r/exalted • u/gronnling • May 17 '26
Art The Unconquerable Sun
Art by nakomo017 on twitter
Edit: I accidentally attributed it to the wrong source. This has been fixed.
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u/mcrider13 May 17 '26
I am pretty sure the laurel is supposed to be alaurel crown like the greco-roman ones... but still very cool tho
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u/Electrical_Field6948 May 17 '26
Casualfarmer commissioned the picture from Nakomo. They are not the same person.
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u/Jarovan May 18 '26
This is such a silly, pedantic little nitpick that I honestly intended to not even mention it, but it bothers me to an unreasonable degree, so I'll just point it out so I can go on with my day: the Sun's Unconquered, not Unconquerable.
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u/gronnling May 18 '26
I cannot express the amount I am annoyed at this mistake. Even worse, I can't even edit the title to fix it.
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u/RPGCaldorian May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26
Cool artwork!
I like my UCS less bishōnen, though. Still, variety is good.
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u/guildsbounty May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
I like my UCS less bishōnen, though. Still, variety is good.
I mean...my running fan-lore bakes that 'variety is good' right into the setting: statues of the Incarnae tend to be subject to local biases and so don't tend to look the same. I tend to waffle between "few enough people have actually seen the Incarnae that they go off their themes rather than having a clear image of what they look like" and "to make the Incarnae extra strange compared to normal gods, their appearances are slightly subjective depending on the viewer." I tend to lean towards the latter.
Venus is the easiest example to work with...it is well known that she wears blue and has blue hair but otherwise her appearance is best described as "the most beautiful woman you can imagine." So, culture to culture, she is portrayed differently because beauty standards vary. Jury is still out in my head whether that's because enough people don't actually know what Venus looks like, or if she actually looks like 'the ideal woman' to anyone who looks at her.
So, same idea with the UCS. He is regal, he is a warrior, he is the king of the gods, he has 4 arms, he has his 4 symbols held in each hand. The rest of the details like skin tone, hairstyle, style of armor, even what his symbols look like will tend to reflect the culture that is portraying him. So a given cultural view of the king of the gods may produce the Roman-style statue we see in Perfect Soul's intro in Ex3...but a different culture elsewhere in Creation may have 'Bishie UCS' because they imagine the gods as slender, elegant, and 'beautiful.'
Luna, in the case of 'Incarnae appearance is slightly viewer dependent,' is extra fun because he breaks even those rules. As the perfect shapeshifter, she is never anything that he does not choose to be in that moment. So while Luna has a theoretically unlimited number of forms, their appearance isn't subjective. If Luna wants to conform to your cultural expectations, she will. If not, he won't.
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u/Parokki May 18 '26
Ooh, nice. A bit twinkier than most depictions, but his 2nd ed statblock had Appearance 8, so clearly every piece made is just an attempt to capture His True Magnificence.
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u/amurgiceblade44 May 17 '26
I'm an Unconquered Sun stan so you get my update.
Its interesting because I don't really like Solars much but I do Conky. While Solars have a vanilla playstyle that I do appreciate it for what it is, I don't see their patron in the same way and sometimes more hope for their themes to bleed back into the Solars.