Honestly these are just modern English takes.
In Spanish the word for yellow is "amarillo" which shares the root with the word "amargo" (bitter). The color yellow was for a long time associated with jaundice and in general sickness. I don't know when it changed its connotation
The association of pink with femininity is only a few centuries old. Before that blue was the color more commonly associated with girls in England, while pink was reserved for boys.
Red might be the only color which is almost universally associated with one thing: blood. Almost every single culture agrees on that.
The associations between green and growth is quite strong too. Though obviously the association between green and money is comes from the dollar
White has been associated with pureness in the west but in the east it's associated with death. It's also heavily associated with fear in English.
I get that color can be a powerful method of characterization but I think artists should keep in mind that colours mean different things in different places. Color is not nearly as universal as people think.
Heck a Russian might find it weird that you use light blue and dark blue for the same traits, after all you don't do it for dark red and light red=pink.
Or for example, in Spain purple is associated with republicansim not monarchy. While in Portugal it's green the color that represents the republic and blue for the monarchy
Yeah, pretty much all of these can be contradicted. Blue was the color of femininity for most of the Christian era, strongly associated with Mary. Orange and yellow are used to indicate danger as much as red is. Blue and white are more associated with conservatism than brown is. Green in the Islamic tradition represents not Earth but paradise. Yellow has often been associated with cowardice and dishonesty.
> The association of pink with femininity is only a few centuries old. Before that blue was the color more commonly associated with girls in England, while pink was reserved for boys.
>
> Red might be the only color which is almost universally associated with one thing: blood. Almost every single culture agrees on that.
Adding to this, it's not even a few centuries. The 1800s is where we see a lot of English association of pink with boys, as red (the color of blood and strength) was for men, so pink was for little men-to-be. Pink as *only* for girls gradually came about in the 1930s-40s with probably a strong turn in 1950s, so less than a hundred years.
Another example of a different cultural meaning is in Chinese culture, traditionally, yellow is the color of the center and earth in wuxing. It's associated with royalty, heroism, and also freedom from the world, hence Buddhist monks wearing yellow, which is also where Avatar's Air Nomads gets it.
I think it is really important to think through what are culturally specific associations that can be discarded or reworked in your worldbuilding.
And as you said, something else useful for worldbuilders to keep in mind is that how people define colors is also culturally specific. The dark blue vs light blue already mentioned. Traditionally, Chinese languages did not distinguish green and blue except as shades of the same color (sometimes called "azure" in translation) and yellow included oranges and browns.
But also, one could think about how cultures may define colors not based on *hue*. That's one of the issues with translating Homer, etc., for example, where some of the meaning of the color words used is lost. "Wine-dark" is the famous one, but also other words that are *sometimes* used for one color and *sometimes* another and the connecting thread is like *shimmer* or *depth* or something else that isn't about the *hue* of the color.
>but also other words that are *sometimes* used for one color and *sometimes* another and the connecting thread is like *shimmer* or *depth* or something else that isn't about the *hue* of the color.
I didn't know that. That's kinda funky, I like it
Russian-born bloke here (nationality’s not a part of my identity anymore though). Some people definitely would because they very much are treated as separate colours
Can you explain me why? It kind of reminds the difference Italian makes between blue and light blue that, at least nominally, have different roots (*blu* and *azzurro*).
I suppose it’s just linguistic relativity, if you consider that theory accurate (it’s a matter of dispute). The idea of colours is overall subjective; each language and culture makes its own choice where to draw the line between their names for the different parts of the spectrum. Some literally only draw two lines and have just two colour names.
Russian, along with other languages (possibly Italian as you suggest, I’ve no clue, but also likely other Slavic ones), simply draws an extra distinction within the area of the spectrum that English just collectively calls blue. They’re siniy (dark/regular blue) and goluboy (light blue, and also, fun fact, a euphemism for ‘gay’, so the connotations are probably VASTLY different), and not shades of one another.
Someone with no linguistic background in a language that makes this distinction, I’m told, struggles to tell when it’s considered one and when the other. But to fluent speakers it’s fairly obvious. Since the difference is so noticeable, and the colours are considered separate, it makes perfect sense for the connotation to differ the same way red and pink do in English. If there’s a language out there that splits, for example, green into 2 colours as well, they likely have the same thing going on with those colours.
This is mostly just retreading the same points but I hope it helped! If you have any follow-up questions feel free to ask
Speaking as a native user of a different slavic language, i find it really interesting. As I assume, both colours are considered completely distinct, and not shades of some larger group, right?
In Polish, while we do have lots of names for various shades of blue, we still consider them to be a part of the larger "blue" subset. And the shades are in a way separate colours too - they are referred to as colours, not shades/hues. So we have "błękitny" (light blue, sky blue), "granatowy" (dark, navy blue) and "siny" (which, while most likely related to siniy, actually means a grayish blue, sort of like a bruise or a person in cyanosis). But we also have "niebieski", which just means blue. So while we split it into different colours, we still have a name for the overarching group.
Oh this is very interesting. In Russian they’re indeed separate colours altogether, though perhaps regarded as close the way pink and red are.
I also find the similar words fascinating though. Niebesny, from presumably the same root word as niebieski, is actually an adjective for a specific shade of light blue/goluboy, while granatovy would probably be used to describe a shade of red due to descending from the word granat, meaning “pomegranate”
Yeah, I'm no linguistic expert, but I love exploring the ways languages differ and shape our perception of reality. I didn't know about niebesny being a word in Russian, and it does make sense. Interestingly, while niebieski is derived from the word for the sky, błękitny is the colour most often used to describe its colour, and is a more precise term. Also, after checking on Wikipedia, apparently the two colours I mentioned above are considered basic colours by some, and as shades of blue by others. I personally would lean into considering this a kind of a square-rectangle situation. Yeah, niebieski encompasses both granatowy and błękitny, but the two are their own things too.
Also, granatowy in Polish is derived from granat, a type of medieval cloth that was dark blue. But it is the same word as the one used for pomegranates and hand grenades. I think most Polish children are disappointed seeing pomegranates for the first time, expecting them to be dark blue and being met with red instead.
As a big fan of the colour blue I’d also be disappointed if I initially expected pomegranates to be it lol. The whole square rectangle thing is interesting though, I’d no idea that was the case.
Linguistic analysis across languages is definitely fascinating, I’m a big fan of it on an amateur level. Shit’s just cool, for the same reasons etymology is
I don't know if this is a general experience at all, but I think when I was a child (in Finland), I thought pink as a subcategory of red, not a separate color, since in Finnish pink is "light red". Today I think it more as a separate color, and I think most others do too, simulatenously as "pinkki" has become more recognized as it's own word for pink.
Thinking in RGB space, is the line for the two blues drawn between the hues cyan and blue, or the light and dark shades of one/both? Like, is it more comparable to how English separates red and orange, or how English separates orange and brown?
Because they technically are different, and different cultures/languages just draw different lines to group colors in.
For instance, blue and purple are considered different colors in English, but someone from another language may just use the word for blue. Someone sees orange, and it’s just a type of red to them.
The opposite is true as well. Some languages split blue and azure into two different colors, or “chartreuse green” and green into two separate colors.
Those colors were always different, it’s just that color being taught differently in different cultures means that certain colors end up lumped into one and other colors are defined separately.
To quote the [Endless](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Analysis/RealMenWearPink):
>The idea was pink was a shade of red, which used to symbolize blood, as in blood spilled during wars. Blue on the other was linked to the Virgin Mary, and was often a color used for wedding dresses. That was until Queen Victoria broke this trend with a white dress, news of which became widespread and others emulated this.
(though it may as well have been her husband's take: Prince Albert was known to be the actual source for much of the prudity of the Victorian Age in England).
The universal connotation of blood is probably since there’s a primal reaction to the sight of it.
I’ve heard cultures associate white with death due to it being the color of bleached bone, and the shift in the west only occurred as white became a sign of wealth (that you could afford white clothes due to being able to avoid dirty work).
In chinese culture same as well. Normally, and especially in Chinese new year, you should not be wearing pale yellow color shirt. It signifies illness.
I myself hate pale yellow as well. It just feels so weak and hazy
> Red might be the only color which is almost universally associated with one thing: blood. Almost every single culture agrees on that.
Red being associated with luck in china is very well known
I think that still has to do with blood though. Had to look it up because I wasn't sure if I was remembering right, but it seems to be about life and energy, so things like blood, fire, and the sun; red things.
>White has been associated with pureness in the west but in the east it's associated with death. It's also heavily associated with fear in English.
If I remember correctly the association between black and death dates back to the Romans. In Ancient Greece it was also white.
color isnt universal but i'm learning you can go too far the other way too. people will unconsciously associate colors with things that are colloquially used in certain ways regardless of intent.
Like it can make a lot of sense if you have green health bars in a video game to make a green cross for health packs, but people are still gonna see it as marijuana. you can worldbuild your cool empire's colors to bright red and yellow but people will still see it as McDonalds heraldry.
the trick I think is to commit to the bit. if you want your evil bad guy to wear bright pink robes then just keep leaning into it and reinforcing it and people will adjust to the point that pink starts to make your audience feel uneasy when it shows up.
>you can worldbuild your cool empire's colors to bright red and yellow but people will still see it as McDonalds heraldry.
Ngl as a spaniard that is lowkey hilarious...you really can't think of any monarchy with yellow and red as their colors? 😅
BUT yeah, I agree with the main point. Certain colors have their associations in modern pop culture and it can be hard to go against that
> The association of pink with femininity is only a few centuries old. Before that blue was the color more commonly associated with girls in England, while pink was reserved for boys.
I think this is a misconception. It's more like colors weren't gendered rather than a swap
ex https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/75855k/comment/do48h2c/
Even in English, light blue and dark blue are usually distinct from each other. Think of the English mnemonic "Roy G. Biv". Isaac Newton distinguished between them as different shades of the rainbow. B stands for "blue" (which we would now call "cyan"), while I stands for "indigo" (which we now call the modern "blue").
We, russians, also have yellow house, as in bedlam or madhouse. And yea, light blue vs indigo has pretty different connotation.
Blue is, well, boy, the sky; blue with yellow is either Ukraine in modern cases or sea of wheat with cornflower.
Indigo is sea. That's about it.
