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Bright Is Not Good

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Go ahead. Make fun of his fashion sense. It's not like he can just snuff you out of existence with a snap of his fingers, right? ...Right?
A Space Marine's armour is bright with heraldry that proclaims his devotion to his Chapter and the beloved Emperor of Mankind. Our principle is that what the enemy can see, he will soon learn to fear...

Generally, bright colors are used to create a jolly atmosphere or to show a character's extrovert personality. However, sometimes they can hide an unexpected threat. And you may notice it only when it's too late. Why? Probably because you were distracted by all those vivid colors.

Compare Light Is Not Good, contrast Dark Is Evil, Evil Is Not Well-Lit and Grayscale of Evil. Expect it to show up in a Stepford Suburbia, or even more probably in a Crapsaccharine World. Monster Clown is a typical character that fits this trope. Not related to smart and evil characters (you should look at Evil Genius or Wicked Cultured for this). For another kind of Bright Is Not Good, see Dumb Is Good. Supertrope to Sickly Green Glow, the specific color family of yellowish green that indicates radioactivity, toxicity, acidity, or biohazard; Psycho Pink, where a dangerous or psychotic character wears the soft and innocuous pink; Hollywood Acid, again, typically a bright green or yellow; and Dangerously Garish Environment which is this for entire places.

No Real Life examples unless they're scientific ones, please. This is not a trope for petty grievances about a color being associated with a political party or a sport team you don't like. Also, it is not about the quality of a certain urban fantasy movie.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • Luck of Black Clover wears bright green, has blonde hair, and clads himself in greaves and gauntlets made of bright blue lightning. In spite of his appearance, he's a borderline psychotic fighter who becomes more unhinged as a battle goes on.
  • In Hotarubi no Tomoru Koro ni, the fireflies glow quietly and beautifully in the night of the wake. This is not a good omen by any means, as it announces the protagonist being trapped in what seems to be a parallel world where they are the only living humans, and where various things try to kill them.
  • Kill la Kill has Ragyo, who wears brightly colored clothing so extravagant that Lady Gaga would probably tell her to tone it down a bit. She also projects a rainbow-colored aura wherever she goes. And she is the Greater-Scope Villain of the anime (later outright Big Bad), one of the most cruel and unforgivable villains in anime ever, and a serious contender for the title of "Worst Anime Mom". The same anime has Nui Harime, who wears a bright pink lolita dress, but is just as bad as Ragyo. This contrasts the Dark Is Not Evil theme of the protagonist, who is Red and Black and Evil All Over, without the actual "evil" part.
  • The last two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion are a complete psychological breakdown (and recovery!) which feature the most saturated, brightest colors in the series at many parts.
  • One Piece has the Big Mom Pirates/Charlotte Family. Almost all of Big Mom's children (including Big Mom herself) wear bright colors, so much they could fit right in a circus or a Disney movie but they're a notorious and vicious pirate crew who would bring destruction to entire islands and populations solely to take some ingredients for a wedding cake. The only exception is Charlotte Katakuri, Big Mom's second son, who wears all black and looks like a tattooed Badass Biker instead.
  • Princess Tutu has Drosselmeyer. He wears a long coat of various vivid colors, has big pinkish, red eyes, and long flowing white hair. However, he is a huge sadist that constantly cackles at the heroes' misery and plans on finishing their story with the most tragic ending possible.
  • Puella Magi Madoka Magica:
  • Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Cytomander is an avian beastman with what seems to be peacock DNA. Despite being bright and colorful, he is a villain (admittedly a sissy one) and possibly the most psychotic of the Four Great Generals.

    Comic Books 
  • Clive Barker's Next Testament: Wick, the Father of Colors is a kaleidoscopic creature whose whole body is covered in vibrant colors. However, he's a malevolent, impulsive, hedonistic eldritch abomination who harbors nothing but ill will for all humanity.
  • The DCU:
    • Batman: The Joker's most famous outfit is purple, along with an orange shirt and a green tie. He also has green hair and white skin. Many incarnations add bright red lips to the mix.
    • The Flash: The Reverse-Flash (both the Thawne and Zolomon incarnations) is a Palette Swapped Evil Counterpart of the Flash, having a primarily yellow costume and has red-lighting when he uses his powers.
    • In Green Lantern, the Corps with the brightest lights, the Sinestro Corps and Agent Orange, are the evillest. The usual "primary = good; secondary = evil" trope doesn't play out here either, with the Sinestro Corps and the Green Lantern Corps being the opposite of what you'd expect from their colors. There's also the Reds, who aren't exactly "good" (though they're more vengeance-oriented berserkers than being "evil" in the traditional sense).
    • In Injustice: Gods Among Us, Regime Superman retains his trademark blue, red, and yellow costume for the first four volumes after he becomes a murderous, world-conquering Knight Templar. He pulls an Evil Costume Switch at the start of the fifth volume.
    • Robin (1993): The Speedboyz are a gang of murderous car thieves who wear bright shirts in teal, orange, purple and red with white masks that have orange lenses.
  • Marvel Universe:
  • Sin City: The aptly named Yellow Bastard is Ethan Rourke "Junior", a sadistic Serial Rapist and murderer of little girls, who is protected by his father Senator Rourke. After getting nearly killed by Detective Hartigan, Junior is revived in a way that leaves his body unable to properly process waste, which gives him a disgusting smell and yellow skin which gives a Splash of Color in the black and white comic. Even in the Crapsack World of Sin City, he stands out as one of the most revolting antagonists in the series.

