lot of people primarily because it's one of the only crimes you can commit that absolutely requires a victim, and thus is one of the hardest things to justify. It's possible to kill in self defense or steal something that was originally stolen from you, as an example, but there's no such thing as 'rape in self defense'. So it's something you can be absolutely sure your audience is going to see as evil.

Since the Solars are basically 'human but bigger' you could probably grab a crime from the real world and make it 'that but bigger'. Or use magic to enforce something similar. Like, you could devise a sorcerey spell that steals free will/aggressiveness in an area to make a peaceful city, but one where the people often don't feed themselves because of how passive they are. Or create 'North Korea but with giant robots'.

An idea I had for my Dawn's first-age incarnation was that as the first age went on, she descended back into her old piracy habits: stealing, raiding, looting and killing not because she needed to (as she basically did when she was mortal) but because she was bored and needed a thrill. A Twilight caste could push hard to make soulsteel production a regular thing so that research can be done into it, or murder someone specifically to test a type of ghost-summoning/ressurection spell. There's a lot you can do with Exalted's setting to create horrible atrocities.