Forums » RP Discussion » Most of my characters are affiliated with a color.

I was looking at my characters and found that each one is affiliated with a certain color... Not all of them but most of them.

Athens- Immortal Fire Wizard: Blue
Because his fire is blue...

Icias- Giant Polar Bearon: White
Because his fur is white...

Ramsley York- Rogue Prince: Green
Idk he just always wears green...

Rro Rogers- Jolly Pirate Lord: Red
He has blood art powers...

Sam Thorne- Modern Character: Gold
Idk, maybe his blonde hair...

What character of yours are based off something weird like that??

The entirety of the Willow Family: Green
Jake Specifically: Green, Purple, and Black
Jenny Specifically: Green, Yellow, and Black
Jared Specifically: Dark Green and Black
Jal Specifically: Green, Blue, and Pink
Jaqulynn Specifically: Green

Roxxie: Red

Xeres: Purple

Reggie: Red

Feral: Lavender

Abelith: Brown

*cracks knuckles* Lessie...

In rough order of my current character list (and ignoring any character AU's floating about):
Dubhanaut - black; power, emptiness
Typhus - bright red; house color, the color of passion, blood, & power
Johann - deep red; passion, power, subtlety
Korinthysis - bright green & beige; acid & desert sands
Lady Forest - purplish-red (more purple); separation from family house, psioncs (occasionally associated with purple)
Quickfoot - blue & gold; robe affiliation, treasure
Draconus - deep green; the color of the forests, serenity and calm
Taunter - deep dark purple; shadows, the supernatural, poisons (also could be partially associated to a sickly green)
Murdoch - Caribbean blue; the wildness of the sea, near-separation from his paternal house by virtue of being a few steps from green
Victoria - pink; benevolent supernatural, fairies, excitability, cheerfulness
Azarkot - burgundy & orange-yellow; house colors, fire & gold

Hm~

Anna Lee - brown and rust
Chasu Maru - black and bronze
Elodar - blue
Green Mike - green, yellow, and gold
Jackson - white and cool, faded pastels; black
Julian Tamagrin - green
Kyra Lo'ora - red and bronze
Loki Nightblade - black and dark blue
Nashyll - silver
Nyn - red-orange
Raven and Shade - black and grey
Sari Lin'oen - warm off-white
Taryn Nix - black and dark blue
The Black Orchid - black, purple, and green
Willow - green and warm brown

Same! I gotta get in on this. I find my characters tend to always lean towards some sort of color scheme:

Nick is a burnt orange like the highlights of polished copper on deep purple and black. I suppose the dark tone could represent his theme of mystery and melancholy - like Lady Forest, the purple for psychic connection. Nick is also a person who walks the shadows, but shines a light into the darkness he strides. While orange is certainly known for being my favorite color, this tone is more towards a brown and could be argued as a nod towards the transition of human history between the stone and bronze ages. It's also just the color his hair.

Sullivan is mostly lacking in color or perhaps has so much if it that it appears so - pure white with accents of molten gold. This theme actually has an awful lot of symbolic meaning I can't share with you here, but I think my color themes always go with how my characters physically appear. Sullivan is albinistic and comes across as an impressionable innocent hiding value.

Emil Rincon - Navy Blue and Steel
Host - Midnight Black and Jet Grey
Jak XIII - Orange, Bright Green and Charcoal
Kane - Cobalt and Teal
Lyra - Silver and Forest Green
Varian - Purple
Viktor - Electric Blue, Bronze, Orange and Brown

One of my characters, Safiye, is strongly associated with the color blue.

This is because her family got their original wealth and power by cultivating and controlling the trade of a plant that allows for creating a blue dye (historically, IRL an incredibly difficult color to create a color-fast dye for that won't rub off on your skin or fade quickly). Many many generations ago, they used this economic power to rise to political power, and became a noble family. The dye is so important to them culturally that they have a strict code in their family about the meanings of different hues and patterns of the color blue, such that if you are a noble member of this family, your clothing is largely dictated by your rank, gender, and sometimes specialties.

Although their trade empire has grown in the last century to include many other kinds of goods, and the dye is a small part of what they ship, it is still what they are best known for and an expensive and fashionable commodity to purchase from them.

They sell only the dye, not the plant, so that they can maintain control over the species and the market. In paintings and statues of family members, it is common for them to be pictured holding a stem of the plant (though a lot of artistic liberties are taken with what the plant looks like -- very few people have ever actually seen it, as they destroyed the populations outside of their own keeps.)

It is known as the riverthorne plant, and that is why they are the House of Riverthorne.

What a curious observation! In my opinion as an artist, having some visual cues to strongly associate with a character is a wonderful tool for establishing identity in subtle ways, but it never consciously occurred to me that similar things are just as effective in writing.

I'm going to add my own to the mix, just because this isn't something I've ever tried to articulate before but which I feel is rather important to my two pet projects.

Siúlóir (or Edward) is my eponymous wizard character and he has always been about the colors purple and gold. Historically, both of these colors have been associated with royalty, wealth and status. Siúlóir is not at all of royal blood and nowadays has only a few coins to his name at a time, but he's got a very different sort of nobility and wealth--he is kind, courageous, gentle and generous, and has the great gifts of magic, wisdom and foresight that occasionally breaks into the realm of prophetic. Purple in particular is also known as the color of melancholy, and Siúlóir is still troubled over tumultuous past events which continue to shape him still, decades and lifetimes after. On the other hand, gold--or yellow--is a color associated with happiness, joy, and cheer. Siúlóir prefers to live in the moment, knowing better than most how precious the present can be, and even at his most troubled and contemplative, he is always prepared to smile. Gold is a color that I have always personally associated with Time, and the focus of Siúlóir's power lies in his ability to see and bend the temporal.

THE MAD ARCHITECT is a completely different animal. His colors are red and gold. By itself, red represents danger, war, strength, passion and determination; together with gold, it evokes power and wealth. The ARCHITECT is an alchemist of great prestige and power who has long unlocked the capacity to create gold out of lead, but alchemy has another layer to it, one of dubious spirituality, and it is with this that he is so affixed. Gold, both the color and the material, is the symbol of perfection in this philosophy, and the ARCHITECT is obsessed with perfection, to the extent that he has plans for destroying and recreating the entire universe because he believes that it is filled with divine errors. Following black and white, red and gold represent the final two stages of the alchemical process known as the Magnum Opus or The Great Work. Finally, they also represent the two ends of the spectrum the ARCHITECT likes to see through to its end: the red of blood and entrails transfigured into the gold of physical and material perfection. Of course, like any morally bankrupt madman, his perspective is heavily skewed, and there is nothing particularly noble or spiritually profound about the horrors of ritual war and torture. The 'gold' he creates by processing live human beings is called Rotemilch, or red milk, and it is the substance that feeds his massive inter-dimensional project: a blood-powered, world-destroying prison and machine known only as The Labyrinth.


Aside from in-universe explanations, what do your characters' associated colors mean? Here are a couple of interesting resources I found that might help you discover hidden depths you didn't know existed!

Cheers!