Colour Coded For Your Convenience - Television Tropes & Idioms

The killer and detective in Death Note are lit by vivid red and blue lights respectively during internal monologue, regardless of the natural lighting of the scene. Later on, Matsuda gets yellow, and both Mogi and Aizawa get green. Even outside their monologues, Light tends to wear darker colours, while L is in an off-white T-shirt and jeans.
- Also, the ruthless and slightly unhinged Mello wears all black, while his calmer, less aggressive rival Near wears all white and has white hair.
- Then there's Misa Amane, Mello's fellow goth of the series. This trope is played even straighter with Misa, since she tones down the Lolita image considerably when she loses her memories of being a serial killer.
- However, an aversion is Naomi Misora, undoubtedly one of the good guys, who always wears black and had a fondness for leather.
Though they're both main characters, the paired opposites Fay and Kurogane in Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle have marked preferences for clothing in light blue/white and black/red, respectively.
The demons in Ah My Goddess have red Facial Markings, while the goddesses have blue. When Belldandy was temporarily given demon magic, her aura turned red from its normal gold. Additionally, Urd's angel is half-white/half-black, reflecting her half-demon heritage.
In Afro Samurai, the hero wears a white shirt; his robotic doppleganger wears black.
The main protagonist's Humongous Mecha in the Gundam metaseries is always white, with red, blue, and yellow highlights.
- The fact that the same applies to the eponymous hero of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha's costume is pretty much intentional.
- Allied and antagonist Mobile Suits, though, vary in color schemes between series (though you can bet there will be at least one enemy Ace in a red one), and sometimes there are enemy "Gundams" that share the hero's paint job.
- And recently there has been cases of pink mobile suits that have been "coincidentally" piloted by girls.(Strike Rouge and Tieren Taozi anyone?)
- Gundam 00 plays this sraight with GN particle emissions. Celestial Being uses drives that give off blue-green particles, whereas the antagonists give off red and gold particles. justified in that Celeatial Being uses "true" GN drives, whereas the antagonists use incomplete, reverse-engineered GN drives.
  - The TRANS-AM System, however, gives the good guys' mobile suits a red-ish hue. It is most likely a reference to Char.
In the xxxHoLic anime just about every extra there is completely white. You can only see their outlines and a few minor details on them (such as clothes and hair).
In Full Metal Alchemist, the Homunculi all have default outfits that are very dark shades of a certain colour. So dark in fact, that they appear black in all but the best lighting conditions. Also, they all have dark hair.
Mahou Sensei Negima does this in regard to the Pactio cards, which give each character a color based on their personality; red stands for bravery, black is for stoicism, etc.
In the first Yugioh series (also known as Season Zero), the good Bakura had natural green eyes, while his darker counterpart had purple eyes.
- Also, the Shadow Realm has a purple color scheme to it.
- Yugi's hair, though much of it is black, has pink/red and gold/yellow in it, as if to offset the "evilness" of the black.
Bleach inverts the typical colors; the shinigami all wear black (fitting since they're essentially grim reapers) while their enemies, the Arrancar, and their allies all wear white.
Slayers lampshaded this; Amelia thinks that all bad guys really do wear black all the time.
In Gundam Seed and Gundam SEED Destiny, stream of yellow means machine gun types weapons, solid yellow beams stand for railguns, green mean particle beams and red is anything heavier and deadlier from plasma cannons to gamma rays. Also, a dull gray Gundams means their phase shift armors are down.
In The Big O Roger Smith, his servants, and his eponymous Humongous Mecha are all in black, whereas Alex Rosewater and Big Fau are all in white.

Close Anime & Manga

One of the more egregious example was when black kryptonite created an evil version of Supergirl — who popped into existence wearing a black version of the Supergirl costume.
Batman dresses in black. Robin dresses like an explosion in a paint factory. Lampshaded when Batman explains that one of the reasons Robin wears bright colors is because he plays good cop to Batman's bad.
- With the recent Deus Angst Machina Tim's life has become, he changed his costume, which is now less colorful than before — and even his first costume was less bright than that of his predecessors, fitting his more subdued personality.
- Parodied in the final panels of this Something Positive strip.
The long time Pink chestplate and Pink striped pants of Gambit from the X-Men are surely only there to fuck with our heads.
- Real Men Wear Pink, dude.
  - This troper read a fanfic once (she sadly cannot remember what it was called), where this was lampshaded... Gambit was colorblind, and completely unaware that he was wearing pink. Needless to say, he was rather put out when this was pointed out to him.
Rogue of the X-Men wore green when she was a villain, later had often parts of green in her costume and a few years ago took on her old green costume which got her some concerned looks of her teammates.
In the trilogy of Hulk: Grey, Daredevil: Yellow, and Spider-Man: Blue, these elements (the colors in the titles being one of the dominant colors of their costume at the time) are explored through the lens of each hero's earliest years. When the Hulk, the original comic book Anti Hero, was a mass of confusion and rage that didn't know whether it was good or evil. When Daredevil, the Man Without Fear, was so afraid of someone losing their father like he did that he put on a costume and beat up criminals. When the jovial, wise-cracking Spider-Man was feeling lower than he ever had in his life.
Lampshaded in the SpiderGirl comic The Buzz. When Spider-Girl first encounters Buzz (red, blue and yellow) fighting Doctor Jade (green and black) she immediately and correctly identifies Jade as the villain and Buzz as the hero based on their costume colours.
Spider-Girl: I'm not the type who usually leaps to rash conclusions, but you are dressed in green, and bad guys have traditionally favoured secondary colours since the advent of colour comics.
There's a Star Wars Expanded Universe comic series called Infinities, which is basically For Want Of A Nail, speculating about just what would happen to the saga if, respectively, Luke's proton torpedo used on the Death Star was defective, if Han's tauntaun died a little earlier, if Threepio was incapacitated and couldn't translate between Jabba and Leia-as-Boush. The last case leads, eventually, to Luke and Leia confronting Vader and the Emperor together, Vader turning on his master to save his children and surviving, and then being taken by them off the Death Star before it blew. It wraps up very quickly with the characters saying that the Emperor also survived, but the Rebellion will be ready — and incidentally, Vader switched sides and wore a white version of his former costume.

