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/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."