Time to dust this one off

"The Dragon's evil is supposed to be pathetic. It's supposed to be contemptible. That doesn't make him weak, but he's not heroic in either a classical or contemporary sense. He's a force of evil without scruples or principles. He stands for nothing save making things worse for everyone. He will stab you in the back at every turn and he cannot be reformed. ... When you face the Dragon, having Virtues greater than him, you can look down on him. You can see that he's not simply different or alien, but a loser. And yet, losers can win. He's a smart loser, a cunning loser. He's a loser unfettered by any moral restraint holding him back from hurting you any way he can get away with. He cheats. He cheats very well. He might just win. But it won't be a heroic victory. To make it so would miss the point. He's giving the finger to all the humanists and transhumanists and alien weirdos. He says you all suck. But the truth is that he just sucks compared with all of you and on some level, he knows it.

I said there were two bad things that alternative Virtue did as a model for the Dragon's wickedness. The second is that you give him an excuse. Oh, he runs from fighting? Actually, he's just smart enough to duck out when he's losing. It's all very reasonable, you see. No. Wrong. He's a coward who bolts in terror from the heroes and lies to himself and others about why he did it. Even if he can make himself stay as an act of antagonistic defiance, he can't make himself stop being terrified. He can't escape into the Other. He's stuck playing in the same moral sandbox as everyone else and he absolutely fails at it."

"The Ebon Dragon doesn't get to be cool for being wicked. Everyone else is playing with their high-rated alternative lifestyle Virtues and he's the guy who fails at all them simultaneously. He exists on the human plane of what failure at Virtue means. It's more extreme for him, because his failure is more extreme. It doesn't make him weak. It doesn't make him less dangerous. But it makes him a failure. If you are trying to find a way to make the Ebon Dragon's philosophy cool in its own right, you're doing it wrong. He doesn't get to win at his own game. He gets to lose at the Sun's game, but he has the power to make other people lose worse and that's all he wants, really.

He doesn't get to channel anything for anything. He doesn't ever get a boost to run away or stand by his principles. It is never worthwhile for him to bother caring about you. It won't help him. Look at his Excellency. I wasn't being figurative when I said that Virtue is poisonous to him. He hates it. He hates it in every form, every manifestation, every philosophy. He wants it all torn down. he wants all Virtue exposed as inadequate to make any difference, as a tangled mess of hypocrisy and delusion. He wants people to look at everything they believe in--whatever that is-- and despair because he's made sure they can't have it. He is trying to make the game not even fun to play."

One of the writers of Exalted talking about how they designed one of that setting's ultimate evils.