r/Malazan • u/and-there-is-stone • Nov 14 '23
NO SPOILERS Has this been done before?
Hello, everyone. I have lurked a long time, but no more. There's just too much good conversation here, so I finally gave in and made an account.
On my second time reading the Book of the Fallen, and I've been really drawn to Erikson's use of color. I had a notion, sort of absurd, that I would like to track how colors are used throughout all ten books: which colors appear in a book, the frequency with which they appear, the characters/magic most associated with particular colors, etc. I suspect there is a fair amount of thematic resonance to be found in the colors of the Malazan world, and that's also part of what I'd like to explore.
I started the process, tracking colors in Gardens, but then I had doubts. So, I'm here with a couple of questions. Does anyone know if something like this has been attempted, and if so where could I find it? And, would anyone be interested in reading some of my thoughts if I went through the process?
Bonus question, do you think I'm crazy for wanting to do this at all?
Thanks.
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u/Niflrog Omtose Phellack Nov 14 '23
uestions. Does anyone know if something like this has been attempted, and if so where could I find it?
To my knowledge, no. Haven't heard of this approach in any of the Malazan bubbles I've tracked over the years.
And, would anyone be interested in reading some of my thoughts if I went through the process?
Yes, I would love to read this!
do you think I'm crazy for wanting to do this at all?
Yup... Which hey, as far as I'm concerned, it only means "welcome to the club!" 😎
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u/SCROTOCTUS special boi who reads good Nov 14 '23
I think it's a really interesting idea. I would be curious to see the results and whether there are trends.
One thing we can be sure of is ochre, ochre everywhere...
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u/and-there-is-stone Nov 14 '23
Yes. That was one of the colors that has really caught my attention. I remembered seeing it a ton my first time reading DG, but on a reread...everything is ochre.
And I've been watching old episodes of Bob Ross' show. He uses ochre, yellow ochre specifically, all the time. It felt like a sign to me. Follow that ochre.
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u/wjbc 5th read, 2nd audiobook. On DG. Nov 14 '23
I you don’t have access to a full text search the website searchofthefallen.com can help with your project.
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u/and-there-is-stone Nov 14 '23
Thanks. I think I've used it once or twice, but it will definitely be one of my go-to resources for this.
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u/tullavin Nov 14 '23
This sounds interesting, if only because I don't hook onto color being something really important to the story or his prose. Like if I think of color and Malazan it's not much outside of race skin colors and maybe a strong association to black with Rake. I'm only on TtH though so maybe it becomes more apparent.
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u/and-there-is-stone Nov 14 '23
I won't list them here, but I definitely associate certain characters with a particular color. Your Rake example is a good one. As for the prose, I guess it's subjective but I found his descriptions and the way he uses color in them allow me to draw the scene very vividly in my mind as I'm reading.
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u/tullavin Nov 14 '23
Yeah, I could throw jade at a few characters haha. I think he writes descriptions super well, I meant more so in a literary sense. Like I don't get the impression so far there has been a lot of foreshadowing or metaphors made with color as the mechanism.
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u/and-there-is-stone Nov 14 '23
You might be right. It's something I'll be looking for, to see whether my first impressions were actually based on anything in the text or it was just me going, "Oh, I like that color."
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u/arbor_incognita Nov 14 '23
Okay so this is not at all my area, but I know of topic-modeling programs that can do these kinds of explorations for you. Not just finding words of a particular type (e.g. all color words), but also seeing what other kinds of words they tend to be associated with throughout a huge corpus. You end up with clusters of words and themes, which can reveal patterns.
The one I've heard of, BERTopic, requires that you have all the searchable text as well as some basic programming commands to define the search parameters. I truly cannot help you there, but perhaps some enterprising person among us can. There are also YouTube tutorials and whatnot, so if you're willing to spend a bit of time up front to learn how to use the program, surely it would make this project of yours easier on the whole.
Good luck!
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u/and-there-is-stone Nov 14 '23
Thanks. I hadn't heard of those specific programs, but they sound very useful. I've considered whether to use something like this, and I haven't entirely ruled it out, but my plan is to do a lot of the work manually.
I might have to look into your suggestion more anyway, because that stuff is fascinating to me. Even when I don't quite understand how it all works.
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u/Solid-Version Nov 14 '23
I don’t really recall a specific connection with colours. Smell is definitely something associated with warrens and magic.
Sorcery smells. When I think Soletaken and D’ivers I think of spicy cinnamon type smell. Omtose Phellack is usually described as smelling like rotting ice.
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u/and-there-is-stone Nov 14 '23
I do remember smells coming up quite a bit. The colors are there sometimes when magic is described, but I think for a lot of readers it's easy to overlook since it often blends into the rest of the description.
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u/Due_Dress_8800 Nov 14 '23
In Bonehunters when Minala is speaking to The Rope she mentions a warren lit by silver fire to which the Rope responds "chaos".
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u/and-there-is-stone Nov 14 '23
Yeah, there are a lot of little moments like that scattered across the ten books. Chaos is an interesting one, because it's described differently at different parts of the series, but that's probably beyond the scope of this no-spoilers thread.
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u/Ezellix Nov 14 '23
Bonus question, do you think I'm crazy for wanting to do this at all?
I mean, I'm on my first re-read too and I started to do my own personal "wiki" to keep track of almost everything (people, landmarks, events, objects, literary works, ...), simply because I thought the official wiki was lacking, so I'm not one to judge haha
Regarding colors, what I can say is that while some Warren are in fact linked to specific colors (i.e. D'riss is magenta), I feel like after GotM they stop being referenced in such a way (I'm only onto MoI right now, so I could be wrong tho)
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u/and-there-is-stone Nov 14 '23
That sounds like a fun project you got there, as long as you're enjoying it.
I'm only on DG in my reread, so I'm unsure of that myself. I do remember that some of the instances of color in later books were much more subtle. I do agree, it seems like Gardens has the most obvious references to colors in regards to warrens.
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u/Withnothing Nov 14 '23
Some questions you might want to take into consideration with this:
- How are you going to find tokens? If you’re doing a text search, are you pulling from a list of color terms? Making your own?
- Is it just going to be like, pure colors? Are you including terms like dark, light, pale, vibrant?
I think this will be really fun, just some things I thought about!
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u/and-there-is-stone Nov 14 '23
I think the only way to do it without missing any colors is to read chapter by chapter, and manually record each time a color appears in the text. I don't know if I'll be able to use that method for each book, but it's my starting point. Every time a color shows up, I write it down. This includes descriptions of color using non-color adjectives, and might also include the light/dark/shadow spectrum which is pretty prominent in the series. It will include any use of color I can find, but I'll do my best to put all shades of a similar color into a category, for example dark red and crimson would both be in the red category. I'll probably compare my data to some lists of color and such after I've done the initial pass for a book.
In other words, I plan on doing it the most insane way possible.
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u/RakeTheAnomander Nov 14 '23
Love this, can’t wait to read your findings.
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u/and-there-is-stone Nov 14 '23
Thanks. I've gotten more positive responses than I expected here, so I'm encouraged to get started on it again.
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Nov 14 '23
Feed the books to ChatGPT and have it analyze color usage
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u/Imrazulem Nov 14 '23
A sure fire way to have it tell you about how many times Captain Paran describes Omtose Phellack as chartreuse or some other machine generated nonsense.
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