Close Comics

Tron is probably one of the best-known "blue heroes, red villains" works.
- The video game sequel, Tron 2.0, takes this farther with an extended color-coding scheme. Good guys are blue, neutrals are yellow, and villains are red (for security programs), sickly green (for virally infected programs), or purple (for the rival company's programs), depending on their affiliation.
- The Space Paranoids portion of Kingdom Hearts II has a similar setup, since it's directly based on Tron.
  - In the Kingdom Hearts II, Sora can change color via his drive forms. Valor Form, in particular, makes him turn red.
The simplest way to tell apart good and bad robots in the not-actually-Isaac Asimov-based I, Robot movie.
- The red light is their "connected to the mainframe" indicator. It just so happens that the mainframe is the cause of the whole disaster.
In the Star Wars movies, the Jedi typically use blue or green lightsabers, while the Sith always use red. Star Wars spacecraft, however, reverse the trope, with the heroes' ships usually firing red laser blasts and the bad-guy craft firing green.
- Also, please note Mace Windu's awesome purple light saber in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith - indicating supreme kickassery. The actor playing him specifically asked for it so he could find himself in the wide shots.
- The Expanded Universe also expands the colors Jedi can use. Jedi lightsabers can also come in purple, yellow, orange, one color with flickery little bits of another color (yes, seriously, it's canon), bronze, silver, gold, and so on. Sith continue to have red lightsabers, though. (In several novels, it's implied that constructing their lightsaber is an important ritual for a Jedi, while Sith sometimes actually get theirs off of a mechanical assembly line. Sith lightsaber focusing crystals are synthetic, which is why they are red- to contrast with the natural crystals of the Jedi.
  - It is also worth noting that Exar Kun, perhaps the most powerful of the ancient Sith lords, wielded a double-bladed blue lightsaber.
  - In the computer RPG Knights Of The Old Republic, you can scour caves for light-saber crystals, amongst the nesting grounds of nasty arachnid critters. Non-red crystals can be found in the crystalline formations around the eggs, but they're scarce and require a lot of searching. If you search the eggs themselves, you'll find a red crystal every time, as they're a by-product of the arachnids' reproductive cycle, but harvesting them destroys the eggs, so each one you recover comes at the cost of destroying an innocent life. A bit of a Broken Aesop, considering how many of the adult arachnids you have to slaughter your way through in order to reach the nests in the first place. Especially as you don't gain any dark side points for it.
  - Furthermore, the Jedi classes are distinguished by colors: Guardians (specialise in lightsabre combat) with blue, Consulars (specialise in the Force) with green, and Sentinels (specialise in a bit of both and some other things) with yellow. It's traditional for Jedi to use a lightsabre that matches their class, but there are numerous exceptions.
  - In the books, though there is at least one instance of a good guy's lightsaber crystal generating a red blade by pure coincidence. Luke got a Darth Vader flashback, but squashed it quickly.
- If you're into it, the color-coded droids of the Trade Federation tell you what they are programmed for (general, pilot et cetera).
Every version of The Three Musketeers ever filmed features (good) Musketeers in blue and (bad) Cardinal's Guards in red. Historically, both groups wore blue, and in both real life and the original Dumas novels, the two groups simply had a fierce rivalry rather than being a good/bad dichotomy.
The adaptation of Logan's Run the Sandmen all wear black and silver uniforms.
In the Mighty Ducks trilogy, the opposing team always wears black in the climactic match.
In the film version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the protagonists have white smoke when they teleport, and the antagonists have black smoke.
Although all of the main characters in Equilibrium, both evil and good, wear black for the majority of the film, the climactic final battle sees the protagonist in a stunningly-white ceremonial uniform, while every one of the antagonists he fights - from the motorcycle-helmeted goons to the Big Bad himself - is dressed entirely in black.
Used in The Great Race. The hero, The Great Leslie, wears white. And all his gear is white. His car, his rope, his grappling hook, his pipe, his clothes. He even gets hit with a white pie in a pie fight. The villain, Professor Fate, wears black and his car is black.
The only time that John Woo subverts his usual "white villain, black hero" color scheme is in the final church shootout of The Killer, which has Hitman With A Heart Ah Jong in a white suit and the villain Johnny Weng and many of his men in black suits. But then again, Ah Jong is the one who ultimately dies, and Weng has to be finished off by Jong's friend, Cowboy Cop Inspector Li.
American Ninja: Ninja Joe is decked out in a black ninja outfit for the final battle. The enemy ninja army are also decked out in exactly the same black ninja outfit. The only way to identify Joe is by his red belt, which from many angles can't even be seen. I guess it's a cunning plan on Joe's part.
In Pixar's WALL-E, the bureaucratic robots (AUTO, Gopher, the "cyclops" doorkeeper) have red glowing eyes and use red forcefields. EVE, a friendly robot, has blue glowing eyes and uses a blue forcefield. (WALL-E himself is school-bus yellow, indicating his naive, somewhat clumsy character.)
- Oh, and the stylist/beautician robots (with female voices) are pink.
  - Unless this troper is much mistaken, there was also a blue one...
Used and lampshaded in Destination Moon. Each of the astronauts has a differently colored spacesuit so the audience can tell them apart when their faces are not visible. One of the character specifically says that the suits are brightly colored to stand out on the moon's surface, and different colored so that they can tell each other apart.
Extreme Prejudice (1987). This modern-day Western has both the sheriff (Nick Nolte) and the villain (a former friend turned Mexican drug lord played by Powers Boothe) wearing white hats; in fact the latter wears a pristine white suit while Nolte mostly wears a black shirt.
Subverted in the finale of Gladiator by the Genre Savvy Commodus with his aimed heroic victory in the arena, where he the villian Wears White to cast himself as the hero, while the hero Maximus is in Black armour, and earlier a full helmet.
In Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, the titular army glows red once they are activated by Prince Nuada. When Johan takes control of one soldier, it glows blue.

