This is all great and stuff, but the problem is that by explicitly pointing out that there is a cure and it exists in a certain direction, that means that all this grandiose film noir struggle against entropy stuff is the biggest idiot ball in the entire setting.
There is a solution to Autochthon’s illness. It’s Solars. The only right and correct action is breaking the Seal, finding Solars and fixing Autochthon. Everything else is entirely overshadowed by the fact this is possible and you’re not doing it. Because you are idiots.
It would be like if, say, in the real world we could solve global warming by just going to Mars and flipping the Climate Fixing Switch. Yeah, getting to Mars is hard. But frankly, if there was a big button on Mars that fixed the environment it is basically the only thing we should be doing as a species.
And you could claim the Autochthonians don’t know this. But that’s not important. Because we the audience know this. Thus while I’m sitting around playing out Ghost in the Shell; Communist Aztec robot version, it will constantly be in the back of my head “Nothing Majority of Seven Sections does matters, because all this fighting void cults is meaningless next to the fact she could be breaching the seal, finding Solars, fixing the entire world and rendering this plotline pointless.”
It’s the anti-“Yozis can’t escape” problem. By offering a solution to what is supposed to be an intractable problem, you render the problem… tractable. And thus the action of not solving it into wasted effort.
It’s like how the existence of the Redemption rules for Abyssals destroyed the conceit of the Great Curse. Oh great, now we explicitly know how to actually fix the Solar Exalted. We can just turn them all into Abyssals, then redeem them, and the Great Curse is gone. Is this risky? Yeah. Will it work? Yeah. Why are we not doing this?
(in response to someone saying that’s just like playing Realm politics when the world needs saving)
But the trick here is there is no fixing the world. You can’t actually solve the major problems of Exalted in the long term, only hold them off indefinitely. This isn’t the equivalent of Dragonblooded being selfish in the face of a world falling apart due to inevitable forces. This is the equivalent of there being a Save The World button and the Dragonblooded not pushing it because… well, the idiot ball.
Yes, you can houserule it out. But that’s stupid and you should never have to do that. The book should offer some explicitly non-canon options for perhaps maybe dealing with Autochthon’s sickness or it being intractable regardless of what you do. In other words, it should have been dealt with exactly like the possibility of the Yozi’s escape. “By default no, nobody will ever cure Autochthon. But here are some potential plot hooks if you want to run that plotline anyway, with some justifications as to why some other Assembly hasn’t done this before now…”