Color Identities 02 - Blue

[rakathspseudonym]

Second in the color identity series, this is Blue. Blue is pretty much the color I identify with most when I write or play cards. So it'll have a bit more to it than some of the other color identities, and has a pretty large collection of characters to it.

Blue is knowledge, it's the rejection of emotion, sympathy, and base things for cold hard logic. It's a firm believer that knowledge is the greatest power, and power is the greatest tool to gather more knowledge. Blue's focus on the cerebral puts them at a weakness in the physical world, and they have issues with killing. Not moral issues, morality is weak emotionally nothings, practicality. It is far more practical to not kill someone so you can use them later. So Blue prefers to only unmake things it can't see a use for later. Blue prefers to delay things, so they can be brought back under their terms.

April O'Leary
October Daye
April is a tree, but unlike most trees her color identity falls well outside of green. Her nature, as a tree spirit living in a computer server tower existing on a network as a being of energy and information... is kinda the perfect identity of Blue. She's emotionally stunted but carries a massive intellect and understanding to her. Her powers, similarly, are built on having a massive knowledge of an area, without much ability to employ it. She leaves that to the more practical members of the cast.

Daphne Powell
No Ordinary Family
Somewhat like Mulan from our previous session, the lack of secondary traits is a lack of extended series time. She probably falls into Blue/Red due to being a teenager, but I can't be sure. There's a chance she'd go the route of black due to mind control, absolute power corrupts absolutely and all. Anyway, her abilities are built on knowledge, and she turns it to her advantage quickly. She reads and controls minds, there is nothing more blue than that other than unmaking magic.

Foxface
Hunger Games
We don't know much about her due to limited canon for her, the dead thing is a problem, but her time in the game was evasive. She stole just enough to live, and kept out of sight. She made herself unimportant to keep tabs on everything to make the best moves. Her death, if you view it as a mistake and not as a suicide, is also a very blue mistake. Blue follows the information, if the information is faulty, the result is faulty. She's a pretty hard character to put a lot into.

Ruth Aldine | Blindfold
Marvel 616 - X-Men
Unlike the others, who are mostly in here due to limited canon, Ruth falls in with April as just being flawlessly Blue. Ruth sees the past, present, and future, all together and uses that information to help how she can. This nature of her's makes her innately blue, especially since her power has serious impacts on her personality... in that she's kinda batshit crazy. Not having a sense of linear time does that. Time and the manipulation of events is also a very blue power, as it's a power that requires a lot of knowledge to make effective, and not just horribly blow up in everyone's faces when you ruin the timeline.

Sky Smith
Doctor Who - Sarah Jane Adventures
Oh Sky, she's so... innocent. Probably the best example of the positive aspects of Blue. She's constantly seeking more to know and understand, she finds humanity fascinating, emotions fascinating, and just wants to know better. And she's learning from the most positive humans, with the best focus. To the point Sky was willing to die to protect Earth as she valued Earth above herself. Sadly Utilitarian Morals applies, but she's learning.

Dimir
So what happens when you view knowledge as the one true path, and an amoral desire for power? You get corrupted knowledge brokers. The Dimir Guild is about control of information and staying off the radar. They act subtly from the shadows, making sure to act in ways that can't be attributed to them. It's the easiest way to get what you need, when nobody knows you're there.

Caleb Rivers
Pretty Little Liars (early series)
Caleb starts out the series as the classic bad boy, but more specifically he's a hacker (blue) anti-authority (black) anarchist figure. Before he fully aligns with the girls and is part of their team, he's in it for himself, and is forced into helping for his own ends. Now, he's a good starting point for Black amorality is not actually evil or immoral. Helping the girls was not about being helpful, he wanted to have Hanna in his life, thus the cost was his services.

Cat Sith
Dresden Files
...The first Malk, a keystone of the Unseelie court, and right hand of Mab, queen of Air and Darkness... is as textbook as you can get. All of Faerie follows rules, but Cat Sith enjoys the fun of taking commands and subverting them in amusing devastating ways. I really can't go into this because all examples are the entire book.

Evangeline A.K. McDowell
Mahou Sensei Negima
Evangeline started mono-black, but that's pre-series. After fifteen years trapped in a school without much to do... she read. She learned, and gathered a bunch of knowledge and uses that to further her power. Fights with her are about power, and her power is knowledge. Her fight with Setsuna was pretty focused on taking Setsuna apart psychologically (blue) to win (black). Her focus is definitely in the amoral power hunt (black), but mostly because... she's old and cranky. She's just learned via age that wisdom is a great tool of power.

Sasha Henrietta Torres
Bunheads (Early Series)
Sasha is heavy in the black, she's taken control of her friends to defend against the chaos in her family. She uses logic, reason, and thought as the tool to maintain her command. Her choices are made critically, through careful consideration of how her acts will ripple, which is very much a blue trait. The black trait is that her actions are generally for personal gain and little concern for who she hurts in the process.

...She does get better.