Close Films

In David Eddings' novels, the good guys and their MacGuffin are blue, the bad guys and their MacGuffin are red. Every. Single. Time.
- Lampshaded by Silk, who was disappointed that the Cthrag Sardius (the Mallorean's Mac Guffin) couldn't have been green for a change.
- Deities tend to be color-coded as well, appearing in a particular shade of light whenever they show up.
- The Elenium does subvert black armor = evil with the Pandion Knights, however, who are on the side of good, even if the main protagonist tends toward Anti Heroism at times. The Corrupt Church still wears red, of course.
  - Also in the Elenium, while Bhelliom the Mac Guffin is blue, to control it you need a pair of rings both of which have red stones.
The Big Bad Sauron in Lord Of The Rings carries a black banner with a red eye on it.
- Interestingly enough, though, when Saruman goes to the dark side he does not become black but calls himself "the Many Coloured".
  - The device used by Saruman's army was either a white hand, or a white 'S' rune.
- Gandalf the Grey dies. Later, he comes back to life in a more powerful form called Gandalf the White (You Should Know This Already.)
In the original novel The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz, it's specifically pointed out that Dorothy is seen as a Good Witch by the Munchkins because she wears blue (the color of Munchkinland) and white (symbolizing witchiness). As one of many parallels, Wicked The Musical has Nessarose (a.k.a. The Wicked Witch of the East) specifically wear blue and white as her Boarding School uniform colours, before she turns evil. She's also a Pale Skinned Brunette, no matter what actress is playing her.
- Wicked - particularly the musical - is build around a subversion of this trope; everyone assumes Elphaba is evil because of her lurid green skin. She is, in fact, the misunderstood heroine.
Bruce Campbell relates an interesting anecdote in his autobiography, "If Chins Could Kill", about how costume designers use this trope to subtly enhance the story, as on the set of "The Hudsucker Proxy" his character started dressing in lighter colors and gradually got darker as he became more sinister.
In Heathers, the three main Heathers only wear their own colors and the protagonist, Veronica, wears all black to show her outsider status inside their clique. Heather Chandler wears red, showing her leadership status. Her red hair bow shifting to Heather Duke shows the latter's replacement of the former. And Veronica snatching it back from her is used to symbolize the end of the Heathers.
The very first Discworld book is The Colour of Magic. That color is "octarine", described as a greenish purple, visible only to people with magical talent, due to the presence of octagons as well as rods and cones in their retinas. Terry Pratchett seems to have finished playing with this idea, though, and books go by without it showing up.
In Graham Mc Neill's Warhammer 40000 Ultramarines novel The Killing Ground, when the Grey Knights have determined that Uriel and Pasanius are not Chaos-tainted, the ceremony afterwards includes not only arming them again, but giving them white cloaks, explicitly a symbol of their purity.
Sometimes in fairy tales, more often in illustrations, the heroines are fair (blonde) and the villainesses are dark (brunette or black-haired). Who knew moral standards were dictated by hair color? Averted by Snow White (whose mother wished for her to have hair as black as ebony).
- A lot of people complain that Disney has too many blonde princesses, when in fact there are only two in the official Disney Princess club. Even if you include Tinkerbell as an honorary third, they're still outnumbered by Brainy Brunette Belle, Fiery Redhead Ariel, Pale Skinned Brunette Snow White, and Arabic Jasmine in the core six, soon to be joined by the controversial African-American (yes, American) Princess Tiana, plus the less-seen but still official Chinese Mulan and Native-American Pocahontas. Which makes it kind of odd for people to be shrieking Another blonde, blue-eyed princess?! about Rapunzel when there hasn't been one since Aurora in 1959. (Eilonwy from The Black Cauldron had brown eyes and is too pitifully obscure to even count.)
In the Dragonriders of Pern books, the eyes of dragons (and fire-lizards) change color according to their state of friendliness (or mood). Calm, happy dragons have green/blue eyes; angry, violent or fearful dragons have red/orange eyes.
- Of course, that's not counting the way the entire SPECIES is Color Coded For Your Convenience, with color determining size, rank, and mating behavior (and as a consequence, the riders are also color-coded, since everyone's place in the hierarchy is based on what kind of dragon they ride).
Reversed in the Sword of Truth Series, where the villain of the first book wear pure white, and the protagonist wears black since the fourth book. Oh, and one woman only wore black because of a subconscious desire to escape evil.
In the Harry Potter series, it is constantly mentioned that Harry has green eyes while Voldemort has red eyes. Inversely, Harry's "trademark" spell, Expelliarmus, is colored red while Voldemort's Avada Kedavra is green.