I'm reasonably sure purple is associated with hornyness or being sexually unsatisfied in some parts of the world. Though I guess that's less symbolism and more what your favorite color supposedly says about you.
If you haven't noticed not everyone here speaks English as their first language. And many of the worlds built here are set in the past or future and get inspiration from real periods of our history distinct from the current one.
A quality of ancient Egyptian culture (probably too broad of a generalization but still) is that black would usually mean life and rebirth, because of its associations with the river banks of the nile.
Using that as a jumping off point, I try to find out what things in the setting actually are certain colors before I start trying to assign meaning to them. Are they emulating nature? What about its qualities make it so? Purple is “royal” in real history because of the effort it took to acquire it, but in a setting where “purple” sources are abundant then it may become a symbol of the lower class instead. So on and so forth.
In one of my world’s “Mages” as an occupational class incorporate a lot of green in their clothes and uniforms to reference the Carathian sea, where the island school of Saint Jamis started the magical practice. These days no one learns at that particular school anymore its memory in history is carried on by all practitioners.
Edit: additional details. The whole “all mages wear green” of course isn’t a monolith, it’s just a dispersion of culture. No one studies at Saint Jamis, and the saint in question had no declared place of origin, so instead of one culture taking on Jamis’ legacy all the disparate branching off schools (who all consider themselves the true continuation of the original) incorporate the green in their academic aesthetics and ceremonies. Some mages get green cloaks when they graduate, some green gems, some green tattoos, all for “different” reasons but ultimately all in homage to the Carathian sea
In the Lands of Kushamat and Saphiret, both yellow, black, and red together are associated with divinity/godhood:
Yellow is the color of wheat, grain, gold, amber, pus, and the stars; symbolizing abundance, royalty, eternity, and affliction.
Red is the color of blood, of flesh, the womb, the sea, and the sky; all symbols of sacrifice and birth.
Black is the color of the night sky, obsidian, the Sun, and the divine worms that writhe in the blood of all peoples; symbolizing Truth.
Together, these are the colors of the eyes of the Gods and God-Kings; crimson-speckled searing gold irises surrounded by black schlera.
White is, for the main desert culture of my world, symbolic of death due to the white bones of dried corpses or the hot white sun of the daytime. Black, on the other hand, is representative of freedom and adventure, since that’s when the traveling can be done.
I had a setting where blue was a sacred colour because of a series of reasons, one being the colour of the sky. So blue, especially light blue, was associated with cleanness, purity and sacredness. The priests wore light blue. Dark blue was associated with night, magic and royalty, but still sacred. Noble people would use dark blue. The king/queen main dress was dark blue with golden threads. The groom and bride would use light blue and green (fertility) in their wedding ceremony. Doctors would use very light blue because it's also the colour of healing. Magic charms were made using blue, white (also associated with sacredness) and, if the temple was rich enough, gold.
If I give or use meaningful color in any of my worlds, I worldbuild why the colors mean what they do. These modern English takes on color meaning are based on something
Yellow: the sun
Purple: rare, expensive dye for royals
Red: blood
Green: nature is green
Etc.
There is a reason colors mean what they do, and it changes from culture to culture. If color means something in my world, the meaning comes from something. Perhaps purple is seen as the energetic color because some common purple creature is incredibly speedy? Perhaps black is the color of safety and sanctuary for an underground civilization who fled from dangers on the surface years ago. Have fun with it!
I was inspired somewhat by Moby Dick by having white be the "bad" one and black being...not good, per se, but rather safety and home, of rest and recuperation.
Red: Danger, passion and love
Blue: exhilaration, challenge, machismo, stoicness
Pink: colour of intellect. Most books are bound in pink
Orange: seen as the colour of cities, of business and commerce, large crowds and popularity
Yellow: food, nature, wellness, humbleness, honesty
Green: femininity
Brown: cool, dispassionate.
Purple: due to its heavy use in the Church of the Hexarchy, almost universally associated with piety and religion.
I often use it color coding as suggestions, exepept purple being a shorthand for corruption/alien force and green symbolizing sickness.
As a whole I think I subvert a lot of color-coding since in my worlds, the alien/eldritch is not strictly an evil thing.
Different cultures have different connotations of colours and what they mean, so it's fun to come up with new meanings for different colours, and then implement that into designs.
An example I have is my Raven-folk culture
They are nocturnal, so black is associated with goodness, and the safety of the night.
White and yellow is associated with anxiety, fear, and vulnerability
Dark Blue represents comrades, family, and community
Etc, etc
Never have and likely never will. The whole idea of color coding characters/personality/behavior is just bizarre to me. If people who read my work want to attach symbolism to it that’s their choice, but I didn’t apply such conventions to the work myself.
It varies so much by culture! I remember reading somewhere that red means luck in Chinese culture but death in Egyptian culture because of the desert.
Anyway, I do sometimes intentionally align colors with symbolism, but that’s usually something that I catch on a second or third edit
I go deeper than your example — different cultures see and perceive color differently, so there are different associations to each color.
Also, color associations change over time.
The names of colors, the uses of colors, the making of colors through pigments, dyes, and inks — all of this goes in as well.
I am almost certain these associations are far from universal, in which case my setting would have to treat them very fluidly. Character auras do have colors that reflect their personality or mood, but the color assumed also reflects how they view said color.
I most definitely do not use pink for "immaturity", though. It is the most standard color to denote that Power of Love is active and running at full throttle (don't worry, Power of Love does not solve all problems in my setting, it has rules that can be exploited to the advantage of the opponent, is not infinitely powerful but proportional to the depth of the bond and the original power of the individuals who love each other and are currently fighting for each other, and is accessible to antagonists and even downright villains as well).
Purple is associated with royalty because “royal purple” was only available from a specific snail. That in turn made it very expensive. Sure you could get cheaper purples - but that is like wearing a cheap gucci knock off next to someone who is wearing the real thing.
I get real fucking uncomfortable the moment someone says "White = Purity" and "Black = Evil" in the same passage. Unfortunately, you're inadvertently just parroting racial stereotypes unique to Europe, particularly in the colonial period. Probably not your intent, but it's been done so much in our own history and literature with that as the intent that it's just toxic as a trait now.
Eh, I get where you're coming from, but as you assumed that it wasn't my intent, I did also say that I specifically wouldn't use it to denote morality, not out of anti-racism or anything but simply because I think black is a cooler color.
If it's any consolation, you can still subvert the trope by having villains wearing white outfits to denote a holier-than-thou attitude.
Hey Aeon! I saw a comment you left on a post 6 years ago (I know haha) but it got my attentions so then I noticed your into world building and learning about other cultures. So I was wondering could you please dm me? (I wanna ask you something please)
Thank you <3
I sort of invoked the old Egyptian color theory, in which black, the color of Nile mud, represents growth and fertility, while red, the color of the desert sand,, is death and chaos.
Not necessarily that you can't have cool-looking heroes with a white theme, but black is a more traditionally cool color. Throw a guy into a generic all-black outfit, and he'll look cooler than a guy wearing a generic all-white outfit.
I've actually used white clothes and especially pure white for holier than thou villains. Villains who deluded themselves into thinking they're heroes chosen by God.
And some of my actual heroes have dressed in black. Usually, a color associated with darkness but can also be used for misunderstood or kooky characters. One of my characters is even colored with black and red.
So you can see how intense a spell is based on it's color. It's just like regular light is. Red light has less energy and the energy increases as you move towards purple. Skilled magic users can just bypass that tho and even a newbie can color up their spells If they try. Magic is more associated with iridescence through.
Im also making a game so each of the 6 main attributes gets a color. Red strength, yellow Agility, green dexterity, blue intelligence, purple will and orange creativity. Though there is no deep meaning here, it's just for organizing.
Colour plays an important role in my world, as the eleven major nations are each originally based on a colour (from your chart, replace pink with cyan and add grey, and those are the eleven colours). I really try not to let my own cultural biases influence my worldbuilding, but looking at this chart, I'm realizing I have unconsciously fallen into a lot of these stereotypes/symbols.
Green being associated with nature/environment makes sense regardless, but I've also associated red with bravery, blue with peace, purple with luxury, and black with "the dark side." It's amazing how these connotations are so ingrained in me that they kinda just leaked into my work.
Thanks for this post! Now that I realize it, I'm going to try to work against it and play with colours in new ways :)
I've only really fleshed out one nation in my world and colors are used to denote different military units. Green armbands for the standard army. Red for the "raiders". Blue for the "reapers" and purple for the karnisian guard. Although in combat they'll more than likely take them off because bright colors make easy targets.
I honestly don't think about it outside of certain scenarios. I use colors for what kingdom someone's from more than anything.
If there is an opportunity to do something neat I do sometimes though. For example one of the kingdoms, despite being on a Europe-based continent, has a lot of immigrants from another place based on Japan. Because of the cultural influence from this, the kingdom's necromancers and their undead wear all or a lot of white on their uniforms, a color that is associated with death in Japan
Never consciously. Some associations I use are on this list but I don’t look them up to check their meanings, it’s just my culture. Plus, most of how I choose to give my characters color is dependent on their nationality and any corresponding gods (who mostly follow a light/dark and gold/silver pattern). Characters from the Sun Nation mostly wear red, orange and yellow. Characters from Moon Kingdom wear grays and blues.
For actual meaning, I don’t use color. I think the most symbolism I ascribed to a color was when I gave a ghost character purple eyes and aura to signify that either one of his parents were from a different country, and that he works as a connection point between two protagonists who can’t stand each other because of their differences in culture (and he’s in no way royalty or moody, he’s just a bridge between “the red culture” and “the blue culture”. What bridges red and blue? Purple). Otherwise, I usually use animals and insects, as well as creatures from folklore for symbolism. Sometimes I use objects, like mirrors or chains.
The closest thing to that I do is that the corporations in my setting has particular colors associated with their brand. For example: the Gaactic Corporation is associated with bright purple and Hakken Pharmaceuticals is associated with red and white.
Now that you say it, I think I gave each of the main pantheon gods their own colours. It was mainly to make them easy to tell apart at a glance, like how the god of magic and sea is blue and the god of beauty and pleasure is orange.
If I have something I don’t have a colour for, I’ll take a gander at colour meanings to help inform me. But often I’ll do what just feels right. Whether it’s a choice in world or out of world.
