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I was reading a Harry Potter fanfic last night, where wild magic was colored purple, and it struck me that I've seen chaotic/wild magic colored purple in several fics. Has anybody else noticed a trend to use purple for such magic, or any other color? I'm curious as to what people might have seen. Is there something about purple that just screams 'wild/chaos' to fanfic writers?
*grin* So - thoughts/anecdotes? Am I completely off-base here?
-Feinan

green and red are other popular choices, so is white and multicolored.
but yes purple is a common color for wild magic, I blame twister.
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huh.
The Grandparent of purple chaos.
now _that_ is a title.Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979

?
...yeah, I got nothing.---
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It's pretty simple:
Evil = Red. Obviously. Darth Vader's lightsaber was red. I meanm its just the way it works.
Good = Blue. Also obvious. Look at any anime fighting series. The good guy always has a blue aura. The heros in Japanese games have blue hair. That's just the way it work.
Red + Blue = Purple
Therefore something that is both evil and good (ie, chaos) is purple.
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Epsilon
Evil is lower on the electromagnetic spectrum

and chaos is higher on the spectrum than good...
makes sense in my cosmology. Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979

There's a bit in one of Andre Norton's novels, The Jargoon Pard if memory serves me, that associates certain colors with certain specializations or qualities of magic. I don't know where she got these associations, but I recall that she distinguished between Violet Magic, described as (approximate quote) "pure Power among the Spirits," and Purple Magic, which was something a bit more ominous, close to what's usually described as Black Magic. -----
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I'm going to have to shoot Epsilon's theory down here a bit... Darth Vader had a red saber, but he fought green sabered people and Mace Windu's was purple. High Jedi are not walking forces of chaos. Its literally against the rules. Also life sucking force lightening is blue.... so unlesss good equals life sucking now, I think your wrong there.
The colors of aura in MA is emotion based. Red is anger/agression, blackish purple is dark green/purple is depression and bad things, etc... etc.. If I remember correctly Belldandy can see people's emotions as colors on their auras.
In Naruto human chakra is blue (Its just only Naruto realy has enough to waste in fancy light displays) and at least the Kyuubi's is red. Even evil human's are technically blue.
I'm guessing 'purple' as wild magic was something in one fic that rippled from a single story to influence several people that took it as universal cannon for whatever reason. I don't know the specific work (fanfiction or published fiction), but I'm sure you could back track the origin with enough time and people that actually remember where they got/stole the ideas from... but I'm not going to bother with that personally.
As a point of logic... why would wild magic have a solid color to representing it in the first place? It wild magic. I've seen a player in AD&D with a wild mage... when a Neutral Evil charicter manages to become partially possessed by Cthulu (complete with tentecles frowing from their lower back) due to using vampiric touch, end up with lawful good lycanthropy, and then manage to have them randomly set off their lycanthropy at noon midbattle and somehow end up winning the battle for their side (the evil side) when they attempt to fireball their own troops and instead end up randomly shifting forms on a table 3 percentage tables deep each round while in an unstable cyclonic Vortex of energy... then rolling for Taresque (still in the energy Vortex that is moving with her) causing the trees your fighting to run screaming in terror.
Wild magic isn't a solid color to anyone that has seen it... its unstable by definition and that when you try to match it with a color chart it is rather difficult to do so, as the color chart seems to have broken out in a terrible case of firebreathing goat eyes.
Also, Good and Evil are on a different axis of the chart then Chaos and Order... of course Chaos is a 'higher spectrum' component then Good... Good and Evil actually require someone/something around to make judgement calls on where on the scale they made up their marks for Good/Evil actually fall... they are also subjective forces. Chaos and Order happen when no one/nothing is around to make the judgement calls. Any scale that doesn't have Order/Chaos on more primal level than Evil/Good is probably going to be created by a group that has catch phrases and one-liners for why it can get away with what it just did.

Too many pink and purple Chaos Space Marines. --
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R!
DOROTHY!
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--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
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Quote:

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Too many pink and purple Chaos Space Marines.

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Pink and blue are the colors of Tzeentch, Chaos God of Secrets, and purple is the color of Slaanesh, Chaos God of Depravity and Hedonism. Warhammer doesn't assign any one color to Chaos as a whole; it's all colors.Ebony the Black Dragon
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I don't know about chaos, but I've associated purple with magic in general for some time.
(This is the original explaination for Lady Confusion having purple eyes - it's indicative of her body having been heavily altered by magic. Her eyes were green before she got the bioenhancement ability, and would be green again if she were ever crazy enough to turn it off.)
I'm not sure where I got this from though, and it may just have been a personal taste issue. After all, I like purple.
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---(Not really)

bah, the true color of Wild/Chaos Magic is plaid! __________________
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I don't have them here to check, and I haven't read them in a year, but wasn't purple the color of magic in Discworld?

Nope, Octarine was the colour of magic. I think it was described as being purplish though.

"A sort of greenish-yellow purple."
--Sam
"SQUEAK."

Quote:

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terrible case of firebreathing goat eyes

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This is now a meme. Or, it will be this weekend.Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979

Octarine always SOUNDED purple to me, though. I mean, I remember it was described as something you can't actually picture, but I always think purple for magic thanks to Discworld.

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