Misused: Blue Is Heroic

Blue is Peaceful or Blue is Calm is too vague IMO, and it also kind of misses the point.

I believe the correlation of blue and heroism is linked to its medieval symbolism as a colour of loyalty, constancy, faithfulness and truth - hence the expression "true blue". (see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/true_blue). Probably also the link between blue and nobility (think "blue blood").

If you look at the traits listed above, they sound a lot like medieval knightly virtues. And, because our modern concept of "hero" is, after all, in good part rooted in the Knight in Shining Armor trope, my guess is that this is part of why we still associate blue with heroism today.

Now whether this makes a usable trope... I'm not sure.

Edited by darkpast on Apr 13th 2021 at 7:09:13 AM

I still do believe there’s some basic connection between the color blue and heroism, as detailed above.

Nevertheless, with how this wiki is, it seems unlikely that we’ll ever be able to get the basic idea of Blue Is Heroic to work without attracting “meaningless coincidence” examples. Something such as Blue Is Calm or Blue Is Peaceful would work, since while it may be somewhat different from the original trope, narrowing down the definition should result in less shoehorned examples.

I don't see why we can't spin off Blue Is Chivalrous in addition to Blue Is Calm, but that will have to be made wholesale at TLP — no indicative examples in the wick check.

Edited by Synchronicity on Apr 13th 2021 at 10:09:34 AM

I think the missing part is blue being associated with order. And heroes usually maintain order, while villains disturb the status-quo. Being "loyal, responsibile, reserved" and all the similar traits derive from that.

Idk, read this and think of MCU: Captain America:

https://www.empower-yourself-with-color-psychology.com/color-blue.html

I also think that outright deleting the trope is a bad idea, because it is indeed a trope, and a very common one.

Edited by Asherinka on Apr 21st 2021 at 1:12:09 PM

Again though, none of these assertions about what the trope is are backed up by any evidence. We did the wick check. A majority of the wicks had no clear meaning at all, and the only meanings we could collect were Good Colors, Evil Colors or Blue Is Calm.

You guys really need to take this issue into account. If the examples themselves have no meaning, how can you say the trope does, and how can you say it has meanings that aren't reflected by any of the examples we've documented so far?

Granted, it's theoretically possible that our check managed to miss an entire, sprawling subcategory of usage just by bad luck alone. But I don't think that's true.

I think any meaning here is one we have to invent for ourselves. Any tropeworthy ideas here aren't actually a part of Blue Is Heroic; they're connotations people have to the color blue that we're giving to the trope because we assume that's what it should mean. But that's backwards. If we want a trope for the concepts being described, we need to find examples and get drafting. We can't just attach meaning to Blue Is Heroic that doesn't even exist in any of the examples we currently have.

Sorry for the slight rant, but I'm starting to get tired of being told what the trope "means", as if the fact that the trope description has absolutely none of that information in it (you know what it does reference though? Calmness), and as if the results of the wick check, are just being glossed over completely.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 21st 2021 at 1:50:38 PM

Erm, now I'm confused. If it is ok for Good Colors, Evil Colors to be a trope, why is it not ok for Blue Is Heroic to be a Sub-Trope?

I mean, there is no real reason why redheads are believed to be fiery, it is just a stereotype. The Fiery Redhead page contains a backwards reasoning as to how such stereotype could have emerged.

Good Colors, Evil Colors and Blue Is Heroic are also stereotypes. Ofc one can't be sure how they emerged. But it doesn't mean we can't document them, does it?

Edited by Asherinka on Apr 22nd 2021 at 4:09:40 PM

Technically, the wick check only says how the trope is tropers which is not necessarily the same thing as how the trope is used by authors.

Trope: "Above all, a trope is a convention." "On This Very Wiki, "trope" has the even more general meaning of a pattern in storytelling."

I might be misunderstanding the basics, but using blue for heroes is a pattern in storytelling. Do we really need the "why" to call it a trope?

Edited by Asherinka on Apr 22nd 2021 at 4:27:16 PM

In Good Colors, Evil Colors the meaning is in *the contrast*. It doesnt matter if the villains use red and the heroes use blue or if the villains use purple and the heroes use green, the colors are used to designate factions/morality. It actually had a recent retool to be about that, because people kept using it for “this color is kinda good/evil.”

Blue Is Heroic is in a similar boat to it previously. People just use it to be “any slightly good guy has some blue on him”, if there is any context at all. It has been so diluted as to not have any of the meanings people in this thread are trying to ascribe to it. To use your Fiery Redhead example, it is like 70% of the examples were “Alice once had a red streak in her hair and got really mad at Bob” or just “Alice is this.” Forget tropeworthiness, a ZCE/decay problem this big already indicates the need for a fix or retool.

