potofsoup:

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. 

heeroluva also made a cool point:

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:

whiteraven1606:

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.

rosemcphee

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.

hegexo

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!

Yay awesome colorblind artists!

bisteverogers:

i love that when romance is off the table, steve ‘this car ride where i show peggy all the alleys i was beat up in is the longest conversation i’ve had with a woman’ rogers actually has no problem being around women.

there’s peggy, of course, that connection that transcends his death and her memory. but there’s also nat. after their introduction in the avengers, we go from ‘there’s a chance you might be in the wrong business’ to ‘she would follow steve to the ends of the earth if he asked her to’ in the run-up to infinity war; she willingly considers steve a friend and sees him as a reason to have faith in the good of humanity again. yes, they fight well together, and yes, they work well together: but i think they also serve to humanise one another, steve who learns that not everyone can be trusted and natasha who learns that sometimes all it takes is a little trust.

you have maria, who goes from ‘okay, cap’ to ‘but, steve–’ when she realises that he intends to go down with the helicarriers. when it counted, she knew him as steve, not as captain america. did the two of them snark at one another at the triskelion? did they sometimes take their lunch together? when did she meet steve, and not cap? later on, in age of ultron, she’s seen wearing his leather jacket in the party scene. it may have been partially out of politeness, but at the same time, she could’ve declined, or asked anyone else; and i think her choosing neither of those options is a sign of how comfortable maria’s become with him and around the team.

there’s sharon, whose relationship with steve has incredibly polarising in the mcu; but, if you take the romance out of it, sharon is, on her own merits, strong and competent and independent, and damn good at her job. she’s used as a mouthpiece and a plot device in civil war, which is unfortunate and lazy, but sharon as we saw her in winter soldier also stands up to injustice; also stands up to bullies; believes in what is right and what is moral and believes in doing good. sharon didn’t want to be seen as just peggy carter’s niece, she wanted to be seen for herself, her abilities: and who can identify with that better than steve, who, at this point, is beginning to shirk away from captain america?

and then steve meets wanda, both of their strengths the product of german experimentation that they endured in order to fight a war that neither of them wanted, steve on one side of the coin and wanda on the other. steve empathises with how lost she is, how young she is, with how much she has given up, with what has been taken from her: he’s been there, too. and if he and natasha are complements of one another through their differences, what’s to stop him and wanda from being mirrors of one another in their sameness? it was important for captain america to be the one to comfort the scarlet witch after lagos as team leader; but it was more meaningful for steve to be there for wanda – which made it that much more significant that the offer to take vision to wakanda came from steve and not from cap.

like – talking about steve and bucky or steve and sam or steve and thor? all valid! all good! i enjoy reading that meta, too. i just wish people would also talk more about steve’s relationships with the women in his life, because he has such great and interesting dynamics with them, not least because he can understand, to some extent, what it feels like to be seen as less than, or not as important, or weak, or incapable.