Colour in Investiture

[Honorless he/him]

https://coppermind.net/wiki/Investiture#Color_in_Investiture

The page mentions that "color is involved with the Metallic Arts in some unknown way" while citing this WoB:

Quote

Questioner

With Soulcasting, we know what can be Soulcast based on the color of the gem. Does-- When Awakening, say you have emerald, green, Pulp. If you were Awakening straw or some other form of plant matter, if you used a source of green for the color, would it be, say, more efficient than using red?

Brandon Sanderson

So I haven't built that into the magic system yet. Part of me feels like I should have. But I did not. I want color to be relevant to each of the cosmere magics. It's kind of an essential part of it, and it's part of where we stray more into the magical sense. Like, in my books we treat magic scientifically but they're still magic. And it was a thing when I was building Stormlight, I'm like, "So the difference between these two gemstones is a matter of a slight impurity and chemically they are 99% the same thing. Am I actually going to have them do different things or not?" And my judgement call was yes, because I want color to be relevant in the cosmere.  But by that point, when I was really getting that magic system to work, I had already written Warbreaker. And I had known that I wanted color to start being a big part. I'd already written Mistborn where I worked in color in different ways

But I didn't work that into the Warbreaker magic. I felt like it already had enough restrictions. I would say my worry about the Warbreaker magic is the color feels tacked on. Like, the magic could work without it, narratively, so why is it there? And that's the question I asked myself while I was building; that's the question I continue to ask myself when I continue to work on-- for that magic system, to make sure it works for me. But my instincts say adding restrictions like that, particularly when they weren't covered in the first book, feels like the wrong way to go. It'd be like retconning the magic. It's something I considered.

Orem signing (March 10, 2018)

I don't think it confirms colour as a part of the Metallic Arts, only part of magic that we see in Mistborn and as such could be referring to Shardic colours or Corrupted red Investiture.

[Eternal Khol he/him]

Yeah. Thats how i interpreted it too.

referring to how we saw Ruin's color being black and Preservation's being white. That kinda being the intro and "foreshadowing" of color being relevant to Investiture and Shards

Edited December 7, 2020 by Eternal Khol

[Starwatcher]

Yeah, I would agree that WoB doesn't establish that color is involved in the Metallic Arts and have removed that section. Thanks for pointing this out!

[Knight of Iron she/they]

I mean, maybe? This is probably where the connection was drawn.

Quote

Brandon Sanderson

So I haven't built that into the magic system yet. Part of me feels like I should have. But I did not. I want color to be relevant to each of the cosmere magics. It's kind of an essential part of it, and it's part of where we stray more into the magical sense. Like, in my books we treat magic scientifically but they're still magic. And it was a thing when I was building Stormlight, I'm like, "So the difference between these two gemstones is a matter of a slight impurity and chemically they are 99% the same thing. Am I actually going to have them do different things or not?" And my judgement call was yes, because I want color to be relevant in the cosmere.  But by that point, when I was really getting that magic system to work, I had already written Warbreaker. And I had known that I wanted color to start being a big part. I'd already written Mistborn where I worked in color in different ways.

 

Edited December 8, 2020 by Ookla the Knight

[basement_boi he/him]

On 12/7/2020 at 2:30 AM, Eternal Khol said:

Yeah. Thats how i interpreted it too.

referring to how we saw Ruin's color being black and Preservation's being white. That kinda being the intro and "foreshadowing" of color being relevant to Investiture and Shards

So, Ruin’s “mist” was black, right? I think, in this case, rather than color affecting the magic, the Shard of origin actually affects the color. I don’t think that for everything, just for this case.