    Eastern Animation 

    Fan Works 
  • Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): Aside from Ghidorah, its "children" the Many tend to turn the biomass they infect and absorb a gold color like Ghidorah. Ghidorah and the Many's golden color stands in stark contrast to both Godzilla's and Monster X's dark and gray colors on the other side of the morality spectrum.
  • dead things: In canon, when using Polyjuice to masquerade as Harry, the potion turns gold. In dead things, despite Harry being Britain's most recent Dark Wizard, the color of his magic (particularly, his Necromancy spells) remains gold. Hermione even Lampshades this in the narration.
    Necromancy shouldn’t be gold, [Hermione] thinks, but it is, [Harry's] magic has been gold for a long time and she remembers the polyjuice turning liquid gold and maybe gold has always been about Death, she thinks, watching the gold spin in the eve.
  • One Less Lonely Gurl: C'ren is the Big Bad Villain Protagonist of the story. She has light blonde hair with pink and green streaks, has fair, rosy skin, is a Justin Bieber fan, and hates anything dark or gothic. She is the epitome of a prep in My Immortal.

    Films — Animation 
  • The Angry Birds Movie 2: The Big Bad Zeta is an eagle with purple feathers who plans on turning the Pig and Bird Islands into her summer resorts after driving out the inhabitants.
  • Cats Don't Dance: The Big Bad, Darla Dimple crosses this over with Light Is Not Good; she has blonde hair, and wears primarily pink, but she is a self-centered prima donna who abuses her co-workers and threatens anyone who tries to take the spotlight from her.
  • Corpse Bride: Zig-zagged. In contrast with the living world's Deliberately Monochrome aesthetic where color is incredibly rare and washed-out, the land of the dead is brightly colored and vibrant in every sense of the word. To the average citizen, the dead are quite friendly, and their brief visit to the living world is a heartwarming reuinion rather than a Zombie Apocalypse. However, they are VERY dangerous if you give them a good reason as one particularly nasty character finds out the hard way.
  • Alameda Slim from Home on the Range, especially in his Villain Song.
  • Tamatoa from Moana. He's a gold-encrusted giant crab who lives in a bright cave of treasures and even has a Villain Song called "Shiny" (which is a visual and auditory homage to David Bowie), who even has his own bioluminescent light. He's also a human eater, a cannibal, and incredibly smug.
  • The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie Boogie whenever he is in the spotlight, which he loves, has a neon-green hue and he absolutely fits right in with the colours of his tacky, cheap fun-house lair, his clownish style. The contrast to the gothic-colored and somber-looking good monsters of Halloween Town can be reminiscent of Batman and the Joker.
  • The Pilgrim's Progress (2019):
    • Mr. Worldly Wiseman wears brightly colored fancy clothes but he nearly gets Christian killed with his advice.
    • Vanity Fair runs a perpetual carnival that is very bright and colorful, but the people immediately resort to violence when rebuffed, ultimately killing Faithful.
  • Titan A.E.: The Drej are Energy Beings of bright blue light, and are responsible for the destruction of planet Earth, and seek to destroy the surviving humans.
  • Toy Story 3:
    • Woody, Buzz, and the rest are running on a Conveyor Belt of Doom, hoping to escape the garbage shredders. Rex spots a light at the end of the tunnel, thinking it's the sun (and thus, outside to freedom). Nope, it's the incinerator.
    • Lotso, the movie's Big Bad, is a bright pink teddy bear that smells of strawberries and looks unassuming; however he's quite possibly the most evil of all of the bad guys within the franchise.
  • Wreck-It Ralph: While on the surface Sugar Rush's characters appear to be sickly sweet and nice, the irony is that pretty much every single inhabitant of the game is a horrible individual. In truth, they were originally just as nice as they appeared, but King Candy, who is in reality Turbo in disguise, intentionally messed up Sugar Rush's programming code so none of the racers would remember who Vanellope von Schweetz really was. The second they get their memories back, light does in fact become good and they instantly apologize for how mean they were. "Candy-coated heart of darkness", as Ralph puts it.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): King Ghidorah has golden scales covering his body, but he's also just about the single evilest character in this movie: an animalistic but intelligent and actively malicious Omnicidal Maniac who kills all humans on sight for his own amusement and who wants to reshape the Earth with an extinction event.
  • Hotel Rwanda: The uniform of the Interahamwe, a politically extremist militia force engaging in genocide against the Tutsi, seems to be brightly-coloured tropical shirts.
  • Joker (2019): This version of the Joker is even more colorful than the comic version; in addition to the green hair, red smile and white face, he has blue paint around the eyes, red eyebrows, an orange and red suit, and a red nose.
  • Midsommar is a horror film where the villains, a commune of fair-haired Swedes, is strongly associated with light and bright colors. They wear white tunics with colorful accents, cover themselves in brightly colored flowers, and paint their temple bright yellow. The sun is also always shining, because it's summer.
  • Rob Roy: Archibald Cunningham is a foppish swordsman who wears a variety of pastel-colored clothes and who commits theft, arson, and the rape of a woman and a boy.
  • Star Wars has Force lightning, a technique where a Force user projects bright blue lightning from their hands. It's almost always used to torture and kill people, and it's fueled by The Power of Hate. It's almost exclusively used by the Sith, who generally go for dark colors.
  • Terminator 2: Judgment Day: The T-1000's liquid form is a bright, shiny chrome color, but not only is it the antagonistic "assassin" rather than the protector in this movie, it's one of the more dangerous and actively cruel Terminators. It's also a lot better than the Arnie-portrayed T-800 usually is at blending in and appearing polite when incognito, which when combined with the T-1000's aforementioned brutality makes it seem all the more psychopathic.
  • TRON: Legacy: As everyone is Colour-Coded for Your Convenience, CLU and his mooks wear black robes with luminescent lines. CLU and his army actually use harsher colors (reds and oranges) while everyone else uses light, brilliant shades (blue and white) for their lights. Castor, on the other hand, wears all white.
  • Venom (2018): Riot is the symbiote with the lightest color, silver, and is by far the most vicious and depraved of its crew.