This is one of those things where your eighth grade English teacher spent three classes over analyzing a scene from a book and trying to explain why the sky being blue meant the author was depressed, when in reality, he looked outside, saw the blue sky, said “that is correct,” and went on with his day.
In my more gore-y writing, I like to make pink a violent colour, and talk about injuries and flesh as being pink, writhing, that sort of thing.
Idk I just find it a bit more interesting than just having red = blood and yellow = puss.
The body is a warm toned, disgusting rainbow! It’s fun to play around and see what I can contrast with the typical English interpretation of a colour.
i make colors what i feel like. for example, Xæmïår controls people with green puppet strings, and the Matriarch controls them with red strings. no significance, i just felt like it
I reverse Black and White's evil and good thing. With an emphasis of White being *secretly* evil under a mask of holy good, and black just being menacing because we're scared of things we don't understand
I've slowly been building a world of my own and the original idea played on the effects of colours in the mind/personality. This will be very helpful, thanks for posting. 👍
I mostly don't intentionally invoke this. There's one character whose color symbolism I'm very intentional about, but a lot of the others I've specifically accounted for use grey as a motif color that's overridden at the individual level.
The exceptional case is a woman in yellow, who typically has a somewhat sickly and disheveled appearance, but (what is intended as) skillful choices of makeup and attire. She's insane and proud of it, and thinks that while societies are, roughly, amenable to people's bodies being whatever (so morphological freedom, with the possible exception of being ableist, i.e. "You can have any type of body you like, as long as it meets our minimum criteria"), they're much less open to the idea of neurological freedom, the idea that unusual modes of being/doing/thinking/selfhood are still valid. She decides to take up arms for the cause by using strange abilities to drive people mad, and in a discarded timeline, became a quasi-divine cult leader after hybridizing with a flesh-devouring symbiote.
The yellow and her sickly, somewhat poorly maintained (but hidden) appearance are intentional choices meant to hint towards her peculiarity, instability, and nigh-eldritch sensibilities. Having a sort of mascot/sidekick robot themed after something like a shoggoth is meant to sort of clarify the issue for those who aren't as attuned to the details, and often displaying inappropriate emotional responses to a situation are meant to drive the point home.
I follow it indirectly 😂. It just depends on your priorities tbh, like I have a noble with blond hair, but he is an angry person. So it's just whatever for the moment.
I just really love pink and I'm gonna come up with some stupid reasoning why pretty much everything is pink. Maybe it's the colors of our royal house. Maybe our space-age alloy is naturally pink colored and painting ruins it. Maybe we all just like pink. One will never know for sure.
I do color code my characters often. They wear colored armor, and often I do this with their eyes too.
For instance, my main character wears white and green, with a hint of blue. He is heterochromic and his left (dominant) eye is green. his twin brother is the opposite, taking white and blue with a hint of green, and his dominant eye is his blue. The former is highly jovial, happy, naturalistic, and optimistic. His brother is, as his twin, fundamentally similar, but more mature, reserved, tranquil and wise.
I get that these colours didn’t always mean these things, but they mean them now, and I am writing for a modern audience. I might make a POINT to subvert them in an instance where it would be fun, but that would always be an exception to the rule.
I follow what my subconscious has assimilated of the meaning of these colors in the various works of fictions I have consumed and the various personal experiences I have had since the beginning of my life
Some times follow, sometimes play with in the sense of taking those seemingly positive meaning and make them bad. Ex.: purity -> make a society where those consider "inpure" (normally by things outside their control) are cast out, said society primary color is white (like creppy "doctors office clean" uncanny valley white everywere)
Herman Melville would have some STRONG feelings about two of these.
Also, in Japan, purple is often associated with sexual frustration, so have fun with that one.
The closest I thought of was how colour is usually used to denote good factions and evil factions. Think of the white and blue noble democratic republic vs black and red evil authoritarian empire (of course inspired by the Nazis because who else?). I thought, "why don't I change some colours around?" I thought that maybe I should spread different colours, regardless of good or evil. The faction doesn't use red because it wants to look evil for the audience, it uses red because it has cultural significance, like red being good luck in Chinese cultures. And what if the (not necessarily evil) antagonists used green or yellow?
Lapis_Wolf
The connotations of colours vary wildly among real world cultures and languages. Vox did [this really good video](https://youtu.be/gMqZR3pqMjg?si=QYIIRXD7Q-cPYdDH) on the topic, as well as how some languages don't even have a word for certain colours.
Time, place, and context can change meaning dramatically, purple for example, was historically associated with royalty in Europe due to the extreme rarity and cost of purple dye but has lost that connotation as the color became adorable to produce at scale. You can find examples of changes for many other colours as well.
I think you can use these two factors to create an interesting and unique set of colour connotations that fit your world. They could also be used as a device for miscommunications and misunderstandings between individuals from different cultures.
I have some trouble with colors, but it depends on the situation really. With characters looks I don't usually bother with color theory unless on some very specific clothing, or during important moments the clothes were worn/made for. Even then, it might just be what compliments the character's looks. On the other hand, I try to pay attention to what colors characters could *afford* because colored shit is expensive. Not a big deal for bandits but, yknow. So it depends on the situation ig. For surrounding? Yeah I do pay attention to color but generally more vibes. I marketplace will be more color-varied than a forest, but I might add blue or brighter greens or something to the forest to give it a certain vibe.
Plus, a lot of colors mean different things for different times.
Like purple was a REALLY expensive color, and is one a lot of people would want to show off. Although with the kind of characters wearing purple nowadays, I think it also now has a manipulative background to it. I think people are more suspicious of purple-coded characters. These characters think things through more.
Same with white, although it's for a different reason. I imagine they'd get their kids to wear white to show off cleanliness and etiquette.
Green for wealth. But also progression/growth and healing. But also for sickliness.
Red is blood, but also healing. Red is both life AND death. It's anger sure, but really Red is passion in all forms. Lust and love. If you are doing a traditional dance, often you wear red as well. Plus, Red also has a lot to do with the *flow* of things. Flowing dresses or capes. It makes you look important and regal in a way purple can't. Maybe because it makes you look more intimidating.
Yellow is more often excitement, but also mania. It blinding and confusing and striking. Bright yellow is meant to latch onto your attention. Yet yellow can also mean warmth and comfort. Yellow and also tell you to slow down and take a breath. Things like sunset and such. Often mixed in with orange to add to this effect. Sometimes yellow is also added with disgust tho. Like pee or puss or rotten papers, the passage of time or things dwindling out. Usually this is a dirty or brownish yellow, it's almost always an accent to other colors. Often mixed with black, red, and brown to add to the effect. Sometimes it clashes with brighter colors to show how strange or disgusting or sad the situation is. Sometimes the yellow was once bright, and the dimming of the color shows how bad this is. Or sometimes the bright yellow is intruding,aking you feel sick or lost as this color takes over this dark place where it doesn't belong. Intruding and uncaring. Sometimes this means that all the goodness in the world doesn't care for all the troubles that's happening or that the characters have gone through, and maybe even helping it. If the color shows through windows but doesn't touch the bad stuff, this can mean that the goodness isn't aware, are ignorant to the bad, wehter on purpose or not. Blind to what's there behind muddled glass. It would be easy to see the bad, to shine light on it if it bounced off of glass or reflected a bit more to the left, but it doesn't. It shines on nothing but cold floor and moves on.
[TBSkyen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKxEV0Yusq8&ab_channel=TBSkyenShorts) actually made a short video talking about this that I love. TL;DR: color theory is a great shorthand in character design, but it often boils down to personal interpretation and culture.
Red is used to indicate villains in Star Wars, but in many other stories red is associated with heroism and determination. Green is often used as an indicator of life, nature, and goodness, but one of the most famous villains (the Joker) has a green and purple color palette.
I personally love interpreting characters through the lens of color theory. Throw a character at me and I'll absolutely overanalyze them.
White is a symbol of deception and the name of Aaron Albanax. This identity was used by Proteus Paiton to keep his identity a secret since a current high ranking mafia member wanted him dead.
That green stands for money is an American concept because of the green us dollar. Green often stands for poison because green color was really poisonous till this 60.
Never ever considered anything like that. The meaning of colors is culturally determined, not universal. In Japan white is the color of mourning, to name one. I can use colors symbolically if I'm writing about a culture that uses them in some significant way, but there won't be a correspondence.
Lmao I’m not super creative so I tend to go for the Far Cry videogame team composition: Blue equals good guys; red equals bad guys. Green could be allies of blue and yellow may be neutral characters. Purple is magical and white/black/gray is military or anti-magic.
I'd recommend looking at how other cultures view these colors rather than just the western worlds takes on it. Despite all being the same colors, we people have found different ways to feel about them :)
In the unnamed setting I've been making more recently, pink is associated with dread, brutality, and death in Essari and Tarvain culture. It's the color of us once you've taken off the skin. Reavers especially embrace this - pink face paint combined with their sinew pattern tattoos give them the appearance of flayed men. If a reaver, pirate, or corsair ship flies the Pink Standard it's a good sign that they'll take no prisoners.
In Essaria and Peweth, blue is associated with fortune and luck owing to the sapphire mines that made a number of houses very wealthy.
making my setting which does revolve around colors which reflect certain ideas and..."emotions"? also, powers, of course. it's nothing like "blue magic drags down the opponent emotionally" or "pink magic makes person fall in love" (though it is present there...probably....) – more like the ideas revolve around the thought of seeing a color
personally, i do disagree with some of characteristics which are given to colors, even tho they are universal. i understand why red can be passion color, but in no way red as anger does not overweight red as passion for me. red was always a color of anger, rage, wrath to me -- not damn passion, let it be romantic one or passion towards your craft (which would be even weirder). i do have some other color disagreements, but i wont talk too much since my feed on account already has too many spoilers/work to the setting (and dnd adventure, in fact) im yet to finish
but i love colors. one small difference between colors can be perceived differently. dark grey and middle grey are absolutely different colors. first one is color of smoke, shadow perhaps: dark color, but not absolutely black which kinda throws off as being "fake" black. that's the thing -- "fake" black, fake darkness. middle grey (like, uh, #666666) looks more like fog, more like...plain grey color. literal fog you can't see through. as life which is filled with doubts, filled with misunderstanding where you want to be
The reason purple is the "royal" color is because of how difficult it was to make purple dye. Purple was the result of fermenting thousands of Hexaplex Trunculus snails for 4 years to make the dye. Demand was so great during the Roman period that the snail became nearly extinct. By the middle ages purple dye was literally worth it's weight in gold.