Close Literature

In Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Buffy is the heroine and Faith is her rival. Buffy wears pale colours and pastels, linen and cotton; Faith wears black and red, and a lot of leather. Their make-up palettes echo this. In the episode "Bad Girls", Buffy starts to be seduced into following Faith's example, and is shown wearing black.
- Also in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Willow has light-red hair and green eyes. When she goes dark in Season 6, her eyes and hair turn black. We can literally watch her transformation back as her hair and eyes gradually take their natural color again later. Later, in Season 7, when she does a strong spell but DOES NOT goes bad from it, her eyes and hair are pure white.
In American Gothic, Spirit Advisor/angel Merlyn is always depicted dressed in white, while Sheriff Lucas Buck (the Devil Incarnate) is quite often dressed in black. What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic?
The Sci-Fi Channel's Dune miniseries is heavily color-coded. Not just the costumes, but the background lighting and set coloring followed this convention. The Harkonnens are all red all over. The Imperial Corrinos are purple and gold. The Atreides primarily wore tan and white. Fremen wear brown and dark orange. Spacing Guild members wear black robes to fit in with their "neutrality" and almost priestly function.
Doctor Who frequently contrasts the generally more casual and natural tones (with some incarnations as the exception) against clinically sterile white high tech (especially during the black and white era of the Second Doctor) or Neutral Evil gray gunmetal environments. (Significantly, the Doctor switched from darker clothes when the series switched from black and white to color.) The Doctor's Evil Counterpart, the Master, wears black, except when in disguise.
- In "The Trial of a Time Lord", the Sixth Doctor's multi-colored suit is in stark contrast with his antagonist ~~Knacker's Yard~~ ~~Farmyard~~ Valeyard's black with dark green trimmed robes. Made all the more jarring when it is revealed that the Valeyard is actually his evil self.
  - It should be noted that the Sixth Doctor is a bit of a subversion; while all the other Doctors tend towards black, brown, beige, or otherwise muted colors, the Sixth, the most anti-heroic Doctor, wears almost ludicrously garish colors, and even has blonde, curly hair.
  - Subsequent novels and audio dramas reclad him in blue.
- Subverted by the colour scheme of Davros' new Daleks with their friendly gold and off-white cream-colored scheme. (But then he originally designed them while passing himself off as a good guy in "Revelation of the Daleks".)
Firefly has browncoats and purplebellies. Though it usually comes up in conversation only. The two creepy bad guys are known as the "hands of blue."
Many, many game shows use a red-yellow-blue theme to separate players. One of the most well-known uses of this is Wheel Of Fortune.

Close Live Action TV

So you know all those Gospel songs about a train to Heaven, and you want to flip it around, talk about a train to Hell (only, of course, without being that explicit). What's the fastest, easiest way to ensure that people get what you're talking about from the first few words of your song? Call it a Long Black Train.

Close Music

Captain Scarlet is an obvious example. Not only are all Spectrum agents specifically colour coded, the leader of the good guys is one Colonel White and the main agent of the baddies is Captain Black. Subtle, ne?
While there are no good or bad guys per se in Fraggle Rock, the Fraggles are typically colour-coded according to their personality; particularly the Five Man Band. Gobo, The Hero and most balanced of the group, has cool blue hair and wears a multi-coloured and multi-hued outfit. Red, the Cute Bruiser Action Girl, has bright red hair and clothing. Wembley, the high-strung and indecisive Tagalong Kid, has yellow hair and a banana-tree pattern shirt. Mokey, the spacey Granola Girl, has pale green hair and wears earth-tones. Boober, the perpetually angsty Grumpy Bear and Smart Guy, doesn't really wear much besides his hat and scarf, but his hair and clothing are all dark-coloured.
- This seems to work for other Fraggles as well. Cantus, The Obi Wan and Trickster Mentor, dresses very strangely; and Manipulative Bastard Convincing John dresses in a confusion of colours, like a stereotypical used-car salesman.

Close Puppet Shows

There were paired productions of Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra where each of the major political factions had costumes of a single color palette to make the action easier to follow. Antony's (the hot-headed military man) faction was red while Octavian's (the calculating politician) was blue and Crassus' (the weak truce-keeper) was white.
In many productions of ''Jesus Christ Superstar", including the filmed 2001 revival production, Jesus is always in white and tan, and Judas is always in red and black. Interestingly enough, the revival had Judas in a white shirt in the beginning (when he's still loyal to Jesus, but questioning his divinity), then wearing all black during "Damned for All Time/Blood Money" (when he betrays Jesus), and for "Superstar", in a red jacket (which could either symbolize his damnation or that, like Mary, who is also in all-red, his loyalty has returned to Jesus).
A Streetcar Named Desire: The first time you see Blanche she's all in white. Hell, even her name means "white."
- Also of note is the men's poker game, which Williams emphasizes should be lit in raw, primary colors. And there are big ripe watermelon slices on the table.
- Another example is Williams' direction for Stella's kimono in the Act 4, Scene 1 - it should be bright blue, a departure from her usual color scheme. This is just after the "STELLA!!" scene, which implies that Stanley and Stella have just had sex.