    Folklore 
  • The association of witches with the color black is fairly modern; before that they were most commonly depicted wearing garishly patterned multihued clothing. Almost proto-psychodelic, which may in fact be related to the association of witches with toxic and hallucinogenic plants such as belladonna. See Paul Devereux's The Long Trip: The Prehistory of Psychedelia. Garish clothes were a result of association with Roma, commonly depicted as wearing outlandish (in the eyes of an average medieval European), multicolored clothes. Also applied to the Romani themselves who were (and sometimes still are) stigmatized as petty thieves and connivers.

    Literature 
  • In an example that's not evil but definitely dangerous, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and its many adaptations present Wonka's Factory as a bright, colorful place, often to the point of Amazing Technicolor World, and its owner/creator's outfit follows suit. But there's a lot of stuff in his factory that really should not be tampered with or tasted, and not heeding Mr. Wonka's warnings about them seriously results in all manner of crazy disasters. Also, in the 2005 film and 2013 stage musical adaptations, Charlie's environment and costumes therein are outfitted in grays and earth-tones while the four well-off brats come from much more colorful places.
  • The Elric Saga: Melniboné is one of the archetypal evil empires of high fantasy, a place of fabulous wealth, corruption, and decadent cruelty sometimes called the Bright Empire, which once conquered the world with fleets of gold-plated warships and ruled from a shining city called Immrryr. Their emperors traditionally hold court atop a throne carved from a single gigantic ruby. Having decayed to a Vestigial Empire hasn't put a damper on either their fondness for light and bright colors or their sadistic hobbies (their favorite musical instrument is constructed by mutilating slaves so that each one can only scream a single, perfect note).
  • Harry Potter:
  • In The Lord of the Rings, evil wizard Saruman declares himself no longer the White Wizard, but Saruman of the Many Colors.
  • The Knight Templar Faith Militant of A Song of Ice and Fire wear rainbow colored cloaks to symbolize the Seven Gods of the Faith.
  • Star Wars: Honor Among Thieves: On the swamp planet Seymarti, a large, brightly colored butterfly-like insect lands on Mauve Shirt Sunnim's shoulder. Despite Han Solo's warning, everyone else is captivated by the beautiful creature, and as soon as Sunnim touches it, it stings him in the neck before Han can blast it. Sunnim dies within minutes from the powerful venom. This is explicitly contrasted with a large, ugly, and dangerous-looking mud-dwelling creature encountered just before, which Han advocates against killing because he can tell it's an herbivore. In an alien swamp, muddy camouflage, many wide-set eyes, and flat teeth indicate a peaceful creature, while jewel-bright wings and graceful movements denote danger.
    Han: When something hangs out in an environment as dangerous at this in bright, eye-catching colors, it's because it's the meanest thing in the jungle. The brightness is a warning, not an invitation.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In Battlestar Galactica (1978), the Cylons wear (or are made of) bright shiny armor.
  • Black Mirror: "Nosedive" takes place in a dystopian Stepford Suburbia future where people rate each other on a Facebook-style phone app, and the rating affects almost everything about your life from where you can live or work to your priority for hospital treatment. Everyone is always smiling and wears bright, inoffensive pastel colors. However, everyone is also narcissistic and obsessed with status; Happiness Is Mandatory (as you being upset or negative might make other people around you upset and get them to downvote you... and you really don't want that), Disproportionate Retribution over slight social faux pas is rife, and it's all enough to drive the Social Climber protagonist Laughing Mad by the end of the episode. The only person in the whole story who wears black is the prisoner in the cell opposite Lacie's in the end, with whom Lacie sprints towards a mix of Vitriolic Best Buds and Love at First Sight.
  • The Boys (2019): Homelander has a Primary-Color Champion look which incorporates gold plating. The world at large think he's the world's greatest hero, but behind closed doors, not only is he stinking corrupt, he's one of the most violent and messed-up Supes of them all.
  • Doctor Who: The New Paradigm Daleks from "Victory of the Daleks" trade in their predecessors' metallic look for bright colors. The change proved unpopular, however, so we haven't seen much of them since.

