Sunshine Challenge 2020 #5: Blue, like the water

[silveradept]

Blue is a tranquil color that is associated with a variety of things including: balance, discovery, peace, calm, openness, patience, honor, grace, trust, depression, recovery, prophecy, respect, empathy, flexibility, and water.

Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue – that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man’s destruction is finished. – Georgia O’Keeffe

Blue is often introspective and deep in its calm stillness. When you have been blue, have you been patient with yourself? Have you taken the time to explore your inner self and discover ways to progress?

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 songs or albums that remind you of the color blue or its theme.

The first thing that jumps to mind when I hear the color blue is Eiffel 65, but not the actual lyric of the chorus. Instead, the rather popular mondegreen "I'm blue / I'm in need of a guy," hops in, meant to be something both mocking and queering, and in this time, both something that is much more acceptable a wish to express and a certain amount of "we were being terrible when we said it, because we didn't mean it in a positive way, then." I still think the song is an earworm and I don't really want it to take up space in my brain. That period of time also means I end up thinking about Aqua ("Barbie Girl", specifically, because that's what was on radio play at the time) and the craze that was Dance Dance Revolution. (Although "was" isn't really the right phrase, given there are still plenty of those machines around and getting played, whether at home or in other places.) I never got into it that much, because the standard size of target for hitting an arrow was such that if I stood on the arrow, such that the arch of my foot was right over the arrow, my toes would be on the panel in front of the arrow and my heel would be on the panel behind it. Since DDR panels are inset, that would mean I wouldn't get a registered touch because no part of my foot would be on the actual arrow panel. I would get frustrated because eventually, I would stop dancing on my toes and have a combo break, despite knowing that I had put my foot flat in exactly the right place. And some of those songs rely on being able to gallop your way across the panels, and it's very frustrating when you're doing it all correctly and it's not registering correctly.

When I'm wearing blue, I'm usually trying to be personable and friendly and to get along, a contrast to red's projection of being someone who gets obeyed and respected. I'd like to believe that when I'm trying to get along, it doesn't make me a pushover, but what I'd like to believe and what reality is are not always in harmony with each other.

Blue is usually the standard color of the element of water, which makes sense, given the varieties of blue that water contains (or reflects and refracts, I suppose) depending on its depth and health. Less clear (probably because I haven't studied enough of The Soup and / or what survives of the religious practices of the long past) is the association blue has (possibly through water) with magic. It could be something as simple as "red and blue contrast each other", but in games that track health with red, the magic meter is often blue. Fighter wears red, Black Mage wears blue. That sort of thing.

Sticking with the water theme for a touch, when elemental magic appears and is set up on Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors, water often gets two slots, one as "water", one as "ice", with different strengths and weaknesses. Chrono Trigger is the earliest game I've played where water and ice had different visual representations (Marle, the eventual canonical love interest, wields ice magic, while Frog, a knight under a transformation curse, uses water magic represented by bubbles, mostly) even though they're treated the same mechanically, but the Final Fantasy paradigm would eventually expand into an elemental square of Fire-Ice-Lightning-Water, requiring the player to treat the different forms as separate elements. Pokémon ends up doing this as well, and water-types and ice-types are very different mons.

There's also something here about how water is a profoundly dangerous element, but that it doesn't appear to be such, unlike the other elements that display their danger more easily, the idea of being like the water, flowing to the place where resistance is least, slipping through cracks, wearing down the things that oppose you until they crumble, and how birth of those ideas that ties into my perception of the Hufflepuff work ethic and my headcanon that Puffs are seen as anodyne, friendly people who prize good relationships and harmony, but anyone who aggravates a Hufflepuff sufficiently finds out how well their web of connections turns into a lot of people who can make a life miserable, possibly without the Puff ever knowing or consciously directing it, and the ease in which the amiable and pleasant water-element aligned character can freeze someone out for slights, real or imagined, but in not sure how much that ties into blue as much as it does into water.