Basically the title. The celestial Exalts get a bunch of cool narrative through-lines from being reincarnated heroes, one of my favorite of which is past life memories. It creates a fun blending of identity and gives roleplaying meat to the sense of legacy, which is neat for all of them but especially (to me) the Solars, since their memories in particular are all going to be from incredibly ancient history, a peak into a totally different world where they had a totally different social position.
While the Terrestrial Exalted are obviously different from their Celestial counterparts, I've often thought that they're leaving a lot of equally cool narrative potential on the table by not translating that mechanic into the hereditary Exaltation model. And I feel like 3rd Edition sets a groundwork where it feels a lot more reasonable - the Progenitive Essence concept lends a lot to the idea that you're passing something spiritual to your offspring rather than just genetics, bolstered by the presence of a bunch of example artifacts that have a greater affinity with specific bloodlines of Dragon-Blooded.
I think it would bolster the Dragon-Blooded's own form of legacy within the narrative, and opens up two opportunities that I can think of. First off, it gives those semi-random Threshold Dragon-Blooded outcastes more of a connection to the wider Dragon-Blooded community, and the ability to participate in their own narratives of discovering legacy and family through witnessing the deeds of their ancestors. And secondly, something that would be totally unique to the Dragon-Blooded relative to everyone else in the setting might be the ability to see "ancestor" memories for people who are still alive, and to use that as an alternative path for characterization and information dispensation.
Playing devil's advocate against myself, there are a few counterarguments I can think of. First, Terrestrials are a lot more common than Celestials, so it might risk making the cool uniqueness of past life memories more diluted. Second, the aforementioned idea of seeing ancestral memories for living people might create an unwanted in-setting effect where paranoid Dynasts view offspring as information leaks, though I think that's probably fine if it maintains the same sort of vagueness and symbolic/emotional approach that past life memories do. But lastly, the one that I don't really have an answer for, is I'm unsure how to make it feel as different as it ought to; "remembering" something is sort of first-person in a way that I feel iffy on with the ancestral theme. Which makes me wonder if it might not be better going with like, a much subtler version of the ATLA approach with Aang visiting past Avatars, where it feels less like a memory and more external, like being given visions or advice by a lingering spirit of the past.
What do you guys think?