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sunshine_challenge's second prompt today, continuing in the chromatic theme with orange. Here's what they have to say:
Orange has a fairly limited set of associations for me, especially in the fannish realm. Orange usually comes in combination with other colors, like the white and black that make up tigers (like Hobbes) and those associated with foxes (regardless of how many tails they have or whether they're just mischievous little Trixxsters.) There's the fruit where orange stands out and is allowed to be by itself (whether in color or in flavor, as orange is a pretty common juice and drink mix flavor), but there aren't a whole lot of characters that I know of who wear orange regularly. That might have to do with cameras and photography and needing to have the right skin tone for orange so as not to look unwell while wearing it, but also because orange is one of those colors that is almost always going to be unapologetically BRIGHT! and therefore needs to be balanced in some way or another. Even the darker tones of orange draw the eye because the color itself stands out so much.
I suppose I can talk about orange in a useful way, now taht I think about it, because there's a throughline of orange between two comic strips that are both complete and that I enjoyed greatly, and that are very close to each other in the way they did things - Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes and Dana Simpsons's Ozy and Millie. (I'm pretty sure Ozy and Millie have explicit inspiration from Calvin and Hobbes.) Hobbes, the tiger, in orange, black, and white, and is the on-again, off-again conscience to Calvin's impulses, and perpetual companion through many of Calvin's adventures. Not usually the Sapceman Spiff, Tracer Bullet, or other ones that request an art style shift along with Calvin's imagination, but when we're not seeing things from inside Calvin's perspective, Hobbes is usually there, to point out the holes in Calvin's logic, to do at least some amount of due diligence about whether or not the chosen course of action is a good idea, and to otherwise provide commentary on how Calvin is living his life. The two of them get into scraps regularly when they disagree, but their friendship stays strong and forgiveness is regular. Whether Hobbes is real or not is a matter that ultimately doesn't need resolving, because it's not important to the story. (And there are a few different stories in there that discussed some more adult topics than a comic strip might have otherwise tackled.)
Also, Calvin announcing that he is home is almost always met by being pounced at high velocity, because Hobbess is still a jungle creature, after all, and some of those instincts don't go away that easily. Calvin is one of the touchstones of the print comic experience, and the fact that it was a limited thing (and that Bill Watterson actively fought licensing and merchandising, so anything you see of Calvin is almost certainly an unauthorized anything) made it stand out along with the excellent writing and drawing that went with.
Which leads into Ozy and Millie, where the dynamic is much the same of one character who is (trying) to achieve a certain amount of harmony and otherwise not get involved in things and one character that would happily be an anarchic force wherever she goes, but for practical considerations and that occasionally, she listens to people with more experience and/or good arguments. Ozy and Millie isn't Calvin and Hobbes from the perspective of Hobbes, somewhat because the Ozy and Millie world is fully anthro, but also because there are a lot more subjects present in Ozy and Millie than there are in Calvin and Hobbes. (Millie is the orange-colored one, Ozy is grey). Ozy's adopted by a single parent of a different species (who is occasionally attempting to capture the Zen Party nomination, despite at least claiming to be a head of state, Chief Diagonal Pumpkin Non-Hippopotamus Draongy Thingy-Dingy-Flingy Llewellyn XIX, also occasionally known as being part of the vast worldwide dragon conspiracy), Millie is the daughter of a single parent (who works as a lawyer, which is comparatively tame), and they both take on the difficulties of being unpopular children in their schooling. Llewellyn is much more cast in the vein of Calvin's father, because we're never entirely sure that he isn't bluffing or otherwise trying to keep a feeling of wonder and uncertainty in his adoptive child (never on the important things, though), and Millie's mom is cast in Calvin's mother, as someone who tries to keep her rambunctious daughter (relatively) in check from her worst impulses, but she's a lot less harried about it that Calvin's mom is. I think it might be because she's struck a deal with Millie about where and when it is acceptable to conduct explosives research and to keep Millie's ambitions to the small and petty for her to get enough wisdom to realize how to pull off the big plans successfully.
The appeal for both series is that they don't treat childhood as a magical time of nostalgia and they don't have quite as unlucky a protagonist as, say, Charlie Brown is. Ozy still loses his fur about once a year, usually due to Millie, but for the most part, he does all right, if a bit questioningly about his own place in the world and whether he has (or wants) any claim to the world "normal" to describe things. (And that's before you see the parallels between Calvinball, the never-play-it-the-same-way-twice sport, and House Rules Parcheesi, which seems to involve a lot more than just a board, pawns, and dice.) Millie is trying to make her place in the world, but the problem is that she's too young for anyone to really take her seriously, and so she escalates, a lot of the time, to the general annoyance of her teachers and the school system. (And Felicia, who cannot abide the presence of so much weird around her.)