Close Theater

The game company Bungie color codes enemies in most of its games. Marathon, Oni, and Halo all had enemies who used the same model but different colors indicated they had more health and did more damage.
- In Halo 3, "stealthy" Jiralhanae wear black. Because they're like ninja space gorilla-men.
Many Turn Based Strategy games have allies in blue and enemies in red, especially if there's a "radar" where individual characters are represented as dots. Fire Emblem and Super Robot Wars are both examples of this.
- Advance Wars, however, colors the player's units red in its campaigns, and enemy units (assuming there is only one enemy faction in the scenario) are usually blue or black.
  - Battle For Wesnoth does something similair in it's solo campaigns. Player characters have a red circle, while enemies and allies will have a wide array of colored circles, with each army getting a color. This doesn't really apply in the multiplayer part of the game, where you pick your colors (the default for player one, however, is still red)
Command And Conquer: Red Alert. The Soviets are red, the Allies blue.
- Justified in that Soviets were, of course, communist, hence "Reds."
- And in the Yuri's Revenge expansion pack for Red Alert 2, the renegade faction led by Yuri is purple.
- The earlier Dune games (made by the same people as Command and Conquer) took this trope to a ridiculous degree by having blue Atreides (good guys) and red Harkonnens (bad guys) when the books the game is based on clearly state it's the other way around. Apparently that's not allowed.
Total Annihilation used the trope in a strange manner - the "good guys" in the campaign (i.e. the ones you're playing) are always blue and the enemy is always red, no matter which of the two sides you're playing, rather than each side having its own colour.
- This is probably because the colour coding is purely a player convenience - in the FM Vs, neither side has any easily visible distinguishing markings.
Supreme Commander, Spiritual Successor to the above-mentioned Total Annihilation, colours its sides more consistently - blue for UEF, red for Cybran, and green for Aeon, no matter who you're playing as. It's also worth noting that no side is particularly 'evil'. Splinter factions are displayed as a different shade of a faction's colour.
- The expansion's universal antagonists, the Seraphim, are yellow. The Order of the Illuminate, fanatical Aeon troops who sided with the Seraphim, are appropriately yellow-green.
City Of Heroes/City Of Villains: While the characters themselves are not subject to this trope, the intro and character design screens and all the main screen interface elements are, to the point that some players refer to City of Heroes as "Blue Side" and City of Villains as "Red Side". Additionally, Pocket D — the extradimensional night club accessible from both games — is red from the middle of the dance floor all the way to the villains' entrance, and blue from the middle to the heroes' entrance.
- It occasionally goes beyond that into powers. The Energy Blast powerset is blue-white for heroes and red for villains, and the same goes for lightning.
  - Now averted as Power Customisation has finally been implemented, but the default powers are still the same.
- The developers have noted this, and mention that the armour and banners of the alien-fighting Vanguard group, who will work with both heroes and villains, are grey and purple to indicate their (supposed) neutral morality.
In Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, a character, Gurdy even draws attention to this after your character catches him swindling a naive professor out of a lot of money. He indicates his bright red clothing and compares himself to a poisonous flower, saying that his bright red colors warn the wise not to deal with him.
In Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, the hero, Phoenix, wears blue, while the primary antagonist for the first game, Edgeworth, wears red. Or, well, maroon. Edgeworth doesn't stay a villain, but it continues to fit his role as The Rival.
Final Fantasy has white mages that cast healing and protective spells and black mages that cast offensive and spells that cause ailments.
- Less well explained (or rather not at all explained) are Red Mages (white and black combined), Blue Mages (enemy magic) and more recently Green Mages (buffs and debuffs). However, also played straight in Final Fantasy VI with white healing spells, black damage spells, and gray status altering spells.
In Star Wars Battlefront 2 the player's team is always designated as blue and the team they play against is red. However the colour corresponds to which ever team the player chooses, not the teams themselves.
Team Fortress 2 has the names of the two sides, Builder's League United and Reliable Excavation Demolition, shorten to BLU and RED, respectfully. Guess which color each uses... although neither is good or bad.
- Technically, both are bad, in a "went-bananas-a-long-time-ago-completely-psycho" way.
  - The 'Meet The Team' machinima always portray RED team as the ~~"good"~~ winning side, however.
World Of Warcraft colors the nametag of each player according to this, blue being allies (or PvP-disabled enemies in some zones and servers) and red being hostiles. Inbetween we have green for allied NPCs and yellow for neutrals, aswell as orange for unfriendly (which is mostly the same as neutral, except that you can't talk to them).
- There are also special colors for classes, item rarity, and spell types.
  - Outside of gameplay mechanics, there are also elements of this trope in the storyline. Blood Elves took to wearing red in mourning of their fallen brethren. As a result, the High Elves (who the Blood Elves have had a bit of a falling out with) never wear red. There are also elements of color coding in the dragon flights. Red, Green, and Bronze Dragons are (for the most part) good. Black dragons are evil, and Blue Dragons are only evil in Northrend.
Sanger Zonvolt and Elzam Branstein from Super Robot Wars are both enormously Badass and both temporarily work for the Necessarily Evil antagonists in Original Generation. Accordingly, they favor black Humongous Mecha with yellow trim and black Humongous Mecha with red trim, respectively. Especially noticeable in Elzam's case since he goes through nearly half a dozen mechs in a given continuity, and paints every one of them black and red. And names them Trombe.
Isn't it interesting that all the protaganists in Mega Man ZX and ZX Advent have green eyes, and all the non-pseudoroid antagonists (including Master Thomas) ALL have red eyes? Giro has blue eyes, too, though that's kinda irrelevant.