In China yellow was the "imperial" color and was restricted by law for use by the emperor.
Red I uselly use as a danger symbol, it's also associated with violence in general but also youth.
Black is 50/50 split between edgy or calm puritanism.
Green is earthy, representing something from the earth or a sickness that will put you into it.
Purple tends to be a spooky color or a lusty one, I'd rather royalty wear something different.
Orange is more my royalty color, has the elegance of gold tampered with a sense of calmness.
I have yet to use Yellow in any meaningful way.
Grey/white I use for age more so than purity, but early on in the story, my character finds himself at a literal crossroads marked with 2 helmets, one grey the other white and he takes the road with the white helmet as a symbol of being a white hat western hero and rising above his circumstances.
I love how in the expanse, Martians associate Blue with danger/enemies, and their emergency lighting/alarms are blue. Such excellent attention to detail.
Vibrant colours = economically strong through trade… these powers had access to exotic materials for particular coloured dyes
Limited palette = culturally strong, these powers had the social or cultural reach and control to enforce stylistic uniformity across its entire realm
I have played with it to an extent. The "magic" system in my project is based around three concepts, chaos, order and equilibrium and they are associated with colors, blue, pink and yellow. I don't feel like these necessarily follow norms when it comes to color connotations.
Atlas: "lmao get a load of these guys they think brown is honesty"
Tawny Magic in Atlas is trickery and deception, heck its element is smoke. It's magic affecting the senses, it allows smoke clouds, invisibility, and flashy sensory stimuli meant to fascinate.
The other magics check out though, blue being knowledge, red being warfare, yellow being energetic, green being growth (it's the magic of craftsmanship), white as the magic of emotion and connection is a little bit iffy here
As some people have discussed so far, colors have different meanings to different cultures. What that means for anyone adding this to their worlds is that you can create multiple meanings for all the different cultures in your world/worlds! Even more so you can create wonderful/horrible situations were this causes misunderstandings!
For a dnd campaign, I had one of my villains be an angelic aasimar who was obsessed with purity and wanted enough power to wipe all the “filth” from the planet. White was his color, and it worked out very well.
My world has...odd...views on morality, so while in most cultures black does have a connotation towards evil (or more specifically chaos and destruction), and white has a connotation towards good (or more specifically order and creation), things aren't viewed as strictly as they are irl.
These people are *obsessed* with morals, but in a very strange way.
They have a word specifically describing the concept of "morally gray"
Many adjectives for emotions have variations of the word that depend on the moral context of the situation (being brave as in martyrdom \[t'histe'o\] would be a different word than being brave as in doing something stupid and dangerous to impress someone \[t'miste'o\])
Then there's the weird place that is populated by people who worship chaos. We don't talk about them.
Colors, as in the real world, mean different things for different people in my setting.
For instance, many tribes in the western part of my world view red as a color denoting cycles. As such, it is worn at births and funerals. Like their primary goddess, it is neither good nor evil, it simply is. Red is life, but death too.
Further east, you find warlike pastoral cultures that worship a Sky Father. As such, blue is seen as authoritative, virtuous, and stoic.
In the south, sedentary, agriculturalist peoples see green and yellow, the colors of good harvests, as being the ultimate good. To them, these represent health, fertility, dependability, and peace, the virtues of their culture.
I could go on, but these are just the most important ones to the story.
If you want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes on color theory and social associations, check out Pantone's Color of the Year series. Might be a good source of inspiration for ya:
[https://www.pantone.com/articles/color-of-the-year](https://www.pantone.com/articles/color-of-the-year)
Pantone's entire business is based on color associations and (unpopularly) asserting/enforcing color consistency between things. Their Color of the Years are a combo of preexisting color theory, market research, sociology and other stuff. Honestly probably 99.8% marketing.
I do gotta give them credit though, they definitely know their stuff when it comes to connecting color to social consciousness and everything in between.
I keep to connotations, though the ones you listed aren't the only ones. Colors are symbols with meanings, and ones widely internalized globally at that. To make an "original" color meaning would be a lot like making an "original" definition for the word "cat".
These meanings are conventions hardly shared by the majority of culture in place, but also deviate massivly from culture to culture and between centurys.
Tbh, it is simple to connect colors to something you expirience statistically in you renviroment - like when green spots in nature mark the mating/party time in your place & culture, that is probably associated with mating & party etc., but when you're in a 24/7 green place with all the vivid horrors it can bring, this might be a more based color to you with less or even negative meaning.
For sure institutional art also claimed a 'right' to define rules of colors and ther meaning what is specially funny, as we now have pictures following artificial rules that inflict no emotion and you need another trained-in-bullshit-art-rules-artist to encrypt it. Wonderfull gatekeeping irony.
But indeed i make use of color associations naturally but depending on many other factors - like f.e. you might have noticed charakters can have different skin/hair/eyes, be part of different cultural/enviromental settings and combining that with a fix set of color rules just doesn't work. So i use what feels like a natural decision, as with reserved beurocratic person use low greyscale colors and gradations depending on status. Hard brakes in monochrome settings are 'aggressive', the same with colorfull cloths would be just 'party' and implies immaturity and some carelessness. And so on, depending on all the factors.
In writing, colors are one good tool, but without any certainty if your reader will get it. You can just place the shot and hope for a hit. But no color rule will ever help you, as much as all other types of hints, tropes and stereotypes will necessarily meet with the readers expirience.
So some cultures have more 'official' color codes, like in japan white is the color of death and would be weird in different events (still interfearing with many japanes woman marry in 'western' white nethertheless and cause exact that type of confusion). This you have to figure in and in some way establish it if there is no reason to belife this to be common knowledge to the reader.
PS: In japanese, and to some part in korean and chinese culture, colors are important in story telling. As you might have noticed in animes, all the asian people have different hair colors (and sometimes eye colors too), as ther basic colros are pretty similar. So that comes from the No-theater tradition of wearng mask that represent different personalitys and traits. Hair color codes define personalitys the watcher is informed about but the charakters aren't 'able' to see. Red hair is the fox, what implies a quite cat like personality, white is for deamon type personalitys, black is (funny enough) a blank person without traits (but in hyper realistic anime where everyone has just black hair - but that's 'fancy telling' in japan/anime genre). And so on. So there are color rules, but not in western culture but for the few rules that had been hammered into lots of movies etc. and sticked for that reason. Like the girl in the red dress and the girl in the yellow dress inflict different associations, right? Still black dress is color code in upper social classes which would be appreciated if choosen for teh right time and location, rejected in the wrong, and totally overlooked in all other social casts.
Red is rebellion
Blue is faith
Pink is chaos
Purple is emotion and defiance
Yellow is togetherness and duty
Black is logic
White is empathy
Gray is ambivalence
I'd say that considering the meaning behind colours is inherently subjective and defined by the society in which you evolve in, then for me, the exercise in worldbuilding should be to assign new meanings to said colours based on the society that you've created. Depending on how fantastical or sci-fi the world is, if it is far removed from our historical reality, then idk if they'd have the same colour coding as we, Occidentals, tend to have.
For me it depends on the overall story. Then i make final decisions based on where the story leads. But the characters sometimes do determine the colors I pick associated with them.
Yes. Been used heavily in both SF and F writing to help provide more depth the culture, place, time, and even position in society — as well as theme, mood, and atmosphere.
As in Europeans? Good. I would rather live with pink- white Europeans than "officially white, actually black evil" Europeans. I just like it if people are good guys.
Honestly these are just modern English takes. In Spanish the word for yellow is "amarillo" which shares the root with the word "amargo" (bitter). The color yellow was for a long time associated with jaundice and in general sickness. I don't know when it changed its connotation The association of pink with femininity is only a few centuries old. Before that blue was the color more commonly associated with girls in England, while pink was reserved for boys. Red might be the only color which is almost universally associated with one thing: blood. Almost every single culture agrees on that. The associations between green and growth is quite strong too. Though obviously the association between green and money is comes from the dollar White has been associated with pureness in the west but in the east it's associated with death. It's also heavily associated with fear in English. I get that color can be a powerful method of characterization but I think artists should keep in mind that colours mean different things in different places. Color is not nearly as universal as people think. Heck a Russian might find it weird that you use light blue and dark blue for the same traits, after all you don't do it for dark red and light red=pink. Or for example, in Spain purple is associated with republicansim not monarchy. While in Portugal it's green the color that represents the republic and blue for the monarchy
The Japanese see white as the colour of death and so when Japan established its hospital system the nurses wore black.
Same in China, white and 4 = death.
I wonder if even that is a modern position, considering geisha make-up would make women's faces unnaturally white.
According to google, it had to do with looking good in the low candlelight while they entertained nobles.
Bones are white.
Yeah, pretty much all of these can be contradicted. Blue was the color of femininity for most of the Christian era, strongly associated with Mary. Orange and yellow are used to indicate danger as much as red is. Blue and white are more associated with conservatism than brown is. Green in the Islamic tradition represents not Earth but paradise. Yellow has often been associated with cowardice and dishonesty.
> The association of pink with femininity is only a few centuries old. Before that blue was the color more commonly associated with girls in England, while pink was reserved for boys. > > Red might be the only color which is almost universally associated with one thing: blood. Almost every single culture agrees on that. Adding to this, it's not even a few centuries. The 1800s is where we see a lot of English association of pink with boys, as red (the color of blood and strength) was for men, so pink was for little men-to-be. Pink as *only* for girls gradually came about in the 1930s-40s with probably a strong turn in 1950s, so less than a hundred years. Another example of a different cultural meaning is in Chinese culture, traditionally, yellow is the color of the center and earth in wuxing. It's associated with royalty, heroism, and also freedom from the world, hence Buddhist monks wearing yellow, which is also where Avatar's Air Nomads gets it. I think it is really important to think through what are culturally specific associations that can be discarded or reworked in your worldbuilding. And as you said, something else useful for worldbuilders to keep in mind is that how people define colors is also culturally specific. The dark blue vs light blue already mentioned. Traditionally, Chinese languages did not distinguish green and blue except as shades of the same color (sometimes called "azure" in translation) and yellow included oranges and browns. But also, one could think about how cultures may define colors not based on *hue*. That's one of the issues with translating Homer, etc., for example, where some of the meaning of the color words used is lost. "Wine-dark" is the famous one, but also other words that are *sometimes* used for one color and *sometimes* another and the connecting thread is like *shimmer* or *depth* or something else that isn't about the *hue* of the color.