    Multiple Media 
  • Transformers:
    • From the the good ol' 1980s series and comics through Cybertron, Starscream had a red, white, and blue color palette, the same as Big Good Optimus Prime, and generally brighter and friendlier colors than the darker-colored Decepticons. He really stands out amongst the Seekers, his Palette Swap buddies from the original series. You've got Starscream's bright and friendly colors next to Skywarp's black, Thundercracker's dark blue, and the mass-produced Mooks' light purple. Of course, he is, well, The Starscream; you can't trust anything about him.
    • Decepticons often favor dark colors. However, the Dreamwave Comics G1 series Transformers: Generation One features a bright orange-and-yellow repaint of Starscream called Sunstorm. He is a totally unhinged radioactive berserker. It was apparently going to be revealed that his madness was due to The Fallen within his mind, but Dreamwave went under before his story could be completed.
    • The G2 toyline featured a large number of G1 toys with completely new color schemes. Many Autobots got darker color schemes, while a large number of Decepticons suddenly got flashy neon appearances (which often ranged from "garish" to "eye-searing" in intensity).

    Roleplay 

    Tabletop Games 
  • Blackbirds RPG: The Plague of Beauty is strongly associated with bright, colorful flowers, with her true form, chosen appearance, servants, and victims all being covered in them. She's also a monstrous Vain Sorceress who took part in the murder and usurpation of the gods, plunging the world into chaos and transforming herself into an Eldritch Abomination which preys on peoples' vanity and self-consciousness to spread a fatal Mystical Plague.
  • The tabletop game Polaris is built around this trope, as it deals with a perfect civilization under the stars whose destruction is heralded by the appearance of the sun. The dawn's first appearance is described in the gamebook: "Light coming up from the edge of the sky, colors redder than stars, new shades that had never been seen, yellow and green and golden through the icicle walls, burning out the stars from the sky, brilliant and impossible and beautiful and alien."
  • Princess: The Hopeful:
    • Princesses of Mirrors have a strong light motif, to the point where one of their nicknames is "Lightbringers". They are also narcisstic brats who have a strong tendency to get others killed due to their own overconfidence.
    • Similarly, the colors of the Court of Storms are white, acid-green, and steel-gray, and they are the Court of "destroy anything touched by the Darkness, no matter the collateral damage".
  • Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000:
    • Followers of Slaanesh (Chaos god of hedonism and excess) in are Sense Freaks who wear hideously garish clothing and choking perfumes at all times, being so blasé it's the only way they can feel anything. One Chaos Space Marine Legion devoted to Slaanesh wears pink and black armor for the same reason.
    • This is pretty much the principle for all Space Marines, barring a handful that actually care about stealth and wear more subdued colors. But they're still an 8-foot, half-tonne killing machine so it seems a bit of a lost cause.
    • The Eldar are usually clad in brightly colored armor, but their loyalty is to their own race, and they're willing to let everyone else burn.
    • The Mordian Iron Guard Regiment of the Imperial Guard dress in bright colored dress uniforms and look more ready to go on parade than to battle.
    • Hilariously subverted with Ork Kommandos. They know how to use camouflage, but not all of them quite grasp that the colors should blend in with their surroundings. Sometimes they paint themselves in purple or orange reasoning that clashing colors enhance the effect (the enemy can see how well hidden you are from farther away!). The subversion comes in that, since Orks unconsciously warp reality, it still works as camouflage.
  • In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, several Zmei (Wyrm dragons) are vividly colored. Rustarin's scales are a shimmering sapphire blue; Trevero's scales are blood red; and Illyana's scales sparkle with all the colors of the rainbow. Despite their colorful appearance, they're also among the most powerful Wyrm minions this side of Malfeas.

