Good Colors, Evil Colors: Difference between revisions

[[File:obi wan and d vader.jpg|link=A New Hope|frame|Guess who's the bad guy.]]

 

 

In an age where every other hero is an [[Anti-Hero]], how do you tell who to root for? Why, you look at what ''color'' the character wears, of course! In visual entertainment, who's good and who's evil is usually distinguished by the colors, and woe be to those who are [[Genre Blindness|colorblind]].

 

Related tropes: [[Chromatic Arrangement]], [[Color Character]], [[Paint It Black]], [[Pink Girl, Blue Boy]], [[Color-Coded Patrician]], [[Sensible Heroes, Skimpy Villains]], [[Good Eyes, Evil Eyes]], [[Dress-Coded for Your Convenience]], [[Color-Coded Multiplayer]], [[Color-Coded Armies]], [[Color-Coded Wizardry]], [[Rainbow Motif]], [[Law of Chromatic Superiority]], [[Red and Black and Evil All Over]], [[Gold and White Are Divine]].

 

* The killer and detective in ''[[Death Note]]'' are lit by vivid red and blue lights respectively during internal monologue, regardless of the natural lighting of the scene. Later on, Matsuda gets yellow, and both Mogi and Aizawa get green. Even outside their monologues, Light tends to wear darker colours, while L is in an off-white T-shirt and jeans.

** Also, the ruthless and slightly unhinged Mello wears all black, while his calmer, less aggressive rival Near wears all white and has white hair.

 

 

* A classic example of the association of heroes with primary colors and villains with secondary ones would be the 1980s [[Lex Luthor]] in his super-armor (purple, green, black) battling [[Superman]] (red, blue, yellow).

** Or take [[Spider-Man]] (dark blue, red and black) and his villains Doctor Octopus (green, sometimes combined with orange/ochre), Electro (green, yellow), [[Norman Osborn|Green Goblin]] (green, purple), Kraven (various shades of brown), the Lizard (green), Mysterio (purple, two shades of green), the Sandman (green and black shirt, brown trousers), the Scorpion (green, purple, white), the Shocker (brown, yellow), and the Vulture (two shades of green).

{{quote|'''Spider-Girl''': I'm not the type who usually leaps to rash conclusions, but you are dressed in green, and bad guys have traditionally favoured secondary colours since the advent of colour comics.}}

* There's a ''[[Star Wars Expanded Universe]]'' comic series called ''Infinities'', which is basically [[What If]]/[[For Want of a Nail]], speculating about just what would happen to the saga if, respectively, Luke's proton torpedo used on the Death Star was defective, if Han's tauntaun died a little earlier, if Threepio was incapacitated and couldn't translate between Jabba and Leia-as-Boush. The last case leads, eventually, to Luke and Leia confronting Vader and the Emperor together, Vader turning on his master to save his children and ''surviving'', and then being taken by them off the Death Star before it blew. It wraps up very quickly with the characters saying that the Emperor ''also'' survived, but the Rebellion will be ready—and incidentally, Vader switched sides and wore a white version of his former costume.