Sunshine Challenge 2020 #4: It's Not Easy, Being Green

[silveradept]

sunshine_challenge is chromatic this year, it looks like, but that means all sorts of new possibilities have opened up for us. We're up to Green on the spectrum. Here's the possibility:

Green is a rich color that is associated with a variety of things including: awakening, growth, renewal, productivity, intelligence, exuberance, prosperity, money, luck, envy, greed, survival, nature, spring, and birth.

Green is the prime color of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises. —Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Green can be the fresh growth of spring plants after a long winter. Green can be the good fortune waiting for you around each corner. What green things have you enjoyed this year?

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: share with us some books or fanworks that remind you of the color green or its related themes.

Green is one of those tricky colors that represents a whole bunch of different things, as you can see from the list above. The "green-eyed monster", envy, is something that came up early in my upbringing, as did the four-leaved clover plant, a supposedly lucky element, which in itself was always strongly associated with leprechauns and their mythical gold pot and "the luck of the Irish." Green also has associations with money in the United States, as Federal Reserve Notes for a significant time were printed entirely in green ink. (We've branched out a little bit into other colors, but the color palette for U.S. currency is still primarily green.) Even so, a lot of fantasy cultures use precious metals in gold, silver, copper, and the like, and often handwave the details of whether one entity's coinage has more or less metal in them, whether the kingdom that minted them is actually going to be worth anything, worries about counterfeit minting, or whether the nobles are minting their own coinage, and so forth. Economics is weird, and the details are stereotypically things that make eyes glaze over. Yes, even in the era of people rediscovering Alexander Hamilton and his decision to focus on financial systems and money.

Green is also a color often associated with vitality, both in vigor and health ("being green" as shorthand for environmentally-responsible work or consumption, chlorophyll-heavy plants and trees as the sign of nature thriving, or how green vegetables are often used as shorthand for "appropriate" or "healthy" eating) and in its opposite (poisonous things, a poison state, or poinson-element damage often are green-tinged or green-colored), and the "evil" palette of colors (which are often also associated with 31 October) tends to foreground green (along with purple and orange) as the main color. Green as evil has a pervasive, but subtle, application in the Matrix Trilogy - all of the scenes in The Matrix are tinted green (compared to the blue of the world outside), which makes the Agents tint green instead of being the Men in Black that they would otherwise likely look like. Since The Matrix is basically Plato's Cave, that makes it the evil thing that has to be defeated through enlightenment. (Maybe in another lifetime...)

Where this eventually lands, however, is in a space that one been inhabiting for a while, the retrospective look at The Dragonriders of Pern, which has been visited very strongly by the Suck Fairy compared to when I read it as a younger me. One of my most common complaints about Pern is that the worldbuilding is too thin when it needs to be stronger, because otherwise you're just supposed to accept that each guild coins their own money, and that those monies have relative valuations, despite having the same denominations stamped on them, and despite the being no currency regulator or overseer, people still know whose currency is better than the others, and the local Lords have never tried to coin their own currency, and none of this is based on coinage that has intrinsic value. Like I said, economics is weird and handwaved a lot.

The other, more common complaint is that the worldbuilding actively contradicts itself whenever the plot needs something to happen a particular way, or a character to be categorized in a particular way. And here is my specifically chromatically-picked example: it is repeatedly asserted by the author (and to some degree, by the text in a novel about the origins of people on Pern) that there is no religion on Pern. This statement is only true if you mean "an organized belief system recognizable to a 20th or 21st century Terran reader" when you say religion (and even then, that's contradicted by the AI quoting Ecclesiastes and saying it came from the finest book ever written). Because there is a significant amount of religious and superstitious behavior on Pern, even if it's never formally organized as such.

In the second generation of Pern writers, a character remarks that having green eyes is seen as a bad luck sign. The explanation given to the reader is that because the death-from-space rain that happens every so many years thrives on organic matter, and any of it that manages to find a foothold in, say, a stray plant will burrow and blight a much bigger area as the spore gorges itself to death. (Not always as scientifically.) So green is an unlucky color.

Except, of course, that the five major colors of dragons already established in the first generation of Dragonriders of Pern are gold, bronze, brown, blue and green. (Matching the colors of the fire-lizards who are the dragons' genetic ancestors.) And the second generation is writing in an in-universe time period that is before the first generation's writings (excepting for the origin stories, for the most part. Which causes all sorts of grumbles from me about the worldbuilding being used to suit whatever plot and not whatever has been established. Because there's also an established part of the worldbuilding that says a particular guild has tried (and, according to the narrative, succeeded) to hold the society basically static over all the time. So if green was unlucky Then, green should also have been unlucky all the way through the Now, and green dragonriders would presumably be considered unlucky, or something like that, or show the cognitive dissonance between green-unlucky and green dragons. There's a little of green-unlucky, green-life that happens, but it's only there for a few lines and then things go on and the the matter of the green eyes is rarely brought up again. And so the consistency of the world is only consistent between the authors that wrote it. For fanfic, that's fine, because the fic community has so many different ideas about everything that's outside the canon. But for what is nominally canon, a better effort could have been made to be consistent across everything.

