There's a bit of a disagreement about the exact hue of the Star Pieces in Super Mario RPG. I think they match the Roy G Biv scale exactly, while another troper thinks they're slighty off. So we can all decide for ourselves, I've uploaded this picture of them to our wiki.
The center star is yellow. Going going clockwise from the top, the outer stars are indigo, green, orange, violet, blue, and red.
As you can see from the picture, the top star is darker than the one to the lower right. Since both are blue, this means the top star is the indigo one and the lower right star is the regular old blue one. The star at the bottom is reddish blue (almost to the point of being purple), so it's meant to be the violet star.
For reference, here's the Roy G Biv power batteries of the emotional spectrum from Green Lantern.
As you can see, they match the Star Pieces exactly. The first four are self evident, and the remaining three are blue, a darker blue, and a not-quite-purple reddish blue.
Edited by RobertMcSantos Hide / Show Replies
That pic seems to have some dithering and slight color distortion, particularly on the face of the blue star, probably due to color reductions. And it's taken at a point where the stars all have a glare on them. I'll reference a somewhat cleaner sprite rip available here
.
Anyway, lightness and darkness don't enter into it. Cyan is defined as a hue between green and blue, not as a light blue. A pixel sampled from the face of the green star is color #00F800, which has a hue value of 120. An equivalent pixel from the blue star is color #6888F8, with a hue of 226. And an equivalent pixel from the top star is color #30B1C8, with a hue of 189, placing it between the green and blue stars on the hue scale. Thus, it is cyan.
Further, indigo is defined as a color between blue and violet, not simply as a dark blue. Yes, DC Comics's colorists sometimes have trouble with this. A pixel taken from the face of the bottom star is color #8838F8, a hue of 265; yes, a reddish blue, but much more blue than red. True violet shades have an approximately equal red/blue proportion, a hue of somewhere around 300, as is the case with the Star Sapphire Lantern in your picture there. Thus, the bottom star would qualify as an indigo rather than a violet.
Edited by Wanderer
I can see where you're coming from, but I think it's somewhat anachronistic to use the modern conceptions of colors for a trope about a discredited division of the visual light spectrum from 300 years ago.
Let's say we do use hues to identify the colors, and we determine the hues of the Star Pieces from the sprite sheet you provided. You claim that violet is right between red and blue, but according to this, that's only true of the version used in internet development. The traditional definitions of violet (which are what Newton was probably working with, since there wasn't much internetting going on in those days) all skew more toward the blue side, with hues around the 275-ish range. Magenta is supposed to be the color with a hue of 300.
Newton defined blue as halfway between green and indigo, and he defined indigo as halfway between blue and violet. That would put blue as one-third of the way between green and violet, with indigo being two thirds of the way between the same two colors. If we accept that Newton's green was roughly the same as what we call green today with a hue of 120, that would put Newtonian blue at 172 and Newtonian indigo at 223.
Since those hues are rather close to the ones you provided for your sprite sheet, it still leads me to believe that the game developers were at least trying to color the Star Pieces according to the same faulty subsections of the rainbow that Newton had established.
So the question becomes one of how they should be labeled on the page. Should we go with the more accurate modern names? Should we fully embrace the spirit of Newton's biased assumptions and stick with his names? In the unlikely event that any tropers other than the two of us are reading this page, I'd love to hear your opinions on the matter.
Oh, uh, I think arguing about what Newton meant by those words just seems speculative.
Well, the purplish star is violet, at least according to everything other than HTML convention. That's true for even the modern definition of the color, no speculation needed.
So if we're going to say that the top star is "cyan" because it doesn't look like the modern primary blue, which color should we say the cyan is replacing? Blue or indigo?
Well, the bottom-left star does clearly look like the modern primary blue, so the question is instead between indigo and violet.
Like you said, indigo is between blue and violet. So if the star with a hue of 226 is clearly the modern primary blue, and violet is supposed to have a hue of around 275, that would put indigo in more of the 250-ish neighborhood. The bottom star is almost right in between them, but it does lean a bit more toward the violet side. Therefore, I suggest we re-add the example using this variant of your version.
"The star pieces in Super Mario RPG, though with cyan replacing indigo."
And also take the "ditto for" out of the Super Paper Mario example so it stands alone better.
Would you find this acceptable?
Edited by RobertMcSantos
I'm thinking the question of precisely where indigo ends and violet begins is a bit subjective.
Of course. The endings and beginnings of all colors are subjective, because colors blend into each other. That was largely my point ever since I first added this trope to YKTTW. Trying to separate the visible light spectrum into groups is arbitrary, because there are no natural breaks in it. It's just one continuous stream. You could split it into a group of three, six, seven, ten, or even one hundred colors, and none of them would be any more correct or incorrect than the others.
That's also why all these semantics are unnecessary. If a work uses seven colors that follow the spectrum's pattern, it counts as an example of this trope. Loading examples with lots of "exceptions" (especially when the work in question doesn't explicitly say what colors its using) only serves to overcomplicate them and distract from what the trope is actually about.
Edited by RobertMcSantos
Original YKKTW.