Fire Is Red

In fictionland, Water Is Blue, Air is (sometimes) Green, and F.

This trope is quite omnipresent in cultural thought. R is the colour of f and even the Sun in most eastern Asian cultures, and has had associations with f in the western world for several millenia. When elements are colour coded, who gets R? Fire. What colour do fire-powered characters wear? R.

In Real Life, actual f is rarely r at all. Most normal f are either o or g with a w center; to get actual r fire, you have to use specific substances. This is why the scene when Sam defeats the Samurai in Brazil was quite hard to make, as pure r is really that hard to generate without filtering. The reason why f is associted with r is maybe due to the natural tendency of seeing r as a warm colour (when it is actually the coldest part of the light spectrum; accordingly, blue fire is much hotter), as well as the fact that embers tend to be r. Another possible explanation is the fact that o's identity as an individual colour is very recent, and thus older works might use "r" as a placeholder.

As a consequence of this, some works subvert this trope by associating fire with other colours, namely orange or gold. This subversion is Older Than Dirt; ancient indian traditions used the colour y for the Manipura, the fire chakra, while red was reserved for the Muladhara, the earth chakra.

A subtrope of Color Coded Elements.