Willa Monday
The Finder (Early Series)
...You might notice a trend here, cause Willa and Sasha start out in the same place. Sasha's a bit tamer as an ordinary girl, Willa... is a child of Romani criminals who learned the trade and became very good at it. What separates her from the mostly White/Black (Rules to further personal ambition), she thinks for herself. Walter and Leo push her to think and be clever, and with those thoughts she rebels against her own anti-authority group. Willa uses her wits and skills as her tool, and lies, deceives, and plays on people to use them for her needs.

She gets some definition of better.

Izzet
Blue is cold desire for knowledge and advancement, Red is a hot blooded impulsive creativity. This is the color pair for mad science, genius on the brink of insanity... and, let's be real, often over the edge. Red loves the now, and prefers to just answer the question by testing. But then learns from these things like Blue suggests, and loving every minute of it. So the characters who fit this fit a mad world of opposites.

Piper McLean
Heroes of Olympus
Okay, so I haven't properly voicetested her, but of all the characters in Percy Jackson... she's one I actually really want more chapters for to see who she is and what she's like. But onto the explanation for this call. Part of this is functional, blue and red are both colors that center on controlling others. From the personality and priorities side, Piper and Leo share the same color alignment, but with different weights. Where Leo is heavy on the red (impulsive and crazy) Piper is a lot more big picture. While Piper is lead by her heart, her heart is lead by her mind imagining all the possibilities.

Richard Castle
Castle
Castle is a heavy creative sort, he uses reason and logic to piece things together... but often as not that inner child of his runs around and impulsively touches things that could explode. He's reckless, passionate, and does not think everything out... but when he does he has a meticulous eye for detail. A lot of his crazy suggestions were revealed as either his devotion to the romantic image of there being far more to life than just facts... or he was poking Kate because it's funny to poke her.

Zarina
Disney Fairies
Of my Izzet aligned characters, she's the most likely to be Izzet, she's a science fairy! She literally is so passionate about learning she accidentally destroyed parts of Pixie Hollow with a giant tree. Because she started on her experiments and kept going until things blew up! She a passionate alchemist, and wants so much to learn that she won't let little things like safety or rules stand in her way. Because she's gotten so far ahead of herself she's forgotten why those rules could be a good idea.

Willa Monday
The Finder (Later Series)
Yup, back to Willa already! See, at first she was all about self-value and amoral following of what's best for Willa. She grew out of that and simply developed an anarchy bend without the self interest, having too much fun in Walter's crazy world to think about the end results too much. Studying the puzzle is better than self-interest. Which leads to this slight shift in her values.

Which explains her choice in the end of the series, she chose freedom (SUPER RED) over what's best for her. That the fear of losing them (also Red) meant the best most logical (Blue) answer was to leave. On her terms, before the choice was taken away.

Grixis
When Grixis was separated from the other shards, it lost access to life and growth magics, the shared focus of White and Green. Mixing the Amorality of Black, the Knowledge of Blue, and the Chaos of Red is generally a bad mix without anything to temper it. Overall the colors are not good for making friends.

Clare Diana Edwards
Degrassi (Season 10 - Present)
Clare had a rough road after her relatively easy start to the series. Her sense of order was pretty much destroyed with a great deal of her faith, mostly due to her parents divorce and general poor attitude attached to it. Clare's still smart as a whip, but Clare's safety net is gone, and that makes her more self-centered (black) and reckless (red). Her red qualities are almost entirely built on the desire to do sexy things with boys, and her black qualities focus mainly on harming those that offend her.

At the start of the series her emotions are kept in check by her religious values, later on her religious values are still there... but have less impact containing her choices.

Imogen Moreno
Degrassi
Imogen's... erratic, so her identity shuffles between the three colors over her three seasons on the show. At first she was the model of a subversive Blue/Black, using her wits to study her targets, and twist them around till they don't know what way is up to get what she wants. Her entire arc with Eli during the first half of Season 11 was a Dimir-style plot of manipulation and control. It also backfired. Red was in her manner and actions, she was passion and freedom... being moved in very calculated self-serving ways.

Her follow up, what she is most of the time, is very much Blue and Red, with hints of self-interest here or there. A creative explosion of passion and ideas, moving at a million miles an hour from one project to the next. But all of these things are for her own ambitions and desires. She slipped back into old habits when Fiona was thinking of going to Italy, and again when she was interested in Adam. But mostly? She's a blithe spirit.

Richard Grayson | Robin | Nightwing
Young Justice
Like Imogen this is a matter of balancing three items that will never balance properly. Robin was very much a detailed knowledge pool to work from... and then used to have as much fun as possible, making his focus in the blue and red, and not much black. As Robin there was a lot of spacing away from becoming Batman, of not making the hard choices, not being that guy. He grew up, the world got darker, he started feeling up to the hard calls. He lied to his friends, to protect them, he schemed, plotted, and used the least heroic methods to get results.

So by the end, Nightwing, was more than comfortable in that area of hard calls without morals or feelings, because that's what he needed to do. And he took his lumps for those calls, because he didn't open up to others. Nightwing had a lot less Red to him, as that was the part of Dick that enjoyed giggling from the shadows and playing the fool with others.