    Video Games 
  • Destiny 2: Starting in The Witch Queen, the art design for the Darkness and the Black Pyramids began incorporating a colorful, high-contrast, almost toyetic palette to what once was previously a uniform and oppressive gloom. These colors primarily being seen on abstract murals and iconography, the intent was to convey a sense of alien culture and symbolic meaning incomprehensible to outsiders such as the player, and the simple, toy-like designs tie in to previous allusions about the whole Myth Arc resembling a game played between vast, godlike entities.
  • The real world in DmC: Devil May Cry is gloom and somber while the demon world has extremely vivid colors.
  • In Evolve, the monster adaptations are brightly colored and just as lethal as the originals.
  • Far Cry 4: The Big Bad Pagan Min wears very flamboyant, primarily pink clothing, and is the Ax-Crazy former Triad drug lord turned dictator of Kryat.
  • Sae Kurosawa from Fatal Frame II wears a white kimono that is extraordinarily bright when compared to other ghosts' attires, with vivid bloodstains on it. She is a force to recon with, as her initial appearances have her be a One-Hit Kill on the player character, and she's the main reason why the Repentance occured. She is also the True Final Boss of the game.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Ozma from Final Fantasy IX is a big colourful swirly energy ball thingy. It is what happens when an Eidolon (a God essentially) forgets who it is. It's the toughest boss in the game, and, thankfully, optional.
    • Kefka Palazzo from Final Fantasy VI wears an outfit with many vivid colors and different patterns on it. His goal is to destroy the world.
    • The entire world of Spira in Final Fantasy X is, as a rule, vividly colorful and sunny. It's also described by a few characters later in the game as being a "Spiral of Death," and the bright colors are there to distract everyone from their misery.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's: Freddy Fazbear's Pizza is full of balloons, streamers, children's drawings, candy-colored animatronics, and death.
  • Kratos, the Ghost of Sparta in God of War. His skin is rather literally pale white, but he was enough of a madman to destroy all of Sparta and the Pantheon associated with it just for revenge. Granted, he would make a genuine attempt to defy this in the Norse lands due to having a son.
  • Hyper Light Drifter: Oooooooh yes. The world is replete with bright, pinkish reds and pale, sickly blues and greens. Sounds like a jogging outfit from The '80s, but instead it emphasizes a sense of worldwide wrongness. Much of the Alien Blood on display is an otherwise gorgeous magenta.
  • Kirby:
    • Marx, the Final Boss of Kirby Super Star, is a brightly colored jester with lavender skin, a red and blue jester hat, and large golden wings with multicolored flashing hexagons under them serving as membranes. Despite the bright color scheme, he's an Ax-Crazy Villainous Harlequin who tricked the sun and moon into fighting, used Kirby to summon Galactic Nova, stole his wish so he can control Popstar, and left him to die in the void of space. He gets even more colorful as Marx Soul in the remake's True Arena; his body becomes a bright purple, his wings turn into a dark magenta, the hearts on them become sky blue, his tongue becomes bright pink, his jester hat becomes brighter, and he has a gold necklace with a pink gem in the center which is presumably made from the remains of Nova.
    • Drawcia from Kirby: Canvas Curse is a bright purple Wicked Witch who also steals Kirby's limbs and goes around causing mischief. Her true form, Drawcia Soul, is just as vibrant as her, and is even creepy to make up for it.
    • Kirby's Return to Dream Land:
      • First, there's Magolor, who is initially a brown-skinned alien wearing blue and yellow robes. Once he gains the Master Crown, though, his body turns gaseous and fiery with red and blue segments, his eyes turn red, and his hood becomes a darker blue. He even keeps this going into his One-Winged Angel form, but clashes heavily with his pure black orb body. Averted with Magolor Soul, who instead goes for Dark Is Evil by having an almost monochrome color scheme with grey and navy blue.
      • The Master Crown also qualifies. Its base form is a golden crown with a bright blue gem in the center. However, it's also a very dangerous artifact which will not only grant its wearer great power to travel between dimensions, but it also corrupts them, slowly consuming their souls with darkness until they become soulless shells for the crown to control and destroy entire worlds. It's best seen with the Magolor Epilogue, where the crown merges with the restored Gem Apple Seed to become a giant one-eyed Botanical Abomination. Averted with its appearance when worn by Magolor Soul, where it instead goes for a dull grey color scheme with a red gem in the center.
    • Kirby: Triple Deluxe has Queen Sectonia. Unlike all of the other Kirby villains (i.e. Dark Matter, Necrodeus, or Dark Nebula), whose sole goal is destruction and darkness, Sectonia's goal is to ascend to godhood by merging with the Dreamstalk and sucking the life out of Popstar so she can become its queen. She also has a very bright color scheme, primarily consisting of dark blue and yellow, fitting for a wasp-like creature. In Dededetour!, she's mostly magenta. Her Soul form in the True Arena is also bright blue.
    • Subverted with Claycia in Kirby and the Rainbow Curse. She wears a purple dress with magenta polka-dots, a bright pink scarf, has teal hair, and is initially the Big Bad of the game. It then turns out she's only evil because she's possessed by the game's true villain, Dark Crafter, who is a pure black cloud, but hides that by using all of the world's colors to make it look like a giant evil rainbow cloud.
    • There's also Star Dream from Kirby: Planet Robobot. It is a powerful, interdimensional supercomputer which powers the entire Access Ark that President Haltmann tries to use against Kirby after having his butt handed to him. However, once Susie stealing the control helmet for Star Dream causes it to assimilate Haltmann's body and gain sentience, it becomes self-aware of the world around it and seeks to commit omnicide to achieve ultimate prosperity. Then, when Kirby knocks off the front covering of the Access Ark, it turns out that Star Dream itself is another Galactic Nova. That's right — another clockwork star just like the one that was destroyed by Marx back in Super Star. It's Soul OS form even takes on the color scheme of the original Nova.
    • Dark Taranza from Team Kirby Clash Deluxe has a color scheme very similar to Sectonia despite what his name suggests. He's also the game's true Big Bad.
    • Void Termina's true form, Void Soul and Void, in Kirby Star Allies. His true form is bright pink just like Kirby himself, Void Soul is entirely baby blue, while Void is straight-up Red And White And Eerie All Over with multicolored veins coursing through his body. They're also the stronger forms of the game's — and by extension, the entire franchise'sGreater-Scope Villain.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
  • PlanetSide has the Vanu Sovereignty and the New Conglomerate rebels, which have bright purple/teal and bright blue/yellow armor, respectively. The Sovereignty are fanatically devoted to (forcibly) "uplifting" humanity. The Conglomerate are devoted to personal freedom, corporate profits, libertarianism, and laissez-faire capitalism.
  • The resident villainous group of Pokémon X and Y, Team Flare, dress in eye-searingly bright orange suits that they consider high fashion, but several NPCs note to be horribly tacky.
  • Super Smash Bros. Brawl: Tabuu is easily the most brightly-colored thing in the entire game, and he's the main antagonist of the story mode.
  • Sword of Paladin: The Miasma is associated with a sickly golden color, as shown by the presence of the Golden Ladies who attack random passerbys with Miasma. The sword of the Emperor of Miasma also has a golden appearance and is what spawns the Golden Ladies in the first place. The Satan Gems are Miasma-infected gems that have a golden glow, but turn pitch-black when purified of Miasma, turning them into containers of Dark Matter instead.
  • View from Below: Peter is the leader of the Pieties, a cult that wears yellow smiley masks and seems to be allies to the mortals. However, they have their own rituals where they sacrifice each other in blood rituals, which Peter secretly gives to the Crimson God. Peter also sends mortals on a quest to defeat the Crimson God, but gives them incomplete information to ensure that the Crimson God wins and kills them in order to complete Somnium's ritual.
  • World of Warcraft:
    • The Scarlet Crusade are all armored and red all over. They are an order dedicated in eradicating the Undead Scourge, a noble intent, but their methods involve killing or torturing anyone suspected to be part of the undead or infected by the plague. Which is anyone not part of the order.
    • The Burning Legion is frequently associated with destroying flames (often bright green) and are led by a fallen titan wreathed in fire.
    • The Sha are creatures imbued with Shadow energy, but they use white flames aside from the Sha of Pride which uses dark blue shadowy bolts. Their forms are deep black with white highlights, combining this trope with Dark Is Evil.