Ever since Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, blue has been the colour of the humans (later the Alliance) and red of the orcs (later the Horde). Warcraft III subverted this by making the orcs commit a Heel Face Turn but keep their traditional red colour, as well as bringing in the undead Scourge (purple = evil), night elven Sentinels (blue or teal = good, natural) and demonic Burning Legion (green, purple, red = evil).
- The third game also gives the option to turn your units blue, allies teal, and enemies red, literally colour-coding them for your convenience.
Gears of War includes lights on the guns which change color whether a COG (Blue) or Locust (Red) is wielding them.
- The sequel has the colour of players in multiplayer appear more red if they are Locust or blue if they are COG the farther away they are.
Dark Reign has the player's units as orange, and the enemy as red.
The player characters in Resident Evil 5 have weapons equipped with red laser sights. When you encounter enemies wielding machine guns, they have green sights fitted to them.
- Going back a bit further, it seems that all recurring characters adhere to a particular color scheme in their default outfits. Chris favors green, Leon and Jill wear blue, and Claire wears red. And of course, Big Bad Albert Wesker always wears black.
Count Bleck, the Big Bad of Super Paper Mario, wears all white - though all of his powers are black or violet. Perhaps he has trouble finding anything dark in his wardrobe, back in his all-black◊ castle.
Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds not only puts soldiers in different coloured suits to represent what side they're on (with instant repaints and costume changes upon being converted by a Jedi), but also has a specific code for the weapons each unit has:
- Red: anti-infantry.
- Blue: anti-mech and anti-heavy weapon
- Green/projectile: anti-building; does splash damage in most cases (except the pummel, which is basically a glorified battering ram).
- Yellow: only fired by heroes and bounty hunters; considering the abilities of the bounty hunters, probably indicates Jedi-killing.
- Gungans keep the same colours, but instead of beams, they're hurling energy balls.
In Eve Online, friendly targets are highlighted with a blue background while hostiles are highlighted with red. Thus, the two most common rules of engagement are called Not Blue Shoot It (defaults to hostile) and Not Red Don't Shoot (defaults to friendly).
Almost entirely averted in Tsukihime where you're more likely to run across whites, grays and blacks. However, Nanaya Kiri could detect the auras of others. Really strong individuals do not have the colorless auras of normal people. Red is for inhuman monsters that need to die and fast. Silver and blue are noble and not targets. Many inverted characters, such as SHIKI or Akiha also have red as a theme whereas Shiki is lightly tied to the color blue, mostly his eyes.
Knights of the Old Republic: Every character-page picture has a colored background reflecting their force alignment. Neutrals will have grey, dark siders have red background, and light siders have blue (and at the very top, they will stand in a pillar of radiant light, against a dark-blue starry sky backdrop). They will also take on an increasingly hostile stance the darker they get.
- There was also a mild subversion of this in the second game. At one point on Onderon, you come across two aliens arguing about who the people should support, the good Queen Talia or the two-faced General Vaklu. The alien in support of the "evil" General is blue-skinned, while the one supporting the Queen is not only red-skinned, but has horns!
The Shin Megami Tensei games have traditionally used blue/white for the forces of Law and red/black for the forces of Chaos.
In Star Craft, humans (normal) have primarily grey machinery. Zerg (Always Chaotic Evil) are primarily orange-hided, plus some purple. Normal Protoss use a lot of gold, while Protoss "Dark Templar" are, well, dark. Each race gets a "highlight" color depending on who is controlling them (player 1 will have red highlights, player 2 will have blue highlights, et cetera.)
- Heroes are always turquoise.
Mirror's Edge employs this as a gameplay feature called Runner Vision - in order to represent the main character's ability to recognize useful paths for Le Parkour, objects in the environment automatically turn bright red to suggest a path for the player to take. This feature can be toggled on and off at will, and even then some of the level architecture remains colour-coded in bright, saturated colours to draw the player's attention to them (such as usable doors, which are always bright red, and blue walkways).
Shadow Complex does this to tell you what item you need to destroy a certain obstacle, just like the Metroid games from Super Metroid on, but with colors instead of symbols. Just shine your flashlight on something, and the color indicates what can destroy or interact with it- yellow for your regular gun, green for grenades, purple for foam (equivalent to the Ice Beam, to an extent), blue for the Friction Dampener (equivalent to the Speed Booster), and red for missiles.
inFAMOUS. Evil lightning is red.
In many old-school arcade games, it is not uncommon for Player 1 to be the blue guy and Player 2 to be the red one, as is the case with Contra and Double Dragon. In games where there is a third player or even a fourth, they will get to wear yellow or green.
In many beat em ups like Final Fight and Golden Axe, its not unusual for the main characters to be color coded. The balanced character (Cody, Ax Battler) will usually wear blue, the powerhouse will wear green (Haggar, Gilius Thunderhead), and the speedster (Guy, Tyris) will wear red. In some games (like Combatribes and Streets of Rage), the powerhouse will wear yellow instead.
In Guild Wars, the Kurzick flag is blue while the Luxon flag is red.
- These are also the colors of the two teams in PVP
- Additionally, item rarity is designated by color, as is the profession of bosses
In Metroid Fusion, you learn part of the way through the game that you need to AVOID the blue X, until you reclaim the Varia Suit. All other X colours are fine.
Sonic The Hedgehog has this trope smeared all over it. Sonic (the hero) is blue, Knuckles (the tough guy) is a cheery red, Amy Rose and Rouge the Bat (the chicks) have extensive pink colouring, Shadow the Hedgehog (the resident Bad Ass) is red and black, and Eggman Robotnik is covered in red, yellow and black - good old evil commie colours.