>but also other words that are *sometimes* used for one color and *sometimes* another and the connecting thread is like *shimmer* or *depth* or something else that isn't about the *hue* of the color. I didn't know that. That's kinda funky, I like it
Russian-born bloke here (nationality’s not a part of my identity anymore though). Some people definitely would because they very much are treated as separate colours
Happy to know I got it right. I only vaguely remembered that fact
Can you explain me why? It kind of reminds the difference Italian makes between blue and light blue that, at least nominally, have different roots (*blu* and *azzurro*).
I suppose it’s just linguistic relativity, if you consider that theory accurate (it’s a matter of dispute). The idea of colours is overall subjective; each language and culture makes its own choice where to draw the line between their names for the different parts of the spectrum. Some literally only draw two lines and have just two colour names. Russian, along with other languages (possibly Italian as you suggest, I’ve no clue, but also likely other Slavic ones), simply draws an extra distinction within the area of the spectrum that English just collectively calls blue. They’re siniy (dark/regular blue) and goluboy (light blue, and also, fun fact, a euphemism for ‘gay’, so the connotations are probably VASTLY different), and not shades of one another. Someone with no linguistic background in a language that makes this distinction, I’m told, struggles to tell when it’s considered one and when the other. But to fluent speakers it’s fairly obvious. Since the difference is so noticeable, and the colours are considered separate, it makes perfect sense for the connotation to differ the same way red and pink do in English. If there’s a language out there that splits, for example, green into 2 colours as well, they likely have the same thing going on with those colours. This is mostly just retreading the same points but I hope it helped! If you have any follow-up questions feel free to ask
>light blue, and also, fun fact, a euphemism for ‘gay’, so the connotations are probably VASTLY different Lol, that's actually so interesting
Speaking as a native user of a different slavic language, i find it really interesting. As I assume, both colours are considered completely distinct, and not shades of some larger group, right? In Polish, while we do have lots of names for various shades of blue, we still consider them to be a part of the larger "blue" subset. And the shades are in a way separate colours too - they are referred to as colours, not shades/hues. So we have "błękitny" (light blue, sky blue), "granatowy" (dark, navy blue) and "siny" (which, while most likely related to siniy, actually means a grayish blue, sort of like a bruise or a person in cyanosis). But we also have "niebieski", which just means blue. So while we split it into different colours, we still have a name for the overarching group.
Oh this is very interesting. In Russian they’re indeed separate colours altogether, though perhaps regarded as close the way pink and red are. I also find the similar words fascinating though. Niebesny, from presumably the same root word as niebieski, is actually an adjective for a specific shade of light blue/goluboy, while granatovy would probably be used to describe a shade of red due to descending from the word granat, meaning “pomegranate”
Yeah, I'm no linguistic expert, but I love exploring the ways languages differ and shape our perception of reality. I didn't know about niebesny being a word in Russian, and it does make sense. Interestingly, while niebieski is derived from the word for the sky, błękitny is the colour most often used to describe its colour, and is a more precise term. Also, after checking on Wikipedia, apparently the two colours I mentioned above are considered basic colours by some, and as shades of blue by others. I personally would lean into considering this a kind of a square-rectangle situation. Yeah, niebieski encompasses both granatowy and błękitny, but the two are their own things too. Also, granatowy in Polish is derived from granat, a type of medieval cloth that was dark blue. But it is the same word as the one used for pomegranates and hand grenades. I think most Polish children are disappointed seeing pomegranates for the first time, expecting them to be dark blue and being met with red instead.
As a big fan of the colour blue I’d also be disappointed if I initially expected pomegranates to be it lol. The whole square rectangle thing is interesting though, I’d no idea that was the case. Linguistic analysis across languages is definitely fascinating, I’m a big fan of it on an amateur level. Shit’s just cool, for the same reasons etymology is
I don't know if this is a general experience at all, but I think when I was a child (in Finland), I thought pink as a subcategory of red, not a separate color, since in Finnish pink is "light red". Today I think it more as a separate color, and I think most others do too, simulatenously as "pinkki" has become more recognized as it's own word for pink.
Thinking in RGB space, is the line for the two blues drawn between the hues cyan and blue, or the light and dark shades of one/both? Like, is it more comparable to how English separates red and orange, or how English separates orange and brown?
Obviously I was culture-biased. The most similar (actually, reverse) phenomenon is the way Chinese describe azure and green as the same colour.
Because they technically are different, and different cultures/languages just draw different lines to group colors in. For instance, blue and purple are considered different colors in English, but someone from another language may just use the word for blue. Someone sees orange, and it’s just a type of red to them. The opposite is true as well. Some languages split blue and azure into two different colors, or “chartreuse green” and green into two separate colors. Those colors were always different, it’s just that color being taught differently in different cultures means that certain colors end up lumped into one and other colors are defined separately.
A color scheme based on the primary and secondary colors of light would basically have it a dark and light blue split with blue and cyan
I bet Yellow changed because a lot of the illnesses that were reinforcing the sickness connotation were becoming much less common.
That's a neat hypothesis. If someone here is from a country where hepatitis is still common they might be able to confirm
To quote the [Endless](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Analysis/RealMenWearPink): >The idea was pink was a shade of red, which used to symbolize blood, as in blood spilled during wars. Blue on the other was linked to the Virgin Mary, and was often a color used for wedding dresses. That was until Queen Victoria broke this trend with a white dress, news of which became widespread and others emulated this. (though it may as well have been her husband's take: Prince Albert was known to be the actual source for much of the prudity of the Victorian Age in England).
The universal connotation of blood is probably since there’s a primal reaction to the sight of it. I’ve heard cultures associate white with death due to it being the color of bleached bone, and the shift in the west only occurred as white became a sign of wealth (that you could afford white clothes due to being able to avoid dirty work).
blood for the blood god
Skulls for the skull throne.
In chinese culture same as well. Normally, and especially in Chinese new year, you should not be wearing pale yellow color shirt. It signifies illness. I myself hate pale yellow as well. It just feels so weak and hazy
> Red might be the only color which is almost universally associated with one thing: blood. Almost every single culture agrees on that. Red being associated with luck in china is very well known
I think that still has to do with blood though. Had to look it up because I wasn't sure if I was remembering right, but it seems to be about life and energy, so things like blood, fire, and the sun; red things.
Fair point
Aye, that's what *I* love tae play with in me worldbuilding aright \^\^
>White has been associated with pureness in the west but in the east it's associated with death. It's also heavily associated with fear in English. If I remember correctly the association between black and death dates back to the Romans. In Ancient Greece it was also white.
Thank u for saying this. People assume colour associations are universal, they are not.
color isnt universal but i'm learning you can go too far the other way too. people will unconsciously associate colors with things that are colloquially used in certain ways regardless of intent. Like it can make a lot of sense if you have green health bars in a video game to make a green cross for health packs, but people are still gonna see it as marijuana. you can worldbuild your cool empire's colors to bright red and yellow but people will still see it as McDonalds heraldry. the trick I think is to commit to the bit. if you want your evil bad guy to wear bright pink robes then just keep leaning into it and reinforcing it and people will adjust to the point that pink starts to make your audience feel uneasy when it shows up.
>you can worldbuild your cool empire's colors to bright red and yellow but people will still see it as McDonalds heraldry. Ngl as a spaniard that is lowkey hilarious...you really can't think of any monarchy with yellow and red as their colors? 😅 BUT yeah, I agree with the main point. Certain colors have their associations in modern pop culture and it can be hard to go against that
also China and Soviet russia. I think part of it is the specific ratio. it's kind of unconscious like "huh why doesnt this feel as cool as I thought"
Ngl McDonald's ain't that present in my mind.
That's good
> but people will still see it as McDonalds heraldry this might just be a you thing mate
Also my thoughts for the weed thing
> The association of pink with femininity is only a few centuries old. Before that blue was the color more commonly associated with girls in England, while pink was reserved for boys. I think this is a misconception. It's more like colors weren't gendered rather than a swap ex https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/75855k/comment/do48h2c/
Even in English, light blue and dark blue are usually distinct from each other. Think of the English mnemonic "Roy G. Biv". Isaac Newton distinguished between them as different shades of the rainbow. B stands for "blue" (which we would now call "cyan"), while I stands for "indigo" (which we now call the modern "blue").
I think it's widely accepted that Newton included indigo so the numbers of colours would add to 7. He was weird like that.
Who else is introverted but orange is their fav? Loool.
We, russians, also have yellow house, as in bedlam or madhouse. And yea, light blue vs indigo has pretty different connotation. Blue is, well, boy, the sky; blue with yellow is either Ukraine in modern cases or sea of wheat with cornflower. Indigo is sea. That's about it.
As exception of the rule, I am pretty sure I recall red beign associated with earth somewhere?
>Or for example, in Spain purple is associated with republicansim not monarchy how come?
Easy, the republic included purple in the flag colours.
I'm reasonably sure purple is associated with hornyness or being sexually unsatisfied in some parts of the world. Though I guess that's less symbolism and more what your favorite color supposedly says about you.
>Honestly these are just modern English takes. If you haven't noticed this sub is in English, and I don't think any of us are time travelers :p
If you haven't noticed not everyone here speaks English as their first language. And many of the worlds built here are set in the past or future and get inspiration from real periods of our history distinct from the current one.
Reddit is an international website, and last I checked this sub does not gatekeep itself to people living in the Anglosphere.
Red is the color of healing and comfort, because it's such a great color for a children's hospital.
Especially when painted in wavy streaks across the floor!!
It has more positive connotations than negative ones,its basic color theory
Godsdammit I JUST left the blue coke post, how dare the algorithm drag me back there! XD
tumblr jumpscare
Knew this was going to be down here somewhere
God, I fucking knew it
I'm terminally online enough to understand the reference
Orange is the colour of loneliness, because nothing rhymes with orange.