Now that I think about it, because of the fairly strong connections between orange and wildlife, just about all of the places where I've seen orange a lot at work have been in anthropomorphizations, like Hobbes and Millie, but also Applejack of the Friendship-is-Magic era and Retsuko, the office woman of Aggretsuko (who desperately needs change in her life and can only get it out with death metal karaoke.) It's very much a nature and natural creatures color, in falling leaves and various fruits and gourds that become popular when autumn comes around (And a completely artificial color, because candy corn is a thing.) Really, the exception to the rule seems to be Rena Rouge, and she and her civilian identity are orange-because-fox-themed, not because she really likes orange as a color.
As I am scrolling through some other responses, they also point out that saffron is a color in the orange spectrum, especially when you use it to dye Buddhist robes (which is the culture that the Air Nomads of Avatar: The Last Airbender are most closely patterned after. There's a certain amount of "which philosophical system do each of the Four Nations follow the most?" in that show that someone with better scholarship than me could probably figure out. I have the Air Nomads as Buddhists and the Fire Nation as Confucians. The Water Tribes seem to be Daoist to some degree in their outlook and bending style, and the Earth Kingdom seems to be rooted in Legalism.) and as a color of fire, although orange fire is generally on the cold spectrum, as fire goes. So there's the counterexample I was looking for - a character in orange that doesn't have an animal connection. Other than the flying bison, who are almost universally white-fluffed with other colors as patterns. (And there's a gem line or two that are orange in Steven Universe, but it's not used much.)
Orange isn't quite as closed-off a color for me, in that there's not as much of a philosophical objection to living in orange, but it's still a discouraged color on aesthetic grounds. And, like red, living in orange embodies a warmth that is sometimes very hard to maintain in the face of everything happening around. Cultivating the inner fire and using it to radiate warmth, kindness, and heat is a difficult task for those who want to be virtuous in their lives, and at least in my world, there are a lot of things looking to extinguish such a flame.
sunshine_challenge's second prompt today, continuing in the chromatic theme with orange. Here's what they have to say: Orange is a warm color that is associated with a variety of things including: excitement, vitality, invincibility, speed, vigilance, dedication, loyalty, family, success, friendship, power, change, harvest, and warmth.Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Orange can be the warm sunrise after after the darkest night. It can be the bountiful harvest at the end of your hard work. When was a time where dedication and vigilance have reaped their rewards? What future harvests excite you?
Please feel free to answer in whichever way comes naturally to you, be it a memory you share or an artwork you create. If you’d like a more specific idea to kick things off: paint or share a picture that evokes the theme of orange.
Orange has a fairly limited set of associations for me, especially in the fannish realm. Orange usually comes in combination with other colors, like the white and black that make up tigers (like Hobbes) and those associated with foxes (regardless of how many tails they have or whether they're just mischievous little Trixxsters.) There's the fruit where orange stands out and is allowed to be by itself (whether in color or in flavor, as orange is a pretty common juice and drink mix flavor), but there aren't a whole lot of characters that I know of who wear orange regularly. That might have to do with cameras and photography and needing to have the right skin tone for orange so as not to look unwell while wearing it, but also because orange is one of those colors that is almost always going to be unapologetically BRIGHT! and therefore needs to be balanced in some way or another. Even the darker tones of orange draw the eye because the color itself stands out so much.
I suppose I can talk about orange in a useful way, now taht I think about it, because there's a throughline of orange between two comic strips that are both complete and that I enjoyed greatly, and that are very close to each other in the way they did things - Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes and Dana Simpsons's Ozy and Millie. (I'm pretty sure Ozy and Millie have explicit inspiration from Calvin and Hobbes.) Hobbes, the tiger, in orange, black, and white, and is the on-again, off-again conscience to Calvin's impulses, and perpetual companion through many of Calvin's adventures. Not usually the Sapceman Spiff, Tracer Bullet, or other ones that request an art style shift along with Calvin's imagination, but when we're not seeing things from inside Calvin's perspective, Hobbes is usually there, to point out the holes in Calvin's logic, to do at least some amount of due diligence about whether or not the chosen course of action is a good idea, and to otherwise provide commentary on how Calvin is living his life. The two of them get into scraps regularly when they disagree, but their friendship stays strong and forgiveness is regular. Whether Hobbes is real or not is a matter that ultimately doesn't need resolving, because it's not important to the story. (And there are a few different stories in there that discussed some more adult topics than a comic strip might have otherwise tackled.)
Also, Calvin announcing that he is home is almost always met by being pounced at high velocity, because Hobbess is still a jungle creature, after all, and some of those instincts don't go away that easily. Calvin is one of the touchstones of the print comic experience, and the fact that it was a limited thing (and that Bill Watterson actively fought licensing and merchandising, so anything you see of Calvin is almost certainly an unauthorized anything) made it stand out along with the excellent writing and drawing that went with.