Close Video Games

El Goonish Shive's Big Bad wore black. Granted, it's probably pretty hard to find fire-retardant material in other colours, but it still counts.
- Yeah, but when you consider that the story arc was called "Painted Black", it probably has nothing to do with a lack of colored fire-retardant material. (Although the author did experiment with other colors in his notebook, the final black design was the only one that looked good.)
  - The trope is averted(or played straight) with protagonist Tedd's purple hair, and undeniably averted with Susan, who prefers to wear darker colors.
Order Of The Stick, the Trope Namer; see quote at the top of the page.
Greenroom, a new webcomic, actually linked to this page when talking about one of the characters. The character in question is lime green, but it's yet to be known if he's actually a bad guy, though recent strips seem to be going that direction.

Close Web Comics

Doctor Horribles Sing A Long Blog has this in spades. Both inverted and played straight in that Dr. Horrible (the villain/protagonist) wears white while Captain Hammer (the hero/antagonist) wears black. Dr. Horrible's white outfit also represents his innocence and kindness, which is sharply contrasted when he switches to a blood red lab coat to represent the blood on his hands, and as a standard villain color to demonstrate that he's taking his villainy more seriously.
The Dark Overlords from the web fiction serial Dimension Heroes, as probably expected, dress in dark clothing.
A brilliant Lampshade Hanging from Homestar Runner: in the show-within-a-show Cheat Commandos, a spoof of such Saturday morning cartoon series as G.I.Joe, the enemy organisation is actually called "Blue Laser".
Oktober lives on this trope. Each character has a specific color that is deeply tied to them, and is prominently displayed in their text. Depending on who is telling the story, every "K" is either Red (Natasha), Blue (Smith/Jones), Green (Matthias), or Orange (Nick).

Close Web Original

The guns on GI Joe shoot red or blue lasers, depending on the affiliation of the shooter.
- Sometimes, the laser guns would even change their color to accommodate the wielder. A Joe could pick up a discarded Cobra rifle and still be assured of it firing his own team color (this was probably an animation error rather than intentional, but it's fun to imagine that there's a "good/evil" switch on the side of each weapon).
- This is parodied in the Homestar Runner "Cheat Commandos" toons, where the bad guy organization is literally named Blue Laser.
The characters in Disney's Aladdin were specifically designed around this trope, on the notion that water is a life-giving force in the desert. Genie and Jasmine sport blue. The Sultan wears much white and gold, with a splash of blue. Jafar and Iago sport red (though Iago had blue wingtips; perhaps a foreshadowing of his side-switching in the sequel). Aladdin and Abu sport purple, because they're in transition from being thieves (red) to heroes (blue). After Jafar gains control of the Genie, Genie often goes purple. And when Jafar puts Jasmine in Go Go Enslavement, she wears a reddish-orange.
The original Transformers was incredibly heavy with this. In its early years, the Autobot ranks were crowded with bright primary colors (come on, Optimus is covered in red, white and blue), while the Decepticons ranks are crammed with the more murky shades - especially popular was grey, black, purple and dark blue (with the white, red, and blue Starscream standing out as the big exception). In its later years, colors diversified a bit more, although 1987's range of toys adhered quite closely to a pattern of grey, black and red for Autobots, and teal, blue and purple for Decepticons.
- It's notable that Hasbro recognised that the Decepticons are predominantly purple, and actually recoloured toys that were largely purple to other tones. The most prominent example was Armada combiner Depth Charge, who started as a purple and black tribute to Shockwave, but wound up covered in earth tones when brought to North America.
- The Transformers cartoon series took the color-coding pattern to the next step, introducing a basic convention of blue eyes for Autobots, and red eyes for Decepticons. This was an unswerving constant in the first year of the cartoon, but was subverted come the second year by the yellow-eyed Decepticon thrust, and while the basic pattern was employed through to the end of the show, more and more exceptions continued to appear. Something that was maintained a lot more consistently, however, was the color-coding applied to the team's paraphernalia: Autobot laser blasts, spaceships, headquarters and machines and devices of all shapes and size were a golden orange in color, while the Decepticons favored their iconic purple.
- Strangely averted with Beast Wars. Optimus Primal, Rattrap, Rhinox and Dinobots had red eyes.
- In Transformers Animated, the red and blue eye concept was revisited with much stricter use (the lone exception being the purple-peepered Decepticon Swindle, who is only given those eyes because he had them back in the 80s, and was a favorite character of the show's art director). Autobots come in a variety of colors, but all of the Decepticons are primarily purple (except for the Starscream clones, which are given the color schemes based on the Starscream-recolor characters in Generation 1.
In Code Lyoko, the villain XANA is most often identified by the color red. Most notably, the towers activated by XANA are surrounded by a red halo (blue is neutral, green when activated by Jérémie, white by Franz Hopper). There are many other examples, like the Digital Sea turning red when XANA's creatures are about to attack.
- William originally wore a white, grey, green and blue costume on Lyoko, but it changed to a black and red one once he became The Dragon under XANA's control.
- Ulrich's swords normally glow blue whenever he strikes or parries, but they glow red in the hand of any warrior controlled by XANA, making such swordfights look like direct shout outs to Jedi vs. Sith duels.
Even before she turned evil, Lydia from Barbie and the Diamond Castle dressed in muted red and purple, as opposed to the other muses, who wore blue and royal purple.

