#given their history with fodlan and how they behave in hopes

[themoomoorn]

With this nifty color analysis in place, how would you interpret Byleth, Ashen Demon and villain(ess) of a thousand mercenaries' nightmares, having a soft pink as their secondary color? It does apply a bit more to the female, but other than their promotion (Which has divine/royal purple/gold/white as the main combo), all of their options include pink!

And one nifty aspect about Claude that I will always be convinced is a happy accident is that yellow and green are both his colors - enhanced by the fact that green appears to be Almyra's representative/national color. He's heroic when he embraces both colors (even though Barbarossa's outfit is mostly brown and gold) and more villainous when he's sliding towards one...hm hm hmm...

For a second, let's look at how Houses/Hopes uses colour and equipment to foreshadow what each characters role is in the game.

Byleth is the Ashen Demon, and checking around in the Japanese text this is meant to be more of a grey character. So, somewhere between black and white. They have black armor initially, but gain white when they obtain their Enlightened One class after fusing with Sothis. Black and White right there, but there's more. They lose the white (Enlightened One powers) if they fight alongside Edelgard, leader of the Black Eagle Strike Force, against Rhea, whose title is the White One in Japanese, undoing their character arc and returning to how they were at the beginning of the game.

That's cool. We also see Red associated with Edelgard, a colour that the series uses to denote enemies, with her little cape and the names of her routes (though Safflower was done this in relation to the lyrics of Edge of Dawn). Dimitri, while he has black armor after the timeskip, has a blue cap (a heroic colour in the franchise) and his Great Lord design drops the black armor for a whiter set. Considering it's used at the end of Flower, where his mental problems didn't drive him, and at the end of Moon, where he becomes the Hero, the design is meant to show he's the good guy here.

Claude is associated with gold/yellow, usually used for a third enemy faction on a map. This works with his outsider status, but joining the Deer in Houses results in the route being labelled as Verdant. It's green, an ally color, while the House keeps it's association with yellow in Hopes, where Claude becomes a villain in his own right. But considering Claude leaves Fodlan in Byleth's hands and returns to Almyra, it's almost like Almyra is meant to be the true third faction.

We also see their weapons relating to the weapons triangle. Byleth has a sword and beats Edelgard's axe in SS while they're implied to lose their sword at the end of Flower, replacing it with the Sword of Seiros. Sword can no longer beat axe. Edelgard's axe beats Dimitri's lance unless he has help from Byleth, while Dimitri's win sees him as King with Byleth being his ally. We get something similar with Claude's bow, it's outside the triangle and would be at a disadvantage if he was attacked directly. He needs an ally to back up. Likewise, the series has used swords as the heroic weapon often enough while axes were originally enemy only as they weren't seen as heroic.

We put this together and we end up with something like this. Grey/Silver + Sword = Good, Blue + Lance = Good, Bow + Green = Good Ally, Bow + Yellow = Bad Enemy, Red + Axe = Bad.

Silver can also represent the design philosophy of the game. It's Byleth's route, the one most materials push as happening, but you can't save everyone. No matter how much you want to march with Dimitri, join Claude, or get Edelgard to wake the fuck up and see reality, you can't. You can get a good ending, but not a perfect ending where everyone lives. And considering the one war phase that is associated with gold is a villain route, a route that is the antithesis of Wind, the idea of a “Golden Route” is presented as a bad thing because it goes against what Houses was doing.