The name of Gojou’s Limitless’ form “Reversal: Red“ has actual, solid foundation, connected to the Doppler Shift.
Specifically, the “Red-shift”.
The easy ways of explaining it are two: a star or an ambulance’s siren.
Yeah, I know, pretty different objects, but it’s gonna make sense, I promise.
First of all, we have to talk about the involvment of light (and sound) and its wavelenght
Star
If a star moves away from us, we’ll see its ‘color’ (light) shift. This is because the light frequency lowers to a wider wavelenght, so towards red, and less energy (light) is able to reach us, distance-wise and void-wise; as much as empty space might seem, there’s still a shtickton of stuff we can’t see nor detect into what we consider ‘void’.
Could it be a subtle input on the nature of Unlimited Void? I wouldn’t be surprised.
Ambulance’s siren
When you hear the ambulance approacing you, the siren has a higher pitch, but strangely enough, when it surpasses you and moves away from you, you quickly realize the sound becomes deeper the more distant the ambulance goes. That is exactly the same thing that happens, but with sound, which is another physical unit running on wavelenght. The wavelenght dilates while the ambulance is distancing us, thus producing a progressively lower tone.
Long story short, this is why Reversal: Red might be a name given to a techinque that pushes stuff away from you. It’s not connected to the objects/people themselves more than the concept of their action, their straying, resulting from Gojou’s space and cursed energy manipulation.
The rest of the rant lays down below, don’t continue if you don’t wanna be spoiled.
If you do, welp, not my fault.
As a star move towards us, its light will shift on the spectrum closer to the blue, because its frequency will get higher and the wavelenght will compress. Thus, the energy level is increasing the nearer it gets to us.
I can hear y’all thinking “Oh, THAT’s why the other one is called Forward: Blue.”
Yep, precisely :D
Same as before - and on the contrary at the same time - the form might be named after the “Blue-shift”, the other effect of the Doppler shift.
With the ambulance: as it approaces, you can hear the pitch getting higher and higher; the sound’s frequency hightens, getting to its “blue” peak when it is front of you.
Following the concept of something getting NEARER to you, “Forward: Blue” works pulling in, towards Gojou.
Now, we reached Hollow: Purple. This is were the speculations and the fun begin.
You might ask me: but, Moody, you used an image where blue is not the end of the line, there’s violet (purple) right there. So why not call it ‘Forward: Purple’?
Hollow: Purple then doesn’t seems to make sense. Also, purple is still the mix of blue and red, right?
Well....yes (Hollow: Purple seems to not make sense using the Doppler Shift), yes (purple is still the result of mixing red and blue) and no (it’s shouldn’t be called Forward: Purple).
I think Hollow: Purple mixes the color wheel scheme theory, the ‘spectral’ violet light, and how we are able to perceive violet.
First, let’s talk about how the human eye “sees” this color, ‘cause it’s a trick :P
I’m explaining:
Our eyes have nice little cells to differentiate colors, named photoreceptors: cones and rods.
Usually we have 3 types of cones, each of those reacting to 3 main wavelenghts: blue (high frequency) green (medium frequency) and red (low frequency). Rods are all the same and they’re sensitive to the amount of light (or brightness) in the environment. They’re also the ones who permits us to see during nightime (in a grayscale, ‘cause the cones turn off during the night).
Our eyes’ lenses shields us from the high-energy radiations coming from Sun and space, which are detrimental and dangerous (but some of them are very useful) on a variety of level (UVA [black light], UVB, UVC [germicide], X-rays, ϒ-rays...the nasty stuff, :D). Thus, violet and/or ultraviolet cones don’t have a reason to exsist, since those wavelenghts are not supposed to reach the retina.
Following this idea, we cannot see the wavelenght of violet.
But we see violet.
As the frequencies of the colors stimulates one or more cones and a certain amount of rods, we are able to distinguish more tints, like cyan, magenta, yellow (CMYK...yes, those very one), brown, pink, ochre, gray and all the other shades in between...and yes, purple as well, as a mix of blue and red cones’ activation. Now this makes sense, right?
Here’s a nice and easy list of how colors come up.
We can see purple, but at the same time, we are not.
We can see it as a ‘cone-mix’ color, but not as a ‘spectral’ color.
There’s an anatomical condition called aphakia (greek - “without lens”) in which a person doesn’t have (naturally or because of surgery/incident) one or both lenses, so the radiation is able to enter the eye and they can “see” the ultraviolet light. Still, it’s not the bright purple we might imagine; some of them define it as a blueish-purpleish white (if someone who’s reading this is aphakic, please don’t be afraid and share your version with us!).
Complicated? Yeah, I feel you.
In my opinion, “Hollow: Purple” extrapolates both this concepts: it is the combination of Red and Blue as cones’ stimulation (color wheel) = Gojou’s techinques of pushing and pulling, which escalates from a ideological nonesense into a consequent annihilation, and something that seems real, feels real, really isn’t, but still happens.
Like "Violet Light”, indeed :)
Same as UV spectrum energy, Hollow: Purple destruction capacity is bordeline-armageddon.
Funny last detail: red is supposed to carry the less amount of energy, while blue has the highest, but in the story it’s the opposite. Reversal: Red is said to be twice the strenght of Forward: Blue, because Gojou is actually manipulating Blue (the original form) into Red, converting negative energy into positive, thus increasing the devastation scale.
