So I’ve been seeing a lot of colorblindness stories and a few questions as a result of the comic and the ficlet. Of course, it’s just my luck that I’m going to be out of town on various company retreats starting tomorrow morning, so I won’t be able to properly do a meta/resource post as I’d like. (I’ll probably update this post later in the week when I have more time.)
Firstly: I’m not an expert on color blindness. I basically decided that Steve was red-green colorblind because that’s the most common kind, and because pre-serum Steve seemed to dress in mostly greens and browns, which is probably how he saw the world. As far as I know, there’s no MCU canon to support exactly what kind of color-blindness, so have fun picking! Of course, once he got the serum, he could see color (someone was confused about why Steve could see Peggy’s red dress in the ficlet, and the answer is because this is post-serum Steve.)
Secondly, can we talk about how Bucky (and really any human being) would look different to Steve?
The above is a hastily Photoshopped image approximation. (I tried to look for a more official image converter but didn’t turn up any in the 15 minutes of poking around.) I really want fics wherein post-serum Steve couldn’t stop stealing glances at Bucky because Bucky just glows.
I just realized that Steve would have had to learn color. Like the knew what color some things were supposed to be, but it didn’t mean anything to him, and suddenly he’s inundated by a world that’s both familiar and foreign. Like a stop sign is supposed to be red, but if he was looking at something else that was red would he recognize right away that something else was red or would it take his brain a while to make the connections? And what about different shades of various colors. I can’t even imagine.
Thirdly, people have been commenting with cool people/artists dealing with colorblindness stories! So I’ve decided to collect them:
My father is red/green and yellow/blue/brown colorblind and he says his mother said he was the hardest person to teach colors. How he sees every color depends on lighting conditions, his energy level, and how mixed the color is with another color. He needs a normal sighted person for matching colors. When I was a child one of my first jobs in our printing shop (yes, he was a printer for over 50 years) was to match colors to the ink book swatches. Then he’d take the code from that to get the parts per recipe from the mixing book. He’d mix the color, I’d come say if it needed more of whatever color, he’d do the final mix, I’d say yah or nay, and he’d put it on the press.
These days describing car colors to him is really hard. Every newer car has a weird undertone of another color that changes how he sees the main color. He guesses at what color they are and he is wrong about 90% of the time.
One of my coworkers is colourblind and he hates it when people try to quiz him with “what colour is this?” or “what colour does this look like?” questions because he CAN see colours, it’s not all black and white. They’re just different colours, or with less variations than the colours people with full colour vision see.
He sees an apple, he sees the colour red, he knows they’re the same colour because they still look the same. They might not be the same red that I see, but it’s still the same colour. He might not be able to tell if a t-shirt is blue or purple because they’re similar shades, but the primary colours are all clearly distinguishable from each other.
This is amazing, but it should be noted that there are several versions of being color blind. The most typical one from what I understand is protanopia aka red-green color blindness, there is also tritanopia aka blue-yellow color blindness and deuteranopia aka red-green-yollow color blindness. Within these types you also have different levels of severity.
Vincent van Gogh is actually suspected to have been color blind* Here is a fantastic post about it!
the1timetraveller 