No one is saying there is no real life association with blue and heroism. But *on this wiki and as used by tropers* it is just a meaningless pattern used far too broadly. That is the whole reason Blue Is Calm and recently Blue Is Chivalrous were pitched. If you want to start Blue Is Patriotic or something by all means go ahead. But Blue Is Heroic’s *current usage* is meaningless.

Edited by Synchronicity on Apr 22nd 2021 at 1:52:34 PM

OK, since we are going in circles, I went ahead and started Blue Is Calm. What can go in the crowner for Blue Is Heroic besides cutting/disambiguating?

Maybe "redefine" options with the definitions people keep tossing around?

Merge with Primary-Color Champion? Practically speaking, if that won examples would be moved rather than cut outright.

The thing is that Primary-Color Champion, as currently defined, is about the combination of blue and red (and sometimes yellow as a third color).

True, which is weird because it's inconsistent with Secondary Color Nemesis, which does not require a color combination.

Edited by naturalironist on Apr 25th 2021 at 6:04:23 AM

Yeah...

Yeahhhh, I'd be cool with a merge if the trope wasn't too narrow to support it. I'd vote for a disambig here personally.

Blue is Calm sounds good...

Anyway, de-wicking this trope anytime soon? Like the Getting Crap Past the Radar or Adorkable cleanup some time ago?

We need a crowner to make a final decision on what happens to this trope first. I think we were trying to gather more crowner options right now.

Edited by MacronNotes on Apr 27th 2021 at 9:23:46 AM

Yeah I am not seeing any Knight in Shining Armor-like or Captain America-like usage in the wick check (and Cap's use of this trope is confounded with him being Captain Patriotic, so he's still not the best poster boy). I think we would still need a rename for Blue Is Heroic in order to narrow it down to those, and at that point we may as well be creating a new trope wholesale.

Should we just have a single prop to disambiguate? If we see any "knighthood" or "freedom/justice" associated examples we can keep them in a sandbox in case anyone wants to TLP.

Maybe? There's been a lot of ideas tossed around, but only some of them are actually viable, so...

I definitely think the "Knightly Blue" (as I'll call it) idea can work, but it's such a different and uncovered idea so far that it'd be best just drafted from scratch, like Blue Is Calm. A redefinition process would essentially be cutting Blue Is Heroic anyway, and then we'd probably still wind up with a disambig.

FWIW I still think Blue Is Heroic is a trope (and I know I'm not the only one), if only as a Trope in Aggregate. We have had a lot of back and forth on this already and I think it's time for a crowner to decide what the community thinks. But here are some proposed criteria to tighten up usage a bit.

The color needs to be a key, consistent part of character design. Blue as a uniform color for the good guys or as a Color Motif for a Hero Protagonist are ok. Entries where the character wears one blue outfit sometimes, or where everyone on the team has a different color and one of them is blue shouldn't count. The entries also need to be about active heroism, not just "is a nice person".

I could also get behind a rename to Knightly Blue where it's a color for The Paragon or similar types. I think that is flexible to encompass Captain Patriotic and cop examples that were discussed earlier.

I think it may be worth looking at Primary-Color Champion more closely. I just skimmed through a bunch of wicks, and while most used it correctly, there were also several that used it to mean "some combination of red/yellow/blue that does not include both red and blue" or "at least one primary color". If the trope ends up being expanded or a supertrope is made to catch these examples, then Blue Is Heroic could be folded into that.

Then we need a separate thread for that trope. We can't fold Blue Is Heroic into it unless it actually does fit, and unless it gets redefined, it doesn't fit.

And again, I support Knightly Blue as a concept, but I just don't think the current state of Blue Is Heroic has anything to do with that idea. Again, the wick check and description back me up on this, which is why I'd rather draft it from scratch.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 27th 2021 at 4:03:53 AM

Knightly Blue I agree is better drafted from scratch. I am reminded of Fate/stay nights Saber◊ and Fate/Apocryphas Ruler◊, for example, whose blue dress + armor getups are obviously stylized but thematically fitting for their real identities of King Arthur and Joan of Arc.

I agree with putting naturalironist's definition of Blue Is Heroic as a crowner option. One example that comes to mind is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, where Link and Zelda (who traditionally wear green and pink/purple/white) wear blue in this game, as does everyone else in the superteam whose goal it is to defeat the evil◊: the blue marks them as 'heroes' in-universe.

Another idea that's coming to me as I'm typing this is Blue And White And Good All Over, a complement to Red and Black and Evil All Over and Gold and White Are Divine. Blue by itself isn't much to write home about (a couple 'hero wears blue' examples in the wick check are blue + black, for example), but blue and white is a color combination for the heavens.

Edited by Synchronicity on Apr 27th 2021 at 5:02:49 AM