Black Mage. White Mage. The Red Mage. One of these things etc etc. It just seems odd to me. On the other hand, The Red Mage has plenty of wicks and 200-plus inbounds. Should we just ignore this or what?

(This isn't in TRS 'cause the answer is probably "Yes." Also TRS has no topic title option for "needs renaming.")

Because we don't need to put our proposed solutions into thread names. Only the problems. Which would be (I guess) "Ambiguous Name". And it needs some evidence, too.

Back off TRS procedure, The Red Mage is a mage with capabilities in fundamentally different kinds of magic.

No no, I know that. What I meant was, it bugs me that it's "the" red mage while black and white mages aren't.

Red Mage (without the definite article) is already a redirect for it. There really isn't an issue, as people can just use whichever one they're comfortable with.

I have personally long wondered why red was chosen as the middle ground color; I've never seen any analysis of that myself.

It's a preexisting term from Final Fantasy. The red mage class is... The Red Mage. Same with the Blue Mage, which has power copying abilities.

Trust me; I know Final Fantasy I inside and out on a structural basis. I was wondering not why we chose red as the intermediary color. I wanted to know why Square Soft Ltd (as they were back then) picked red.

The only rational answer I can think of is that red was used as the third color (for Lawful Neutral, True Neutral, and Chaotic Neutral mages) in Dragonlance. (Even though it doesn't quite relate, since that's the intermediary between three different types of mages, as opposed to what in D&D terms would be the intermediary between a mage and a cleric.) But that just shifts the question as to what made the creators of Dragonlance pick red.

I suspect the reason they went with Red Mage is because of colour palette limitations. In the original NES release, the party's battle sprites came in two palettes: red/pink/white and blue/tan/brown. It wouldn't surprise me if they did take "inspiration" from D&D, since it certainly wouldn't have been the only element they were "inspired" by.

Even that raises questions, because there were other palettes used in the game for other sprites (several examples for monsters, some of whom did use heroic palettes).

Not only that, but they were hardly locked into the red/pink/white schema. It could have been blue/pink/white, in which case we'd be discussing the Blue Magellan for this trope.

...The Red Mage doesn't reference that-D&D-dragon-named-story? You know, the one where Raistlin starts as a red mage?

I feel... betrayed :D