    Web Animation 
  • RWBY:
    • The Schnee family is entirely white-themed. Their surname means "snow", and those born into the family have names that evoke whiteness. The red-themed founder of the Schnee Dust Company, Nicholas, is a good man who uses his wealth to lift the people of Mantle out of poverty. However, the family head, Jacques Schnee, marries into the family and takes on the family's name and symbols after taking over the business from Nicholas. Under his leadership, the SDC loses the beacon of quality and philanthropy; as a stately, white-haired, white-suited man, he looks the part and engages in good PR, but is a greedy businessman who not only maximises profit by cutting corners on quality, suppressing wages and workers rights, but who also terrorises his own family and seeks to control every aspect of their lives.
    • Since his first appearance, General James Ironwood dresses in pristine white garb befitting his status as a headmaster and general dedicated to protecting Remnant's citizens. However, he willingly turns on his own allies if he thinks they're not up to the job, taking authority away from them in favour of giving it to himself. When he does it to Ozpin in the second volume, it brings Qrow back to Beacon, prepared to pick a fight over Ironwood's behaviour. Five volumes later, the Atlesian Council becomes increasingly concerned about his growing ability to circumvent their power in favour of placing himself in command of all the sensitive decisions. Eventually, Ironwood descends so far into authoritarianism in his fight against Salem to the point that he becomes an Arc Villain in Volume 8.