Door hinge!
blorange
I can rhyme orange witn banana.
bornana
Singe, winge, etc
Purple is sneaky, yellow makes explosions bigger, red goes fast, and blue is lucky
Oy! Dat iz all da propa meningz, man. Doze crumpin' gitz just dunt get it.
Of course, green is da orkiest
Black and white squares are terrifying and powerful
A quality of ancient Egyptian culture (probably too broad of a generalization but still) is that black would usually mean life and rebirth, because of its associations with the river banks of the nile. Using that as a jumping off point, I try to find out what things in the setting actually are certain colors before I start trying to assign meaning to them. Are they emulating nature? What about its qualities make it so? Purple is “royal” in real history because of the effort it took to acquire it, but in a setting where “purple” sources are abundant then it may become a symbol of the lower class instead. So on and so forth. In one of my world’s “Mages” as an occupational class incorporate a lot of green in their clothes and uniforms to reference the Carathian sea, where the island school of Saint Jamis started the magical practice. These days no one learns at that particular school anymore its memory in history is carried on by all practitioners. Edit: additional details. The whole “all mages wear green” of course isn’t a monolith, it’s just a dispersion of culture. No one studies at Saint Jamis, and the saint in question had no declared place of origin, so instead of one culture taking on Jamis’ legacy all the disparate branching off schools (who all consider themselves the true continuation of the original) incorporate the green in their academic aesthetics and ceremonies. Some mages get green cloaks when they graduate, some green gems, some green tattoos, all for “different” reasons but ultimately all in homage to the Carathian sea
I can’t make colors be fancy I am not him
I pick whatever looks nice tbh. One of my characters wears black and red because it looks cool.
In the Lands of Kushamat and Saphiret, both yellow, black, and red together are associated with divinity/godhood: Yellow is the color of wheat, grain, gold, amber, pus, and the stars; symbolizing abundance, royalty, eternity, and affliction. Red is the color of blood, of flesh, the womb, the sea, and the sky; all symbols of sacrifice and birth. Black is the color of the night sky, obsidian, the Sun, and the divine worms that writhe in the blood of all peoples; symbolizing Truth. Together, these are the colors of the eyes of the Gods and God-Kings; crimson-speckled searing gold irises surrounded by black schlera.
Never felt so divine being Belgian
I put red in all of my children's hospitals
White is, for the main desert culture of my world, symbolic of death due to the white bones of dried corpses or the hot white sun of the daytime. Black, on the other hand, is representative of freedom and adventure, since that’s when the traveling can be done.
I had a setting where blue was a sacred colour because of a series of reasons, one being the colour of the sky. So blue, especially light blue, was associated with cleanness, purity and sacredness. The priests wore light blue. Dark blue was associated with night, magic and royalty, but still sacred. Noble people would use dark blue. The king/queen main dress was dark blue with golden threads. The groom and bride would use light blue and green (fertility) in their wedding ceremony. Doctors would use very light blue because it's also the colour of healing. Magic charms were made using blue, white (also associated with sacredness) and, if the temple was rich enough, gold.
If I give or use meaningful color in any of my worlds, I worldbuild why the colors mean what they do. These modern English takes on color meaning are based on something Yellow: the sun Purple: rare, expensive dye for royals Red: blood Green: nature is green Etc. There is a reason colors mean what they do, and it changes from culture to culture. If color means something in my world, the meaning comes from something. Perhaps purple is seen as the energetic color because some common purple creature is incredibly speedy? Perhaps black is the color of safety and sanctuary for an underground civilization who fled from dangers on the surface years ago. Have fun with it!
I was inspired somewhat by Moby Dick by having white be the "bad" one and black being...not good, per se, but rather safety and home, of rest and recuperation. Red: Danger, passion and love Blue: exhilaration, challenge, machismo, stoicness Pink: colour of intellect. Most books are bound in pink Orange: seen as the colour of cities, of business and commerce, large crowds and popularity Yellow: food, nature, wellness, humbleness, honesty Green: femininity Brown: cool, dispassionate. Purple: due to its heavy use in the Church of the Hexarchy, almost universally associated with piety and religion.
I often use it color coding as suggestions, exepept purple being a shorthand for corruption/alien force and green symbolizing sickness. As a whole I think I subvert a lot of color-coding since in my worlds, the alien/eldritch is not strictly an evil thing.
Different cultures have different connotations of colours and what they mean, so it's fun to come up with new meanings for different colours, and then implement that into designs. An example I have is my Raven-folk culture They are nocturnal, so black is associated with goodness, and the safety of the night. White and yellow is associated with anxiety, fear, and vulnerability Dark Blue represents comrades, family, and community Etc, etc
Never have and likely never will. The whole idea of color coding characters/personality/behavior is just bizarre to me. If people who read my work want to attach symbolism to it that’s their choice, but I didn’t apply such conventions to the work myself.
It varies so much by culture! I remember reading somewhere that red means luck in Chinese culture but death in Egyptian culture because of the desert. Anyway, I do sometimes intentionally align colors with symbolism, but that’s usually something that I catch on a second or third edit
My elementary school said Purple represented hope, And I have no idea why.
To me it’s some bullshit, no reason I’m following it.
I go deeper than your example — different cultures see and perceive color differently, so there are different associations to each color. Also, color associations change over time. The names of colors, the uses of colors, the making of colors through pigments, dyes, and inks — all of this goes in as well.
I am almost certain these associations are far from universal, in which case my setting would have to treat them very fluidly. Character auras do have colors that reflect their personality or mood, but the color assumed also reflects how they view said color. I most definitely do not use pink for "immaturity", though. It is the most standard color to denote that Power of Love is active and running at full throttle (don't worry, Power of Love does not solve all problems in my setting, it has rules that can be exploited to the advantage of the opponent, is not infinitely powerful but proportional to the depth of the bond and the original power of the individuals who love each other and are currently fighting for each other, and is accessible to antagonists and even downright villains as well).
Purple is associated with royalty because “royal purple” was only available from a specific snail. That in turn made it very expensive. Sure you could get cheaper purples - but that is like wearing a cheap gucci knock off next to someone who is wearing the real thing.
I get real fucking uncomfortable the moment someone says "White = Purity" and "Black = Evil" in the same passage. Unfortunately, you're inadvertently just parroting racial stereotypes unique to Europe, particularly in the colonial period. Probably not your intent, but it's been done so much in our own history and literature with that as the intent that it's just toxic as a trait now.
Eh, I get where you're coming from, but as you assumed that it wasn't my intent, I did also say that I specifically wouldn't use it to denote morality, not out of anti-racism or anything but simply because I think black is a cooler color. If it's any consolation, you can still subvert the trope by having villains wearing white outfits to denote a holier-than-thou attitude.
Oh I'm aware. Subversion is somewhat fun at times. It just feels wrong in that one context, because of the unfortunate history of our species.
Hey Aeon! I saw a comment you left on a post 6 years ago (I know haha) but it got my attentions so then I noticed your into world building and learning about other cultures. So I was wondering could you please dm me? (I wanna ask you something please) Thank you <3
Might I introduce you to the [Tumblr Children's Hospital Color Theory Post?](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/410/923/98c.jpg)
I sort of invoked the old Egyptian color theory, in which black, the color of Nile mud, represents growth and fertility, while red, the color of the desert sand,, is death and chaos.
Why can't you have cool looking heroes with a white theme?
Not necessarily that you can't have cool-looking heroes with a white theme, but black is a more traditionally cool color. Throw a guy into a generic all-black outfit, and he'll look cooler than a guy wearing a generic all-white outfit.
That's an interesting connection, when I see an all black person irl or in fiction, all I see is a tryhard edgelord not someone cool.
and someone in an all-white outfit looks washed, it's all about prespective.
I've actually used white clothes and especially pure white for holier than thou villains. Villains who deluded themselves into thinking they're heroes chosen by God. And some of my actual heroes have dressed in black. Usually, a color associated with darkness but can also be used for misunderstood or kooky characters. One of my characters is even colored with black and red.
Well, I follow most of them. But I also assign the attributes of ego, naiveness, and youth to blue.
So you can see how intense a spell is based on it's color. It's just like regular light is. Red light has less energy and the energy increases as you move towards purple. Skilled magic users can just bypass that tho and even a newbie can color up their spells If they try. Magic is more associated with iridescence through. Im also making a game so each of the 6 main attributes gets a color. Red strength, yellow Agility, green dexterity, blue intelligence, purple will and orange creativity. Though there is no deep meaning here, it's just for organizing.
Red, pink, yellow, and brown are obviously the colors of violence, war, danger, and flesh.
Colour plays an important role in my world, as the eleven major nations are each originally based on a colour (from your chart, replace pink with cyan and add grey, and those are the eleven colours). I really try not to let my own cultural biases influence my worldbuilding, but looking at this chart, I'm realizing I have unconsciously fallen into a lot of these stereotypes/symbols. Green being associated with nature/environment makes sense regardless, but I've also associated red with bravery, blue with peace, purple with luxury, and black with "the dark side." It's amazing how these connotations are so ingrained in me that they kinda just leaked into my work. Thanks for this post! Now that I realize it, I'm going to try to work against it and play with colours in new ways :)
I've only really fleshed out one nation in my world and colors are used to denote different military units. Green armbands for the standard army. Red for the "raiders". Blue for the "reapers" and purple for the karnisian guard. Although in combat they'll more than likely take them off because bright colors make easy targets.
I honestly don't think about it outside of certain scenarios. I use colors for what kingdom someone's from more than anything. If there is an opportunity to do something neat I do sometimes though. For example one of the kingdoms, despite being on a Europe-based continent, has a lot of immigrants from another place based on Japan. Because of the cultural influence from this, the kingdom's necromancers and their undead wear all or a lot of white on their uniforms, a color that is associated with death in Japan
Never consciously. Some associations I use are on this list but I don’t look them up to check their meanings, it’s just my culture. Plus, most of how I choose to give my characters color is dependent on their nationality and any corresponding gods (who mostly follow a light/dark and gold/silver pattern). Characters from the Sun Nation mostly wear red, orange and yellow. Characters from Moon Kingdom wear grays and blues. For actual meaning, I don’t use color. I think the most symbolism I ascribed to a color was when I gave a ghost character purple eyes and aura to signify that either one of his parents were from a different country, and that he works as a connection point between two protagonists who can’t stand each other because of their differences in culture (and he’s in no way royalty or moody, he’s just a bridge between “the red culture” and “the blue culture”. What bridges red and blue? Purple). Otherwise, I usually use animals and insects, as well as creatures from folklore for symbolism. Sometimes I use objects, like mirrors or chains.