In other stories, though, being a green rider has had certain associations with it, but those things have been mostly associated with promiscuity and someone outright saying "green dragons should go to people who don't have any maternal instinct, so rider and dragon are aligned." And one of the dragonriders least favored by the narrative and the characters (at least until she gets A MAN who can control her) is a green rider, as well, who broke social conventions by being the one the dragon wanted, despite not being in the official ranks of people being considered, and even worse, greens are fighting dragons suitable for MEN, not women.) So that's less "green is unlucky" and more "the brash one raised by the unconventional one that everyone makes fun of for being bold, forthright, and who speaks her mind rides a man's dragon because she wants to be one."

Pern is a place of fractal wrongness, in any case. And green riders tend, more often than not, to get the short end of the stick societally in the dragonrider culture. It's very much a series where the premise of it could have been something quite grand and wonderful, but what we've gotten so far suggests the authors aren't up to the caliber of doing the premise justice. There are still some books to go, though, to perhaps find out that things got better.

They're not going to get better.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

My feeling about the Matrix green was green-on-black terminals, rather than evil. If the Wachowski sisters had directed it in a later timeframe, it could have easily been blue vs. amber (as became popular) with the amber justified as amber-on-black terminals.

[silveradept]

An interview transcript said as much, that the Wachowski sisters were thinking about phosphorescence rather than evil, but it happens to fit in this case. So no, it wasn't deliberate.

💚

[oldtoadwoman]

I don't usually question money since it's just something I grew up with in a society where we all agree what it means. (It's weird to think about money first being invented.) But every now and then, when some stageringly-large number is mentioned on the news or something, my brain just goes, "What even is money? Why is this person more powerful because they have different numbers on a bank ledger than I do?" I think as we move away from physical cash and coins, money just feels more and more abstract to me.

Re: 💚

[silveradept]

Money was already pretty abstract to start with, and it's only really getting more and more abstracted the larger the sums get. And as it transitions to even more abstracted forms, like the electrons that we have serving as money most of the time.

[nrgburst]

That's good Pern meta. I never thought very deeply about it, but you're right- green has always been associated with bad things. I always thought that "greens are so promiscuous ugh good thing they are rendered infertile by chewing stone" was a bit unfair. Reproducing is only for the most prized female, all you rest are worker ants sort of thinking. And since prestige/respect/power goes with dragon color/size...

[silveradept]

The in-universe justification is that greens produce low-quality dragons, of course, so sterilizing them is the right and proper course of action. Because eugenics from the geneticist is somehow more acceptable than from others.

Green has a lot of negative connotations for Pern, but they're not the same ones in-universe as out of it, and they're not always the same ones between stories.

[shipperslist]

1) I never realized that about the Matrix!
2) I've only read the first Dragonrider book (bc the library I visited as a teen only had the first one and it was in English) but I remember how much I loved it. Perhaps because I love dragons. And now I have a kind of itchy feeling to reread them, just to see how bad they are. :D

[silveradept]

Once I read about the tinting and lighting, I couldn't un-see-it. It makes for a fun tidbit to point out to someone as well as a useful shorthand for knowing where you are at any point in the movie.

If you do reread, be prepared for it to be pretty bad. Because a lot of readers remember the dragons part and not much else. But there's a lot of else.

[shipperslist]

In the light (heh) of this information, I'll be sure to have a lot of fun rewatching The Matrix.

And thanks for the warning.

[enemytosleep]

Oh man, I haven't thought about Pern in decades, but now you've got me thinking. I do remember even as a young person not caring for the color rankings and being confused about guild interacting when they seemed so isolationist. It's been so long that I can't comment too deeply because I simply don't remember much, but the trilogy is on my shelf and short, so maybe I'll reread with a more critical eye sometime soon.

[silveradept]

"I haven't thought about Pern in decades" is a pretty common thing, especially since the author very much wanted to retain as much control as could be done rather than understanding the fans would do what they do best.

And also because Pern is pretty much a trash fire in the execution of the really rather good concept.

[autobotscoutriella]

Oooh, that's an interesting analysis of Pern! I only read one of the books (Dragonflight, I believe, for a college class focusing on dragons - I had interesting professors), but we talked a lot about the ways that the worldbuilding worked and the ways that it really, really didn't. I very much wanted to like it - the premise was right up my alley.

[silveradept]

It is a really good premise. I think the strength of that premise, and the promise of dragons helped a lot of Pern readers ignore the otherwise bad execution of the idea.