Close Western Animation

A subversion of this trope in real life, of course, the dominance of camoflauge as a battledress for modern soldiers. Not to mention people's definition of 'good' and 'evil' in reference to the many of them tend to vary.
However, during pre-medieval, medieval and renaissance times, this was usually Truth In Television. In particular, it enabled you to tell friend from foe on a chaotic battlefield (well, mostly). 'Showing your colours' was a statement of allegiance to a organisation, lord, monarch/emperor or nation as well as a statement that you intended to fight 'openly' as opposed to spies and assassins, who did not display their colours and thus fought dishonourably by the customs of those times.
"Red state" and "blue state" to refer to U.S. states where Republicans and Democrats, respectively, predominate in presidential elections. Note that this has only been standard since the 2000 election; before that, election maps were often colored red and blue, but which color represented which party switched regularly. It is left up to the individual reader to decide whether this is an example or a subversion of the usual blue/good red/evil convention. This may very well be an example of Adaptation Decay, given that red has traditionally stood for socialism and blue for aristocracy. (At least one assignment of red to the Republicans in the 1980s was intended as a slight by a liberal news director: he gave the conservatives the color of radical Communism.)
- Recently there has also been an emergence of "purple" states, where the vote totals tend to be a lot closer and thus seeming that the state is not really red or blue, but a combination of the two.
  - Strictly speaking, purple indicates a state that splits its electors (meaning each voting district gets one elector, and the electors are chosen independently), and it sent some of each.
  - This is only likely to happen in Nebraska and Maine, and Nebraska did it in 2008.
Blue was the color of the Left, and red was the color of the Right, in the American Revolution. (The French Revolution is a more famous example of left-leaning revolutionary "Blues", but the French monarchists used white and gold.) That changed when Karl Marx took over the color red in the 1840s, but Communism is no longer much of a concern in modern American politics — allowing American "heraldry" to return to its original form.
- In Canada, the colours are reversed; that is, Red = Liberal Party and Blue = Conservative. In an area of Canada where many American expats and/or tourists gravitate towards, Hilarity Ensues.
Also in the American revolution, the colonial army wore blue uniforms, while the British army wore bright red ones (hence "Redcoats"). No offense meant to Brits, but the British army was the evil one back then.
- None taken.
- Eh, attaching such labels to history is a slippery path, my friend.
The U.S. military services use "blue" as a map color code and all-purpose slang for friendly forces, with "red" for enemies. Shooting at friendly forces (by accident or mistake) is referred to as a "blue-on-blue" engagement. Conversely, incidents of fighting between rival insurgent factions in Iraq have been described as "red-on-red."
- This is probably the origin of red and blue being the common team colors in multiplayer games that only have two hardcoded colors.
- This dates from early US Navy wargames in which their primary antagonist was seen as the Royal Navy (of the British empire). The British Empire "coloured the map red" and manned the "thin red line" — Britain is represented as red, so US forces became blue. This predates Communism as any meaningful international force.
- US forces practice military doctrine against a hypothetical enemy force ("OPFOR") using Russian doctrine referred to as Krasnovians — it is Russian for "Red-landers". OPFOR always wins.
- On aircraft carriers in the US Navy, deck crew members are color-coded by their jobs (purple = fuels, red = weapons, yellow = plane directors and so forth). This allows them to tell at a glance who is who.
- The combat flight simulator Il-2 Sturmovik inverts this color scheme: red is used for the Allies, blue for the Axis. The fact that the game was originally developed in Russia may have something to do with this.
As in Canada, red is the color of the UK's leftist Labour party and blue for the rightist Conservatives, plus yellow for the moderate Liberal Democrats.
- No prizes for guessing what colour represts the Green Party. UKIP have now adopted purple.
Real life armies often used colors to make it easier to tell sides apart. Brightly colored uniforms weren't a serious liability when guns were inaccurate and battles had to be fought at close range. This tradition didn't change until South Africans decided to go with "dirt" for their official color.
- Of particular note is the fact that the British Army traditionally wore red, the post-Revolution French troops wore sky blue, and the American Continental Army wore a darker shade of blue. Which is probably why red is bad to everyone but the Brits.
It doesn't hurt the Nazis' frequent presentation as cartoonish villains that their flag was red, white and black.
- "Are we the baddies?"
It's possible that the blue = democratic, red = authoritarian orientation came from the red uniform of authoritarian Sparta as a contrast to the more democratic Athens in the Peloponnesian War. This may be an outright lie made up by an overimaginative history teacher, however.
Artificially-flavoured food also falls victim to this. Bananna flavour? yellow. Strawberry? pink. Mint? green or white with red pinstriping. Peach? light pinkish orange. Raspberry? blue or dark red. Cherry? blood red.
- It helps that most of them are trying to copy the color of whatever food they're supposed to taste like. Except blue raspberry; no one knows what's up with that.
  - Blue raspberry most likely came about due to the fact that there are no naturally occuring blue-colored foods (blueberries are actually purple). So they made raspberry blue out of the need for diversity, as well as to differentiate it from cherry, with which it is often paired.
When dealing with skinheads, it's usually taken the wearing of red suspenders or laces indicates that the wearer is a white power skinhead, due to the practice in some corners of "earning" those colors through spilling minority blood. Black and yellow are usually regarded as the colors of choice for anti-racist skinheads. Of course, in some corners, red means that the wearer is actually an anarchist/socialist skinhead, and there's the saying, "Laces and braces don't make you a racist," so... yeah.
Most poisonous (to eat) insects and certain other animals have bright colors as warnings.
- Subverted in that several nonpoisonous species have adapted to take advantage of this, and wear the warning colors without the toxins to back it up.

Close Real Life

Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing Help

Tools

Toys

Examples