    Webcomics 
  • Kyriena in Broken is easily the most colorful and bright character in the comic, and her bright, constantly wide smile is terrifying when you know what she's done to the protagonists.
  • Roommates is generally black and white but from the occasional color illustration The Fair Folk like bright colors a lot, like the Monster Roommate is fond of golds, his mother (and Card-Carrying Villain) whites and pale blues, his sister bright purples etc., also several resident psychos like bright reds way too much.
  • Royal Blue: The King of Steira, despite being bright blue, is an evil coward and abusive father.
  • Posey from The Sanity Circus dresses in cheery red colours and, in the early chapters, is often set against bright bloom backgrounds. She is a fear-eating Eldritch Abomination in the form of a small girl.

    Web Originals 
  • In Brig Scarlet Flamingo, brightness of a colour scheme usually corresponds to its user’s moral greyness at best.
    • The Scarlet Flamingo is painted coral pink (as the characters describe it), gets golden, silvery, reddish yellow and sparkly white sails at one point, and is a corsair brig. Its predecessor the Red Drake was painted bright red, and its crew was even crueler and even attacked the ships of its own country.
    • The Azure Palace, owned and designed by ruthless arc villain Simon Canter, boasts various shades of bright blue and a colourful sea-themed design inside, and Canter’s carriage is heavily gilded and with leaf patterns.
    • Subverted with the yellow, red and white flag of Courbarte: it belongs to the Flamingo’s enemies, but the story quickly reveals there are plenty of good people on that side as well. Played completely straight with the flag's yellow, red, white and brown modification flown by Knight Templar Joel de Goirré.
    • The Ram’s Horn, an inn used for the meetings of Port de la Reine’s bandit gang, is decorated with a large sculpture of a ram’s head painted, as Anthony describes it, "poison yellow".
    • Meanwhile, grey and pale yellow are the colours of the buildings belonging to the Ernscott family, the benevolent authority figures of Jarison Haven.

    Western Animation 
  • Amphibia: The Core's "inner sanctum" inside its mindscape has the appearance of a grand, brightly-colored library, a stark contrast to its mechanical Red and Black and Evil All Over appearance in reality. It shows the inner sanctum to Marcy whilst it's planning to manipulate her and assimilate her permanently.
  • D.W. Read from Arthur has a primarily pink and white color palette, but she is by far the biggest Jerkass among the main characters and is downright cruel to her older brother Arthur most of the time.
  • Darkwing Duck:
    • Negaduck wears yellow, red and black — the colors of the venomous coral snake — to contrast hero Darkwing Duck's more toned-down purple, pink and teal color scheme.
    • DW's oldest and most recurring enemy, Megavolt, wears a yellow jumpsuit, giant battery and plug helmet that act as beacons to his being an electrical powerhouse, making his very powers both bright and deadly.
  • Gravity Falls:
  • Jackie Chan Adventures: Out of the seven Demon Sorcerers introduced in Season 2, Bai Tza the Water Demon has a very light blue-and-white color scheme, yet she's a vicious piece of work who doesn't think anything of drowning an entire city.

