- Alternatively, the entire thing was a joke that was never supposed to be made into a game. Byron Hall however didn't get the memo...
FATAL, on the other hand, is a game that is similarly about pushing boundaries, but instead of giving you choices, the book tells you exactly what it expects you to do. It only takes until the second page before it's salivating over the prospect of raping a chained-up maiden instead of rescuing her, and it flat-out tells you that over half of all men in the setting have raped someone, and that they are seldom if ever punished for doing so. The writers do all the transgressing for you, including giving you rules for raping people during fist fights and working out the damage from forcibly inserting things into people's orifices.
Exalted gives you power and freedom and allows for transgression to arise organically from game play. Sex doesn't have to even come up, and if rape does appear, then the other players are likely to step in and hand out punishment; they're heroes after all, and while one player might be an evil son of a bitch, the others are strongly likely to stand up for the little people in the setting. That's what heroes do. It's an emergent part of gameplay: you can go there or not as you decide, and so it's a meaningful exploration of where rules come from, and why being able to get away with breaking them doesn't make it ok to. It's a dark subject, but the game assumed that if the players want to go there, they can handle it with empathy and maturity.
FATAL expects every game will involve raping people. The only women in the book are whores and rape-victims. They say that no-one gets punished, and that HALF (!!!!) of all men are rapists. It says that you are expected to rape, and that it's no big deal. No-one should think about it too hard, just keep on raping. It tells you that it's just a normal and accepted part of the setting. If you rape someone, it's not expected to be a plot point; in fact, you can probably get experience points for it. FATAL thinks that raping someone is the same as fighting bandits; they even use the same rules. It takes away the choice of the players and removes any possibility of treating the subject with any degree of humanity and compassion. FATAL thinks that you're playing the game wrong if you don't rape people. It doesn't think you should learn anything from it, it doesn't think you should even think of who it happens to as human beings.
Exalted wants you to understand the meaning of freedom and power, and that while some rules are created by petty bureaucrats to keep the people down, others are universal and that hurting people weaker than you is wrong. FATAL demands you subscribe to its own creepy attitudes on women and rape, giving you a formula for working out exactly how badly you hurt someone and reveling in how much 'damage' you can do. In philosophical terms, the two are polar opposites, and there's a reason why one of them is the worst game ever made.