All my other blog post WIPs require me to do more research (AKA more watching of shows) and I just haven’t circled back to that. Yet I wanted to post something, so here I am!
I like colors, I think they are very pleasing, please enjoy a carousel of color-related topics.
I remember being five or six on the bus one day and thinking that I didn’t have a favorite color, but maybe I could have a different favorite for every season. Brown could be for fall, white could be for winter, and I believe pink and green were for spring and summer. Immediately I decided this was “stupid” and threw out the whole thing.
It’s not stupid…at worst, I guess it’s pretentious. Now that I’m an adult, I have some freedom of movement and an urge to go out to the park and watch the changing of the seasons. You really can immerse yourself in places where different colors, from the changing landscape, call out to you at different times.
Within like a year of that “stupid idea,” I began feeling Called to be, or relate to, the Blue Water Girl. You got Misty from Pokemon. You got Katara from Avatar. You got the blue Bionicle from Bionicle. You got…okay, maybe there weren’t that many examples, but it was enough.
Cool colors seemed calm and intelligent, which I valued and identified with. When I decided to quiz a bunch of people about what Pokemon we all were, I gave myself a Water-type. Milotic is a graceful, partially blue serpent that evolves from the ugly Feebas, and literally changes form when you raise its Beauty stat to max. Yes, I really thought I was hot shit.
But something devastating happened to me in fifth grade. I made an element-based personality quiz with all the greats: blue Water, deep-blue Ice, green Earth, purple Mind, pink Nova…et cetera. I took the quiz, but instead of getting Water, I ended up with gray ugly Air.
It was self-betrayal on a whole new level.
Assigning most people to only one element ever is a fool’s errand, of course. Nowadays I do relate to air as an element more. And I might take fire over water. And I love Electric-types, and Ice and Steel and more and so on. It’s not “either this or that,” it’s a hierarchy defined in large part by what video game I played last.
Many colors I like, or I adore certain shades of in certain contexts, but I feel actively positive about most shades of blue. I especially like sky blue—literal and deep, from the center of the sky, not the lighter color of a crayon.
I guess blue is the color of sensation, neuroses, societal expectations and somehow also favorite old toys, but some things must evolve.
Alright, get this. I like Homestuck, where characters are super strongly connected with their theme colors. Ever since I started reading in high school, it influenced my taste in colors. I even collabed on a fanwork, meaning I got to work with these tasty hues extensively.
There’s a character named Kanaya known as a rainbow drinker, but that’s not relevant to this post because I didn’t give a shit about her; I didn’t think she was very cool or funny. (I was wrong for that. I reread some of the story a few years back, and realized her character’s humor in those earlier acts aged like a fine wine.)
No, the only ones epic enough for me were Dave Strider, the red man, and Terezi Pyrope, the red-shades-cane teal-shirt teal-blood woman. They were artists, jokesters, foolish wild cards, and Terezi could also taste colors, so she licked everything, which I thought was funny. I’m a simple Simon.
The instant these characters started getting smarter and having more obvious emotional depth, I kind of dropped off, again because I’m a simple Simon. But the damage was done. My fanwork versions would never be half as intelligent, and they would be cursed to stay that way…forever…forever.
The color I had always sworn NEVER to identify with was pink. Pink was the color of everything vapid. One could go blue and therefore girly, but never pink, as that was TOO girly. There seemed to be a difference between “cool girls” wearing dignified purple and fashion-loving giggly gigglers.
But the tides…would they shift? High school forced me to drink the rainbow. Just drawing characters with new and changing color palettes made me reconsider. Almost their whole aesthetics were the colors. I gained a fresh appreciation for Aradia’s dark red. Jane’s cyan. The pleasing combinations of certain characters doing unexpected team-ups. Could this even make me respect…pink?!
Somewhere buried in the Homestuck color chart was the hue of an eternal unfavorite, the blood color of the alien with “no personality.” It was Feferi, and she was tied to a color I wasn’t even sure I’d seen before: Tyrian purple.
The name seems tailor-made to keep people afraid of touching girly things from running off. In reality, it comes from fancy ancient garments in a time when dyes were hard to come by. The hue is hard enough to find in nature and seems even tougher to find in merchandise…oh, wait, no it’s not. This is literally the same thing as hot pink. Maybe a few shades darker, but that’s it.
Not only that! Around the same time, my sibling was writing a story where several characters had adventurous color names. Grullo. Carmine. Amaranth!
“Amaranth.” “Tyrian.” “Rose” and “rose madder.” With names like these, suddenly certain types of pinks became more fascinating. Adjacent to them are magenta and fuchsia, familiar yet forgotten. I realized I like all of this family of sort-of-pinks. I just don’t like a super-saturated Polly Pocket pink. Also, I probably wouldn’t wear any of them.
If I were cursed to wear only one color for the rest of my life, though, the choice would be obvious. Black!!! It’s the color of so many elemental universal things.
It was just inevitable that once I got over the childhood idea that my favorite color should be something vibrant (and also was something that defined me at an existential level), my appreciation for neutrals would grow.
When a family member asked me what color I wanted my festive gift gadgets and clothes to be, I said, “Black. It goes with everything!” I think she was horrified.
Quick shout-out to burgundy; this is the type of red my mother adores, and I feel more appreciative of it and other reds as I grow older. Again, like one feels about fine wine, I guess. “Burgundy” is one of those things that goes hand-in-hand with “mahogany” and “merlot.” A bright red and yellow always lose to a deep red and gold.
But I have to be honest: I love color combinations far more than I love individual colors.
What a huge revelation.
I’m sure no other adult feels this way.
Not a chance.
I love the colors of sunrise and sunset, especially the mixture of yellow and blue I hear rhapsodized about far less often than the majestic oranges and purples. The colors of certain animals’ fur or the flashing feathers of birds’ necks, mixing together as they move in ways not every camera can capture.
I love cyan and red, yellow and navy, and green and pink making a surprise appearance on sliders that don’t seem like they contain opposite colors, yet do. I love CMYK, peas and carrots, pink and brown.
Blue, orange and pink need to be the colors of three protagonists someday; don’t ask why, they just do. So do red, yellow, and pink—again, they just do.
Sometimes your color combos define the aesthetic of your series (or at least they do if you’re me). Sometimes the colors on an album cover leak out into your perception of the musical suite, or the band or their ethos, maybe seeping in far more deeply than intended. But colors are fun! So I don’t mind this.
Fast fact to round this out: did you know that all the froot loops in the breakfast cereal Froot Loops are actually the same flavor? Really disturbing. What’s a “froot”?!??!?!??!?!
Thank you for reading, and Patrons, thank you for Patreonning.
For more posts about totally different subjects, check out three randomly selected posts from across the site: my review of Almost Christmas, tips on how to write after you’ve broken your streak, and/or a mythical tale of procrastination and dragons.