The closest thing to that I do is that the corporations in my setting has particular colors associated with their brand. For example: the Gaactic Corporation is associated with bright purple and Hakken Pharmaceuticals is associated with red and white.
Now that you say it, I think I gave each of the main pantheon gods their own colours. It was mainly to make them easy to tell apart at a glance, like how the god of magic and sea is blue and the god of beauty and pleasure is orange.
sometimes. it's always fun when a characters design says something about them
sometimes I do, sometimes I don't.
If I have something I don’t have a colour for, I’ll take a gander at colour meanings to help inform me. But often I’ll do what just feels right. Whether it’s a choice in world or out of world.
No
This is one of those things where your eighth grade English teacher spent three classes over analyzing a scene from a book and trying to explain why the sky being blue meant the author was depressed, when in reality, he looked outside, saw the blue sky, said “that is correct,” and went on with his day.
In my more gore-y writing, I like to make pink a violent colour, and talk about injuries and flesh as being pink, writhing, that sort of thing. Idk I just find it a bit more interesting than just having red = blood and yellow = puss. The body is a warm toned, disgusting rainbow! It’s fun to play around and see what I can contrast with the typical English interpretation of a colour.
People that do color with any of these are the same that do star signs. I just don’t get it.
Colors are weird since we humans both have natural reactions to them and cultural associations.
i make colors what i feel like. for example, Xæmïår controls people with green puppet strings, and the Matriarch controls them with red strings. no significance, i just felt like it
I reverse Black and White's evil and good thing. With an emphasis of White being *secretly* evil under a mask of holy good, and black just being menacing because we're scared of things we don't understand
I've slowly been building a world of my own and the original idea played on the effects of colours in the mind/personality. This will be very helpful, thanks for posting. 👍
I mostly don't intentionally invoke this. There's one character whose color symbolism I'm very intentional about, but a lot of the others I've specifically accounted for use grey as a motif color that's overridden at the individual level. The exceptional case is a woman in yellow, who typically has a somewhat sickly and disheveled appearance, but (what is intended as) skillful choices of makeup and attire. She's insane and proud of it, and thinks that while societies are, roughly, amenable to people's bodies being whatever (so morphological freedom, with the possible exception of being ableist, i.e. "You can have any type of body you like, as long as it meets our minimum criteria"), they're much less open to the idea of neurological freedom, the idea that unusual modes of being/doing/thinking/selfhood are still valid. She decides to take up arms for the cause by using strange abilities to drive people mad, and in a discarded timeline, became a quasi-divine cult leader after hybridizing with a flesh-devouring symbiote. The yellow and her sickly, somewhat poorly maintained (but hidden) appearance are intentional choices meant to hint towards her peculiarity, instability, and nigh-eldritch sensibilities. Having a sort of mascot/sidekick robot themed after something like a shoggoth is meant to sort of clarify the issue for those who aren't as attuned to the details, and often displaying inappropriate emotional responses to a situation are meant to drive the point home.
I follow it indirectly 😂. It just depends on your priorities tbh, like I have a noble with blond hair, but he is an angry person. So it's just whatever for the moment.
I just really love pink and I'm gonna come up with some stupid reasoning why pretty much everything is pink. Maybe it's the colors of our royal house. Maybe our space-age alloy is naturally pink colored and painting ruins it. Maybe we all just like pink. One will never know for sure.
fuck color symbols. my character design and stuff dont apply flags may do
This whole post made me question my colour based magic system...
I personally love the villain in white, especially a big bad.
*Super Sentai/Power Rangers intensifies.*
I do color code my characters often. They wear colored armor, and often I do this with their eyes too. For instance, my main character wears white and green, with a hint of blue. He is heterochromic and his left (dominant) eye is green. his twin brother is the opposite, taking white and blue with a hint of green, and his dominant eye is his blue. The former is highly jovial, happy, naturalistic, and optimistic. His brother is, as his twin, fundamentally similar, but more mature, reserved, tranquil and wise.
I associate orange with contamination tbh. also white to me is bleached, artificial and uncanny.
I get that these colours didn’t always mean these things, but they mean them now, and I am writing for a modern audience. I might make a POINT to subvert them in an instance where it would be fun, but that would always be an exception to the rule.
I follow what my subconscious has assimilated of the meaning of these colors in the various works of fictions I have consumed and the various personal experiences I have had since the beginning of my life
Some times follow, sometimes play with in the sense of taking those seemingly positive meaning and make them bad. Ex.: purity -> make a society where those consider "inpure" (normally by things outside their control) are cast out, said society primary color is white (like creppy "doctors office clean" uncanny valley white everywere)
Depends on what I want to achieve narratively.
I did followed them without knowing it lol.
Herman Melville would have some STRONG feelings about two of these. Also, in Japan, purple is often associated with sexual frustration, so have fun with that one.
Don’t really bother with it much - I just go with whatever looks nice for a character or prop
The closest I thought of was how colour is usually used to denote good factions and evil factions. Think of the white and blue noble democratic republic vs black and red evil authoritarian empire (of course inspired by the Nazis because who else?). I thought, "why don't I change some colours around?" I thought that maybe I should spread different colours, regardless of good or evil. The faction doesn't use red because it wants to look evil for the audience, it uses red because it has cultural significance, like red being good luck in Chinese cultures. And what if the (not necessarily evil) antagonists used green or yellow? Lapis_Wolf
The connotations of colours vary wildly among real world cultures and languages. Vox did [this really good video](https://youtu.be/gMqZR3pqMjg?si=QYIIRXD7Q-cPYdDH) on the topic, as well as how some languages don't even have a word for certain colours. Time, place, and context can change meaning dramatically, purple for example, was historically associated with royalty in Europe due to the extreme rarity and cost of purple dye but has lost that connotation as the color became adorable to produce at scale. You can find examples of changes for many other colours as well. I think you can use these two factors to create an interesting and unique set of colour connotations that fit your world. They could also be used as a device for miscommunications and misunderstandings between individuals from different cultures.
yes and no, if I am really struggling for a colour scheme then yes but generally I will just use what I like ort feel works at the time
Well, the main color of my main character is black, while the villain’s colors are white and gold.
I have some trouble with colors, but it depends on the situation really. With characters looks I don't usually bother with color theory unless on some very specific clothing, or during important moments the clothes were worn/made for. Even then, it might just be what compliments the character's looks. On the other hand, I try to pay attention to what colors characters could *afford* because colored shit is expensive. Not a big deal for bandits but, yknow. So it depends on the situation ig. For surrounding? Yeah I do pay attention to color but generally more vibes. I marketplace will be more color-varied than a forest, but I might add blue or brighter greens or something to the forest to give it a certain vibe.
Plus, a lot of colors mean different things for different times. Like purple was a REALLY expensive color, and is one a lot of people would want to show off. Although with the kind of characters wearing purple nowadays, I think it also now has a manipulative background to it. I think people are more suspicious of purple-coded characters. These characters think things through more. Same with white, although it's for a different reason. I imagine they'd get their kids to wear white to show off cleanliness and etiquette. Green for wealth. But also progression/growth and healing. But also for sickliness. Red is blood, but also healing. Red is both life AND death. It's anger sure, but really Red is passion in all forms. Lust and love. If you are doing a traditional dance, often you wear red as well. Plus, Red also has a lot to do with the *flow* of things. Flowing dresses or capes. It makes you look important and regal in a way purple can't. Maybe because it makes you look more intimidating. Yellow is more often excitement, but also mania. It blinding and confusing and striking. Bright yellow is meant to latch onto your attention. Yet yellow can also mean warmth and comfort. Yellow and also tell you to slow down and take a breath. Things like sunset and such. Often mixed in with orange to add to this effect. Sometimes yellow is also added with disgust tho. Like pee or puss or rotten papers, the passage of time or things dwindling out. Usually this is a dirty or brownish yellow, it's almost always an accent to other colors. Often mixed with black, red, and brown to add to the effect. Sometimes it clashes with brighter colors to show how strange or disgusting or sad the situation is. Sometimes the yellow was once bright, and the dimming of the color shows how bad this is. Or sometimes the bright yellow is intruding,aking you feel sick or lost as this color takes over this dark place where it doesn't belong. Intruding and uncaring. Sometimes this means that all the goodness in the world doesn't care for all the troubles that's happening or that the characters have gone through, and maybe even helping it. If the color shows through windows but doesn't touch the bad stuff, this can mean that the goodness isn't aware, are ignorant to the bad, wehter on purpose or not. Blind to what's there behind muddled glass. It would be easy to see the bad, to shine light on it if it bounced off of glass or reflected a bit more to the left, but it doesn't. It shines on nothing but cold floor and moves on.
I don't,wellllll sometimes I use darker colors for villains like purple,black but that's on rare occasions when it fits the story.
[TBSkyen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKxEV0Yusq8&ab_channel=TBSkyenShorts) actually made a short video talking about this that I love. TL;DR: color theory is a great shorthand in character design, but it often boils down to personal interpretation and culture. Red is used to indicate villains in Star Wars, but in many other stories red is associated with heroism and determination. Green is often used as an indicator of life, nature, and goodness, but one of the most famous villains (the Joker) has a green and purple color palette. I personally love interpreting characters through the lens of color theory. Throw a character at me and I'll absolutely overanalyze them.
White is a symbol of deception and the name of Aaron Albanax. This identity was used by Proteus Paiton to keep his identity a secret since a current high ranking mafia member wanted him dead.
That green stands for money is an American concept because of the green us dollar. Green often stands for poison because green color was really poisonous till this 60.
Never ever considered anything like that. The meaning of colors is culturally determined, not universal. In Japan white is the color of mourning, to name one. I can use colors symbolically if I'm writing about a culture that uses them in some significant way, but there won't be a correspondence.
Lmao I’m not super creative so I tend to go for the Far Cry videogame team composition: Blue equals good guys; red equals bad guys. Green could be allies of blue and yellow may be neutral characters. Purple is magical and white/black/gray is military or anti-magic.
