Color Tropes Cleanup

Lol, it's alright.

I'll see about finishing the wick check tonight.

Is there any verdict, other than this TRS thread for Good Colors, Evil Colors, that we can list in the sandbox? In particular, is there a TRS thread with chairs/ZCE/misuse problems involving color, and is not a Personal Appearance Trope?

Color tropes are appearance tropes for the most part. They're just a subtype of them, but distinct in that people assume the color itself is all the needed context.

Edited by WarJay77 on Dec 7th 2020 at 6:20:28 AM

Blue Is Heroic Wick Check is complete.

Looking at all of the wicks on there, the main problem with this trope seems to be that it gets used for literally any character who is heroic and has the color blue included in their character design.

I feel as if there's a genuine association of the color blue with heroism, but there's some aspect missing to the trope that's causing it to become plagued with ZCEs and "hero wears blue" examples.

Edited by jandn2014 on Dec 8th 2020 at 11:00:50 AM

Yeah, that's the thing. Any legitimate pattern here is buried in a sea of "this hero wore blue once" examples. It's the sort of trope that makes it hard to tell how many of these are a legit thing and how many of them are just coincidence and shoehorning.

I think Light Is Good is strongly related to a lot of the genuine associations. Blue = sky = light, freedom, etc. Notably these examples (or at least the ones that come to mind for me) tend to involve medium to bright shades of blue. Compare with red: red light is associated with darker times of day, while truly light red, pink, is thought of as a different color altogether.

(thoughts get a lot more rambling ahead, thinking out loud with non-rhetorical questions & trying to answer them)

I think blue being a primary color is also a significant factor here. It feels... basic, in a way. Vanilla. That's why in a group of color characters, blue will be closer to the center, in terms of main characters. But then why doesn't yellow get the same treatment? Well blue is also the color of the sky, something universal. If not the most common color, then tied for it. But green is also super common, what with being the color of plants. It's not a primary color, though. So is it the combination of those things, common + primary?

So:

• Blue is Light
• Blue is Basic
• Blue is Calm
• Blue Contrasts Against Dangerous Red

...

I don't think Heavenly Blue quite covers the blue/light/sky associations. Consider for example, the page image for Storm Hawks:

A setting based heavily in the sky and in flight, with a lot of avian theming. A ragtag bunch of plucky teens out to save the day against the evil empire. Their team logo (as seen behind them) is a blue hawk with its wings spread. Naturally, blue is a perfect fit for them. It represents the sky, flight, freedom, the brightness of day (against the dark, foreboding lands of the empire). But heavenly? No.

Edited by Twiddler on Dec 8th 2020 at 11:46:22 AM

...as reluctant as I am to take this off-thread, I want to make a TRS for this. I don't think a thread this small and new can make big decisions like this. I'd rather start a thread and see if the mods direct us back here.

Yeah a thread is probably where we should take this

I think Twidder's take on Blue Is Heroic is correct.

There's some cultural/historical context for this as well: in both The American Civil War and The American Revolution the "good guys" wore blue uniforms, at least according to Hollywood History. This may influence American media, at least for Captain Patriotic-type heros.

TRS has been opened.

So there's this draft in TLP about pink being used to signify crazy/dangerous characters. Lots of examples, but is there something actually there or is it just "crazy characters in pink"?

Yeah, I've been concerned about it, but I have no idea if it's legit or not.

I've definitely seen a few such characters in various works in my time, but I can't recall the pink ever being singled out as symbolic or to create a dissonance against the crazy. In the case of females who are crazy, it seems more about the cute girl who looks harmless but is a vicious psychopath, but that's a play on their femininity, not the colour pink, in which case that's Pink Is Feminine at very best.

It might be one of those cases where it's common enough to seem like it should be a thing, but it's not really.

My few cents on Blue Is Heroic is that I think some people think "Hero wears blue" is the definition.

You might want to bring that to the TRS thread.

Would it be a good idea to discuss Purple Is the New Black preliminarily while the Blue Is Heroic thread is in progress?

Sure.

Well for that trope, a lot of the on page examples (from a quick glance) do explain the connection to purple and black/darkness. So, I would like to see a wick check before I judgement on this one. I don't doubt that it's attracting bad examples though

Yeah, a wick check sounds good.

There are 412 wicks at time of writing, so we'll need to draw 50. I don't want to stick around too long, so I'll leave that to you.

Someone at TRS noticed that Red-and-White Comedy Poster is entirely ZCE, and possibly Not a Trope. Then I noticed that although it wasn't on the Amazing Technicolor Index, it did focus on color, and the issue at play is typical for color tropes.

At the same time, I realized that You Gotta Have Blue Hair is used as "character has oddly colored hair", while the trope focuses on when this is used to distinguish characters. I think some of the wicks also assume that the trope is specifically about the color blue, but we'll get to that later.

You Gotta Have Blue Hair is at least a couple tropes in one, I think. When everyone in a setting has outlandish hair colours for distinction/style, and when only main characters are given outlandish colours to distinguish them. Possibly also outlandish hair colours used as a mark of strangeness.

Edited by Twiddler on Feb 12th 2021 at 2:08:41 AM

Hmmm...yeah, You Gotta Have Blue Hair might be worth tackling next.

I remember being posting on the You Gotta Have Blue Hair TRS years ago. There was a plan to split it but that hasn’t went through. I think it’s a way to differentiate characters but I do think that concept and the one where only important characters get colored hair is worth splitting

Edited by MacronNotes on Feb 12th 2021 at 3:55:18 AM

Well, first things first then; let's run a You Gotta Have Blue Hair wick check. Here's the sandbox: You Gotta Have Wick Check. I'll also crosspost this to the project thread and add it to the sandbox.