Which leads into Ozy and Millie, where the dynamic is much the same of one character who is (trying) to achieve a certain amount of harmony and otherwise not get involved in things and one character that would happily be an anarchic force wherever she goes, but for practical considerations and that occasionally, she listens to people with more experience and/or good arguments. Ozy and Millie isn't Calvin and Hobbes from the perspective of Hobbes, somewhat because the Ozy and Millie world is fully anthro, but also because there are a lot more subjects present in Ozy and Millie than there are in Calvin and Hobbes. (Millie is the orange-colored one, Ozy is grey). Ozy's adopted by a single parent of a different species (who is occasionally attempting to capture the Zen Party nomination, despite at least claiming to be a head of state, Chief Diagonal Pumpkin Non-Hippopotamus Draongy Thingy-Dingy-Flingy Llewellyn XIX, also occasionally known as being part of the vast worldwide dragon conspiracy), Millie is the daughter of a single parent (who works as a lawyer, which is comparatively tame), and they both take on the difficulties of being unpopular children in their schooling. Llewellyn is much more cast in the vein of Calvin's father, because we're never entirely sure that he isn't bluffing or otherwise trying to keep a feeling of wonder and uncertainty in his adoptive child (never on the important things, though), and Millie's mom is cast in Calvin's mother, as someone who tries to keep her rambunctious daughter (relatively) in check from her worst impulses, but she's a lot less harried about it that Calvin's mom is. I think it might be because she's struck a deal with Millie about where and when it is acceptable to conduct explosives research and to keep Millie's ambitions to the small and petty for her to get enough wisdom to realize how to pull off the big plans successfully.
The appeal for both series is that they don't treat childhood as a magical time of nostalgia and they don't have quite as unlucky a protagonist as, say, Charlie Brown is. Ozy still loses his fur about once a year, usually due to Millie, but for the most part, he does all right, if a bit questioningly about his own place in the world and whether he has (or wants) any claim to the world "normal" to describe things. (And that's before you see the parallels between Calvinball, the never-play-it-the-same-way-twice sport, and House Rules Parcheesi, which seems to involve a lot more than just a board, pawns, and dice.) Millie is trying to make her place in the world, but the problem is that she's too young for anyone to really take her seriously, and so she escalates, a lot of the time, to the general annoyance of her teachers and the school system. (And Felicia, who cannot abide the presence of so much weird around her.)
Now that I think about it, because of the fairly strong connections between orange and wildlife, just about all of the places where I've seen orange a lot at work have been in anthropomorphizations, like Hobbes and Millie, but also Applejack of the Friendship-is-Magic era and Retsuko, the office woman of Aggretsuko (who desperately needs change in her life and can only get it out with death metal karaoke.) It's very much a nature and natural creatures color, in falling leaves and various fruits and gourds that become popular when autumn comes around (And a completely artificial color, because candy corn is a thing.) Really, the exception to the rule seems to be Rena Rouge, and she and her civilian identity are orange-because-fox-themed, not because she really likes orange as a color.
As I am scrolling through some other responses, they also point out that saffron is a color in the orange spectrum, especially when you use it to dye Buddhist robes (which is the culture that the Air Nomads of Avatar: The Last Airbender are most closely patterned after. There's a certain amount of "which philosophical system do each of the Four Nations follow the most?" in that show that someone with better scholarship than me could probably figure out. I have the Air Nomads as Buddhists and the Fire Nation as Confucians. The Water Tribes seem to be Daoist to some degree in their outlook and bending style, and the Earth Kingdom seems to be rooted in Legalism.) and as a color of fire, although orange fire is generally on the cold spectrum, as fire goes. So there's the counterexample I was looking for - a character in orange that doesn't have an animal connection. Other than the flying bison, who are almost universally white-fluffed with other colors as patterns. (And there's a gem line or two that are orange in Steven Universe, but it's not used much.)
Orange isn't quite as closed-off a color for me, in that there's not as much of a philosophical objection to living in orange, but it's still a discouraged color on aesthetic grounds. And, like red, living in orange embodies a warmth that is sometimes very hard to maintain in the face of everything happening around. Cultivating the inner fire and using it to radiate warmth, kindness, and heat is a difficult task for those who want to be virtuous in their lives, and at least in my world, there are a lot of things looking to extinguish such a flame.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-06 12:21 am (UTC)Still, could be that Alya really does like orange a lot and just can't find anything that has a lot of it.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-06 12:29 am (UTC)and yet
no subject
Date: 2020-07-06 12:39 am (UTC)