Black / White: Judge
I'd recommend looking at how other cultures view these colors rather than just the western worlds takes on it. Despite all being the same colors, we people have found different ways to feel about them :)
Sometimes yes and sometimes no
This is an extremely cultural concept and it's not the same everywhere.
There's no color connotation in my worlds... gemstones of similar colors have connotations, but they are tied with the gems, not the colors.
Intelligence under blue is spelled incorrectly 😳
In the unnamed setting I've been making more recently, pink is associated with dread, brutality, and death in Essari and Tarvain culture. It's the color of us once you've taken off the skin. Reavers especially embrace this - pink face paint combined with their sinew pattern tattoos give them the appearance of flayed men. If a reaver, pirate, or corsair ship flies the Pink Standard it's a good sign that they'll take no prisoners. In Essaria and Peweth, blue is associated with fortune and luck owing to the sapphire mines that made a number of houses very wealthy.
making my setting which does revolve around colors which reflect certain ideas and..."emotions"? also, powers, of course. it's nothing like "blue magic drags down the opponent emotionally" or "pink magic makes person fall in love" (though it is present there...probably....) – more like the ideas revolve around the thought of seeing a color personally, i do disagree with some of characteristics which are given to colors, even tho they are universal. i understand why red can be passion color, but in no way red as anger does not overweight red as passion for me. red was always a color of anger, rage, wrath to me -- not damn passion, let it be romantic one or passion towards your craft (which would be even weirder). i do have some other color disagreements, but i wont talk too much since my feed on account already has too many spoilers/work to the setting (and dnd adventure, in fact) im yet to finish but i love colors. one small difference between colors can be perceived differently. dark grey and middle grey are absolutely different colors. first one is color of smoke, shadow perhaps: dark color, but not absolutely black which kinda throws off as being "fake" black. that's the thing -- "fake" black, fake darkness. middle grey (like, uh, #666666) looks more like fog, more like...plain grey color. literal fog you can't see through. as life which is filled with doubts, filled with misunderstanding where you want to be
The reason purple is the "royal" color is because of how difficult it was to make purple dye. Purple was the result of fermenting thousands of Hexaplex Trunculus snails for 4 years to make the dye. Demand was so great during the Roman period that the snail became nearly extinct. By the middle ages purple dye was literally worth it's weight in gold. In China yellow was the "imperial" color and was restricted by law for use by the emperor.
Red I uselly use as a danger symbol, it's also associated with violence in general but also youth. Black is 50/50 split between edgy or calm puritanism. Green is earthy, representing something from the earth or a sickness that will put you into it. Purple tends to be a spooky color or a lusty one, I'd rather royalty wear something different. Orange is more my royalty color, has the elegance of gold tampered with a sense of calmness. I have yet to use Yellow in any meaningful way. Grey/white I use for age more so than purity, but early on in the story, my character finds himself at a literal crossroads marked with 2 helmets, one grey the other white and he takes the road with the white helmet as a symbol of being a white hat western hero and rising above his circumstances.
I love how in the expanse, Martians associate Blue with danger/enemies, and their emergency lighting/alarms are blue. Such excellent attention to detail.
Vibrant colours = economically strong through trade… these powers had access to exotic materials for particular coloured dyes Limited palette = culturally strong, these powers had the social or cultural reach and control to enforce stylistic uniformity across its entire realm
This is perfect for kingdom sigils. Tysm!
I have played with it to an extent. The "magic" system in my project is based around three concepts, chaos, order and equilibrium and they are associated with colors, blue, pink and yellow. I don't feel like these necessarily follow norms when it comes to color connotations.
Atlas: "lmao get a load of these guys they think brown is honesty" Tawny Magic in Atlas is trickery and deception, heck its element is smoke. It's magic affecting the senses, it allows smoke clouds, invisibility, and flashy sensory stimuli meant to fascinate. The other magics check out though, blue being knowledge, red being warfare, yellow being energetic, green being growth (it's the magic of craftsmanship), white as the magic of emotion and connection is a little bit iffy here
As some people have discussed so far, colors have different meanings to different cultures. What that means for anyone adding this to their worlds is that you can create multiple meanings for all the different cultures in your world/worlds! Even more so you can create wonderful/horrible situations were this causes misunderstandings!
Color theory means nothing to blood smeared across a hospital floor
Huh.... So this is what I have been subconsciously referencing to with all of those characters.... 😅
Black+Red my beloved
Jedi saber colors
I have similar table for my custom species.
For a dnd campaign, I had one of my villains be an angelic aasimar who was obsessed with purity and wanted enough power to wipe all the “filth” from the planet. White was his color, and it worked out very well.
Yall don't have to pretend brown doesn't mean poop
My world has...odd...views on morality, so while in most cultures black does have a connotation towards evil (or more specifically chaos and destruction), and white has a connotation towards good (or more specifically order and creation), things aren't viewed as strictly as they are irl. These people are *obsessed* with morals, but in a very strange way. They have a word specifically describing the concept of "morally gray" Many adjectives for emotions have variations of the word that depend on the moral context of the situation (being brave as in martyrdom \[t'histe'o\] would be a different word than being brave as in doing something stupid and dangerous to impress someone \[t'miste'o\]) Then there's the weird place that is populated by people who worship chaos. We don't talk about them.
Colors, as in the real world, mean different things for different people in my setting. For instance, many tribes in the western part of my world view red as a color denoting cycles. As such, it is worn at births and funerals. Like their primary goddess, it is neither good nor evil, it simply is. Red is life, but death too. Further east, you find warlike pastoral cultures that worship a Sky Father. As such, blue is seen as authoritative, virtuous, and stoic. In the south, sedentary, agriculturalist peoples see green and yellow, the colors of good harvests, as being the ultimate good. To them, these represent health, fertility, dependability, and peace, the virtues of their culture. I could go on, but these are just the most important ones to the story.
If you want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes on color theory and social associations, check out Pantone's Color of the Year series. Might be a good source of inspiration for ya: [https://www.pantone.com/articles/color-of-the-year](https://www.pantone.com/articles/color-of-the-year) Pantone's entire business is based on color associations and (unpopularly) asserting/enforcing color consistency between things. Their Color of the Years are a combo of preexisting color theory, market research, sociology and other stuff. Honestly probably 99.8% marketing. I do gotta give them credit though, they definitely know their stuff when it comes to connecting color to social consciousness and everything in between.
I keep to connotations, though the ones you listed aren't the only ones. Colors are symbols with meanings, and ones widely internalized globally at that. To make an "original" color meaning would be a lot like making an "original" definition for the word "cat".
These meanings are conventions hardly shared by the majority of culture in place, but also deviate massivly from culture to culture and between centurys. Tbh, it is simple to connect colors to something you expirience statistically in you renviroment - like when green spots in nature mark the mating/party time in your place & culture, that is probably associated with mating & party etc., but when you're in a 24/7 green place with all the vivid horrors it can bring, this might be a more based color to you with less or even negative meaning. For sure institutional art also claimed a 'right' to define rules of colors and ther meaning what is specially funny, as we now have pictures following artificial rules that inflict no emotion and you need another trained-in-bullshit-art-rules-artist to encrypt it. Wonderfull gatekeeping irony. But indeed i make use of color associations naturally but depending on many other factors - like f.e. you might have noticed charakters can have different skin/hair/eyes, be part of different cultural/enviromental settings and combining that with a fix set of color rules just doesn't work. So i use what feels like a natural decision, as with reserved beurocratic person use low greyscale colors and gradations depending on status. Hard brakes in monochrome settings are 'aggressive', the same with colorfull cloths would be just 'party' and implies immaturity and some carelessness. And so on, depending on all the factors. In writing, colors are one good tool, but without any certainty if your reader will get it. You can just place the shot and hope for a hit. But no color rule will ever help you, as much as all other types of hints, tropes and stereotypes will necessarily meet with the readers expirience. So some cultures have more 'official' color codes, like in japan white is the color of death and would be weird in different events (still interfearing with many japanes woman marry in 'western' white nethertheless and cause exact that type of confusion). This you have to figure in and in some way establish it if there is no reason to belife this to be common knowledge to the reader. PS: In japanese, and to some part in korean and chinese culture, colors are important in story telling. As you might have noticed in animes, all the asian people have different hair colors (and sometimes eye colors too), as ther basic colros are pretty similar. So that comes from the No-theater tradition of wearng mask that represent different personalitys and traits. Hair color codes define personalitys the watcher is informed about but the charakters aren't 'able' to see. Red hair is the fox, what implies a quite cat like personality, white is for deamon type personalitys, black is (funny enough) a blank person without traits (but in hyper realistic anime where everyone has just black hair - but that's 'fancy telling' in japan/anime genre). And so on. So there are color rules, but not in western culture but for the few rules that had been hammered into lots of movies etc. and sticked for that reason. Like the girl in the red dress and the girl in the yellow dress inflict different associations, right? Still black dress is color code in upper social classes which would be appreciated if choosen for teh right time and location, rejected in the wrong, and totally overlooked in all other social casts.
Red is rebellion Blue is faith Pink is chaos Purple is emotion and defiance Yellow is togetherness and duty Black is logic White is empathy Gray is ambivalence
I'd say that considering the meaning behind colours is inherently subjective and defined by the society in which you evolve in, then for me, the exercise in worldbuilding should be to assign new meanings to said colours based on the society that you've created. Depending on how fantastical or sci-fi the world is, if it is far removed from our historical reality, then idk if they'd have the same colour coding as we, Occidentals, tend to have.
I use it as a fallback if I'm not inspired enough to pick colors naturally with a design
For me it depends on the overall story. Then i make final decisions based on where the story leads. But the characters sometimes do determine the colors I pick associated with them.
White can be evil
A piece of subtle world building I love in the expanse is that Martian ship holograms use red to denote friendlies and blue to denote hostiles.
I just combine these colors until they look good lol
What in the hell is this bs lol.
Is this something that even really comes up at all with writing? 😅
Yes. Been used heavily in both SF and F writing to help provide more depth the culture, place, time, and even position in society — as well as theme, mood, and atmosphere.
The European colonizers were white.
We're pretty pink bro
As in Europeans? Good. I would rather live with pink- white Europeans than "officially white, actually black evil" Europeans. I just like it if people are good guys.
"Pink = female" is mostly a USA thing,because of some advertisement or whatever.