![]() The two main characters of Given, Mafuyu (Mayu to friends) and Ueno are very clearly colour coded. It’s not a very flashy show, but in its unassuming way, it subverts a lot of classic narrative templates, including this trope. Given has…um… given me… al lot of food for thought. So why bring this up now? Because of Given. O.K., just one more Kuruko and Taiga from Kuroko no Basket (it’s one of my favourite examples). Gray-Man, Ed and Al from FMA… I’m going to stop now cause this is going to last for ever. Natsu and Grey from Fairy tail, Allen and Kanda from D. More subtlely (at least colour wise) Chuuya has a generally warm palette while Dazai is in cool tones, especially back in his Port Mafia days, in Bungo Stray Dogs. Secondary characters in both Chobits and Card Captor Sakura often use this pattern. In anime, we see it a lot! Assassination classroom is a pretty obvious example with blue Nagisa and red Karma. It should be noted that there is no inherent morality involved, neither archetype is necessarily “good” or “bad” with relation to each other. In Western tradition, the colours aren’t as prevalent. As you probably guessed from the word “oni” in there, the trope name is in fact from Japanese folklore tradition which has multiple tales featuring these types of characters in their respective colours. Like I said, it’s a fairly standard narrative set up. The formula can be applied to entire races of civilizations as well. It’s when your two main characters act as foils for each other with one being passionate, wild, assertive even occasionally aggressive (the Red Oni) and the other is more intellectual, introverted and controlled (the Blue Oni). The Red Oni, Blue Oni trope is fairly common in fiction. So when you combine tropes with colour theory, it’s like a candy coated cocktail for me. I should probably disclose that I mostly have no clue what they tell us about each other, but I guess it’s that mystery that keeps me interested. fiction) started to take on these patterns and forms and what this can tell us about each other. I would see archetypes come up in books or shows and wonder how they came about. I do know that I’ve been fascinated with tropes since I was small. But at some point, I started to really notice them in all things and particularly in cinema and anime. I’m not sure when I started having this fascination with colours.
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