Does square enix hate purple?

[LolitaBansheeMeru]

Well, it is in keeping with lore (and real-life history too) - traditionally purple dye was extremely difficult to produce as it could only be created in very small amounts from the ink extracted from a certain species of sea snail, hence the association with royalty and wealth (in Roman times the colour was associated with the emperor, who wore a toga with a purple stripe), and by extension, the shade of purple known as 'royal blue'. It was only with the onset of the Industrial Revolution and with advances in chemistry leading to the invention of synthetic dyes that purple fabrics (and other colours too) could be easily and cheaply created and dyed.

Given Eorzea is, despite some advances trickling in from Garlemald via the Garlond Ironworks, stil in a roughly late medieval, early Renaissance level of technological development, having only a limited number of purple shades for dyes is very much in keeping with the real-world history that it is inspired by.

almost 65% of the game is robots/machines(as much as i hate it) and what isn't is so low in number We are not in a medeval area we are just in well Lets just say The empire is basicly all big countrys like the usa/franch/england/russia etc and we are well basically africa lol

[Iscah]

The only contex where red, yellow and blue are primary colours is in the kindergarten introduced colour wheel which is mostly just a social construct rather than a useful tool.

It's a perfectly useful tool for an artist. Things don't lose their value just because they were true when you were in kindergarten. You only need to look at one - the colours and their mixes are there. They do blend into a ring. You can take a collection of random objects and arrange them like that and have it make sense - or you can look at a rainbow with its red on one end and violet on the other and think that yes, it's not a far leap to join those two ends of the colour sequence together.

And the fact you can mix reds and blues to create purples - whether it happens on the object or in your mind - gives validity to it. It can be portrayed as a wheel because those colours do combine, even if the spectrum is a straight line.

There are other ways of arranging colour of course. The larger colour-pencil sets seem to use white, yellow, orange, red, pink, purple, blue, green, brown, grey, black. But that's a different way of thinking, aiming to create a linear flow of colours that won't join back up again - and arguably arranged so they can keep that red-purple-blue link, instead choosing to split the sequence at a point where they can easily connect the shades that are left out of the wheel. That seems logical to me from a visual interpretation of it.

Orange and brown exist. Oranges are the various wavelengths of light between red and yellow, and browns are just those wavelengths with lower saturation.

Purple doesn't exist in the sense that there's no pure wavelength of light we can ever associate with it. (Caveat here that indigo/violet, which do have pure wavelengths, often get colloquially lumped in with purple/magenta.) Purple/magenta is just an optical illusion resulting from how our biology works. In a gross oversimplification of what is actually happening, our brains take the RBG signals we receive and sort of average them out. Since both the red and blue sensors are being triggered our brain would ordinarily average that out to be green since that's the wavelength of light that lies between the two, but our green sensors aren't being triggered at all so our brain makes up the magenta/purple colour to be able to process that conflict. This has the illusionary effect of linking the red and blue ends of the physically linear colour spectrum into a perceptually circular one.

Trying to argue that "purple isn't a colour because it doesn't have a pure wavelength associated with it" is like trying to argue that tomatoes aren't vegetables because they're fruits. They're both things at once according to two unrelated sets of criteria with overlapping terms.

By the same logic, purple isn't a spectral colour but it's a visual colour. It might not strictly exist to a scientist studying the properties of light but it absolutely exists to an artist. Anything that isn't a primary colour is a illusory blend of different colours to us, whether it lies within the spectrum or not. We don't only see the strict spectral definitions of colours while being blind to anything inbetween.

In fact, if I'm reading the Wikipedia articles right, it's violet that doesn't exist on any display using an RGB colour system as it can't be reproduced with only red and blue light, and has to be approximated as a purple.


On a side note, it's interesting to see that the exact secondary colours of RGB light are yellow, cyan and magenta.

[Iscah]

Well, it is in keeping with lore (and real-life history too) - traditionally purple dye was extremely difficult to produce as it could only be created in very small amounts...

That logic doesn't really apply here because we have no issues with the amount of purple dye we can use or the expense of obtaining it, only the range of colours it comes in.

[MrThinker]

That logic doesn't really apply here because we have no issues with the amount of purple dye we can use or the expense of obtaining it, only the range of colours it comes in.

I actually thought Enkidoh was doing a bit of tongue in cheek right there...

[Joven]

When I first read the title I thought it said Does square enix hate people?

[Mhaeric]

On a side note, it's interesting to see that the exact secondary colours of RGB light are yellow, cyan and magenta.

This is not a coincidence. RGB and CMY are directly related to each other. The primaries of one are by necessity the secondaries of the other.

Also, if you think anyone is arguing that "purple isn't a colour" then you are completely misunderstanding the point.

[ChrisRedfield2]

they sure do hate purple