Ok, I have a day off and something on my mind, so here goes:

We have talked about good & evil and why it is not a solid bedrock for action fantasy, but we have to also talk about other aspects that are tied into good and evil and address those.

So today I want to talk about things in literal black and white.

Yup, we are pulling out our color wheels and talking about the color theory of action fantasy.

Since action fantasy has been built on the bedrock of good and evil, it has taken the cultural color assignments of "good=white, light" and "evil=black, dark".

Wanna make something bad? Just darken it's color.

Dark elves, Black Knight, etc.

Conversely, we lighten things to make them good.

This is all known, non-surprising stuff.

Where I want to go is: how do we change this in a way that also enriched the space?

The morality color mapping in action fantasy is not only icky, it's boring.

Let's be dope.

So, let dispense with

Black Knight
White Knight

And let's play around with:

Green Knight
Blue Knight
Red Knight
Yellow Knight

"Quinn, did you just discover the power rangers or something?"

Heh, good catch, but I want to go deeper.

Because with each of these colors, I want to look at the positive and negative color associations and how they can be used as an evocative and more detailed symbolism.

The positive of blue forex is that it is stable, wise, intellectual. It's negative is that it is cold, aloof, distant.

For your Blue Knight, you can use the positive, negative or both to portray them.

Your blue Knight could be a hero of quiet, immense intellect, analyzing situations and conjuring deep strategems to overcome foes.

Your blue Knight could be a villain who has coldly and "logically" come to the conclusion the world would be better without life on it.

So that is color as personality, and I hope we can see how expanding our color range gives us a lot more depth.

There is also the cultural signifiers of colors to think about!

I encourage you to Google color associations for different countries and colors.

Colors mean different things in different places!

Going back to our Blue Knight: on one country he might be seen positively bc of what blue means, and in another seen negatively.

Here is a cool exercise that I've done in worldbuilding and I'll encourage you to do:

Pick a region and write out a 3-5 colors (no black/white).

Which colors do folks view negatively? positively?

Note what each color is used for in the region, and what each symbolizes.

In my experience, building this cultural "palette" is a powerful little exercise. You can literally use the colors in the descriptions and context of your setting to make the world more rich, more real.

And I'll be honest, I WANT to use black and white, bit they are so loaded with so much baggage it's better to use everything else first.

So much black and white has dimmed the saturation of our worldbuilding, making it grey.

That's more or less what I want to say about it, I've been thinking for some time about making that exercise into a worksheet for worldbuilding for people to use bc it is a powerful little technique.