[Exalted] Dragon Blooded Lore

[Bling Cat]

I'm joining a new group, who are playing a Dragon Blooded Exalted game, and I'm making my character, but I'm having some trouble finalizing a concept that I'm happy with, which I'm currently putting down to not knowing much about the lore of Exalted. However, given the sheer volume of stuff there is to read in the Exalted lore, I thought I might ask if there's anybody who could give me a quick primer on the Dragon Blooded?

[The Rose Dragon]

The Dragon-blooded were created to be the soldiers and adjutants of the Celestial Exalted in the Primordial War, and later took upon themselves the duty of forming the highest echelons of the Solar Deliberative's bureacracy, right below the Celestials themselves. In the event known as the Usurpation, under the Sidereals' guidance, they slaughtered the Solars and chased the Lunars to the edges of the world, and started ruling Creation from the center. Since then, the biggest changes have been the consolidation of the Blessed Isle under one ruler (the Scarlet Empress) and her family, and their rule over the Threshold having become less certain.

Dragon-blooded receive their powers through blood, and have powers symbolically evocative of the five elements (with a number actually using elemental essence itself). Each Aspect has its own strengths, but unlike the Celestial Exalted, one's Aspect does not necessarily follow one's personal strengths. For example, Fire Aspects have the highest affinity for swordsmanship, but a student of the sword (it is unlikely a Terrestrial is already a master swordsman by the time of their Exaltation, which always happens before the age of 20) can Exalt as an Air Aspect rather than a Fire Aspect quite easily.

The most important choice (if you are given one) is the kind of Dragon-blooded you are going to play, where there are two main groups: those Dragon-blooded who came from long lineages and were trained with the expectation of Exaltation, or those whose Second Breaths came as a surprise and thus had less training to prepare for it. The former get more resources to play with, but have less flexibility in both spending those resources and in backstory (you pretty much start as the nobility of Creation, and that comes with certain expectations), while the latter get fewer resources, but are far less limited on what kind of background they can have.