Headcanon #225: Updates to Colors and The Distinctions Between Violet, Celadon, and Cerulean.
I have previously started the following: 1) All blues (including cerulean) are desire based. 2) All purples (including violet) are pain based. 3) Celadon is hope. 4) Cerulean is longing.
Now, when I originally set up blue as desire, I did so under the assumption that blues, and shades thereof, were physical desires, as defined by its brightest and pulsating form - the flashing neon blue that correlates directly with sex (and sexual desire to some extent, with the exception that the act itself does cause differences within the pulses of the color and how bright it is, among potential other things).
However, the color periwinkle is a blue-based color that has nothing to do with a physical form of desire; it is defined as concern, which is more a combination of curiosity and fear on behalf of another person (but does not use either of those colors because it is a color all on its own in the same way that concern is an emotion all on its own). Therefore, the idea that all blues must be physical desires must be incorrect.
The problem then arises in that if blue is still connected with desire - any form of desire - then why isn’t hope a blue-based color? Celadon is a green (which...has no such overarching emotional connection in the same way that blue:desire and purple:pain do, since celadon:hope is not compatible with lime green:pity and olive green:understanding, unless we go on it being something directly correlated with an emotional connection to another being...which is always possible), not a blue, and yet hope is a desire - a desire for certain future events. So not all desires are blue.
I have recently come to the conclusion that violet is temptation for the following reasons: Violet is a purple, which means that it must be connected with pain, and it has been described as an “ache nestled just in her chest, something broken.... Something almost like hope”. Hope is a desire for a future event, so violet, therefore, must be something similar to that desire but painful. Violet is also Eleanor Weiss’s color, which originally made me think it must be guilt, except that there is no hope in guilt (unless one is hoping for reparation). However, given Eleanor’s past as Nonnie Montgomery and her relationship with Dead Richard (a forbidden relationship between a human and a Toon, among other things) and the circumstances of the aforementioned quote, the idea of violet as a desire for something forbidden - temptation - made much more sense to me.
But, again, you get this idea of a desire that is not a blue. Therefore, although most desires are blue, not all blues are desire based and not all desires are blue.
Then we get into the ideas of cerulean:longing, celadon:hope, and violet:temptation, which are all very similar. In their most basic forms, the distinction is as follows: violet is, again, a desire for something that is forbidden; celadon is a desire for a future event (in general, but typically not one that is forbidden); and cerulean is a desire for physical intimacy without falling into anything sexual. This does not mean that the desire for physical intimacy assumed by cerulean cannot be sexual, but that the desire for intimacy is more important than the sexual aspect of it, which can lead to sexual encounters that flash cerulean instead of neon blue.
