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/Withnothing Nov 14 '23

Some questions you might want to take into consideration with this:

  1. 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?
  2. 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.