As you'll have seen from my latest Ponyfic Roundup, I read BillyColt's story This Nearly Was Mine recently. Vinyl Scratch is a major character in this fic, and early in the story she is described as "very pale yellow". Although I didn't note that in the review, it seemed an odd choice to me, and indeed several Fimfiction commenters brought it up, saying she wasn't yellow.
In an idle moment, I poked about a bit online, and on Vinyl's mlp.fandom.com page I found this:
a layout artist on the show noted that the character model's coat color is actually a very pale yellow, specifically the 24-bit hex triplet #FEFDE7.[3]
The citation given is to a locally archived copy of a discussion from way back in April 2011 from the old Allspark forums (slow-loading PDF) featuring a poster called Nayuki who was a layout artist on Friendship is Magic. Another forum member asks Nayuki, "I've heard [Vinyl] was really supposed to be a kind of very pale yellow or off-white. Is that true?" To which the reply is:
Short answer: Yes
Long answer: Yes, she's off-white
Awesome answer: #FEFDE7
Look up #FEFDE7 on various quickly Googleable sites and you get a variety of text interpretations or none at all. These include yellowish white, cosmic latte (I love that one!) and light grayish yellow. I'm not qualified to say which is right, or how approximate those text names may be, so I'll stick with the actual show staffer's description of "off-white".
Still, it does seem Vinyl's coat colour description could be a little less clear-cut than "not yellow in any way, don't be silly", which is what I would have thought earlier.
Off-white can mean so many things! People have come up with hundreds of names, trying to capture the nearly infinite variety of hue and saturation values that are only a step away from pure white, as well as general descriptors like cool-white and warm-white. (Rarity and Celestia, respectively.) "The mare with the FEFDE7 coat," sounds silly. It's obviously jaundice-white!
ReplyDeleteAs the Beatles so memorably put it:
Delete"Somepony calls you, you answer quite slowly,
The mare with the FEFDE7 coat."
please write that XD
DeleteXD Now, I desperately want a complete pony filk of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds!
DeleteI mean, it already has the words "horse" and "marshmallow" in the same line, no less, so clearly it's about Vinyl's doomed romance with Rarity...
Delete*jawdrop* It all makes sense now!!! I mean... "Diamonds!"
DeleteOh, and FEFDE7 can be pronounced fef-de-et, so it will scan...
DeleteWait... ka-li-de-scope... so it should be ef-eef-de-et?
DeletePicture yourself in a boutique forever,
DeleteYour tangerine dress with the marmalade throat,
Somepony calls you, you answer quite slowly,
A mare with ef-eef-de-et coat...
(Against my memory, turns out it's "A" at the end of the first verse of the original. "The" only comes in the others.)
Ooh, that's good! It could work with the "the" if it was fef-de-et.
DeleteHow to spell that so it would look like a word that's logical prononciation would match... Feffdiette, maybe? "The mare with the feffdiette coat."
(Why am I so excited by this??? XD)
We now need a fic where Vinyl is constantly referred to as "the cosmic latte unicorn". :P
ReplyDeleteAnd wow, I actually worked out how to make signing into Blogger for comments work for a change.
DeleteAaaaand now I want to create an OC unicorn with an exact FFF8E7 coat!
Deleteoh! :O yeah, I knew that, though of course it wasn't apparent till people dug into stuff at some point along the ride
ReplyDeleteI wasn't around the fandom in 2011, though I do remember the Allspark forums, so I think it was news to me. :)
DeleteI have a lot to say about this. It's hard to notice she isn't white until you see her compared to an actual white, and then she does look yellowish. I saw the same thing of an animator saying what color code she was, and that it's a pale yellow. I'm colorblind, but I can mostly see yellow fine. Still, I'm in the habit of taking an official word like that and running with it since I tend not to be able to tell for myself. So when I entered "Being the Lesser Evil" in a write-off, I also called her very pale yellow. I got mocked for it in the write-off event comments by multiple people, I got mocked for it in the write-off Discord, I had a user send me a link to the wikipedia page for "off-white" (which claims some shades that are up to 80% yellow are off-white!). I compromised and called it "a very pale yellow, almost white" on revision, but man. People need to chill.
ReplyDeleteBut if they did, where would we get all of our nerdrage fights?
DeletePasco Did Nothing Wrong 2024 campaign :C
DeleteInteresting you assume I meant you...
DeleteIf you use sweeping statements ("mocked" twice, "criticized" never), shouldn't you at least look where you're sweeping? I don't like being lumped in with Internet trolls as if my contributions matter less.
DeleteAll right, not necessarily "Internet trolls", but being lumped in as another unreasonable "mocker" who "needs to chill" isn't much better.
DeleteADDITIONAL: Did one of my comments vanish just now? I could have sworn I posted one that didn't show up when I refreshed the page.
FWIW I haven't deleted anything. If something's gone, it may be Blogger's fault but it ain't mine.
DeleteFair enough. Then again, I might have done something daft, like not press the send button hard enough without noticing. It happens.
DeletePoint is, Logan did an article about the topic without judging what was correct, and I told him it could be contentious, also without judging what was correct. If you want to reprise an old internet argument, then let's please do so on the write-off site rather than cut-and-pasting it wholesale here.
DeleteAlso, what's with the "selective memory"? I deliberately didn't cite any examples, so I don't see how you think I'm cherry-picking. I'm speaking to being felt mocked, particularly in the Discord chat. You think I can't accurately remember how I felt then? That's a strange accusation to make. It's also not something you get to decide. I wasn't even mad about it, more disappointed, since I'd already mostly disengaged from the write-offs by then, so it seemed like a good example of how these seemingly innocuous topics can incite, as iisaw put it, nerdrage. I didn't think it'd be quite this good an example, though.
So yeah. People need to chill. Me and Blue Chameleon both, apparently.
All right, not "Internet trolls" necessarily, but portrayed-as-unreasonable "mockers" who "need to chill" isn't a much better group to be lumped in with.
ReplyDelete