    Real Life 
  • A sudden, bright flash/lighting up of the horizon or even worse, the entire sky accompanied with sudden heat can only mean one of three things: a nuclear bomb has just exploded somewhere nearby, an asteroid or comet has made entry into the Earth's atmosphere, or a gamma ray burst has hit the earth. The flash from any of these is powerful enough to blind you and its heat can do anything from cremate you alive to give you a slight sunburn, depending on what happened and how far you were from it. A distant flash on the horizon not accompanied by sudden heat can be distant lightning or fireworks (or in some locales an aurora), but a flash with heat always means "something very, very bad is happening and whatever the hell you do don't look at it!"
  • Aposematism includes the use of vivid colors by animals as a warning sign against predators.
    • The most famous example is the poison dart frog.
    • The Monarch Butterfly, which is toxic to birds... and is actually mimicking the Viceroy Butterfly, which is not poisonous, but tastes like aspirin.
    • Some animals have bright colors despite not actually being poisonous to fool potential predators. Unfortunately for them, not all predators are that easily fooled. It's pretty risky to draw attention to yourself via bright colors when you don't actually have anything protecting you.
  • The mantis shrimp. It's brightly colored, probably much more colorful than our eyes and brains can handle — especially since it has 16 varieties of cone receptors in its eyes (compared to the 3 varietes we have), allowing it to see an almost impossibly wide light spectrum. It also looks really cute, in an alien sort of way. It also brutally, happily murders everything around it with its claws, delivering dismembering supersonic punches which deal massive damage even when they miss, because the water around the claw starts boiling due to friction caused by the speed of these punches. It's strong enough to punch through aquarium glass (which, coupled with the aforementioned bloodlust, makes it a poor choice for most aquariums) and injure human beings, and has earned an affectionate nickname thumb splitter, since that's what will happen if you try to touch it. Oh, and those claws? They're so tough that scientists would love to replicate their structure, in case it can be reproduced in human scale and used in the military.
  • The Blue-ringed Octopus has its iconic bioluminescent blue rings dotting its body. Looks cool when you see it, but these venomous guys have an extremely potent toxin that can kill 26 adult humans within minutes. If you get attacked by these guys, you're a goner, as there's no antivenom to counter it.
  • Chemical hazard labels have bright backgrounds to be easily spotted.
  • Many chemical substances present themselves in colorful crystals, or burn with pretty colors. Many are explosive/toxic/otherwise dangerous.
    • Hexavalent chromium (the name even comes from Greek χρῶμα, chrōma, meaning color) is well known for producing brightly colored compounds. All of the compounds are highly toxic, mutagenic, corrosive, carcinogenic and some are explosive.
  • An astronomy example: the brighter or more vivid the star's color, the worse it is for evolving life. Bright blue stars are the worst for evolving life. Red stars are bad, too. Red dwarfs are too small and cold, red giants too bright and unstable. Mediocre whitish or yellowish stars (yellow-white F class, the Sun's G class or the yellower-than-Sun K class) are the best for Earthlike planets. And, finally, Zig-Zagged with brown dwarfs, which aren't candidates for life-bearing planets at all. While the name doesn't sound very bright and therefore the trope seems to be averted, they are actually deep glowing red and worse (colder) than red dwarfs, playing it straight.
  • Supernovas are incredibly bright, with a single star going supernova outshining entire galaxies with billions of stars. They are also a very bad thing to any possibly inhabited star systems nearby, as they emit enough radiation to sterilize any planets within about 50 light years.
  • Fire. As the temperature grows higher (and thus more dangerous), the color of the flame shifts from red, to pink, to bright blue. This is common knowledge among fire-fighters.
  • Many animals react violently or panic at the sight of the color red, because they take it as a sign that one of their companions has been wounded and is bleeding heavily.
  • The colors of certain dinosaurs have been figured out thanks to microscopic pigment cells in the fossils of their plumage. Most of them had fairly dark colors. The brightest of them? Sinornithosaurus, a hawk-like predator that was decked out in red, grey, yellow and black. Ironically, its colors are thought to have been used for forest camouflage.
  • For this very reason, strong lamps have been used in interrogation rooms to extract confessions from criminals or hostile agents.
  • Emergency vehicles are brightly painted and use vivid strobe lights primarily to encourage other traffic to keep their distance.
  • Many minerals:
    • Cinnabar is an intense crimson red that has been used to make the pigment vermillion. However, it's extremely toxic as its made of mercuric sulfide. Criminals were often sent to the cinnabar mines in Ancient Roman times as it meant a surely slow, painful death.
    • Burning Magnesium results in a bright white flash that can blind someone who looks at it for too long.
    • Minerals containing copper are often beautiful shades of blue and green, but can easily cause poisoning, with malachite being one of the worst.
  • Black boxes, which aren't really black but bright orange, mainly in order to make them easy to spot particularly in the ocean. What makes them not good is if you actually encounter one, that means a plane crashed nearby.
  • Zig-zagged with plants. Flowers tend to be brightly colored to attract pollinators and ripe fruits are often red-to-orange to invite (helpful) herbivores. As a bonus, brighter fruits are generally more nutritious (containing higher amounts of carotenoids, antioxidants and vitamin C; that’s why you’re told to eat a rainbow.) However, there are plenty of aposematic toxic plants, though they generally prefer to use defenses such as thorns. Chilis are believed to be intensely red to attract birds (who are unaffected by capsaicin) while keeping mammals away (of course, this subverted by the millions of humans who love spicy food.)

 
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Sunblast

Sunblast is by no means a traditional hero. While he may thwart villains, he only does it for the recognition and enjoyment of beating them up. Rather than have them arrested, he willingly lets them go so he can do it again later.

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