Blue-Red

BLUE VS. RED

Blue believes in the power of intellect. Improving oneself requires mental fortitude. You need to be mindful, focused, careful, and patient. Each step must be meticulously managed to ensure that you are always advancing in the right direction toward your ultimate goal. Listen to your head, for it will always guide you down the correct path.

Red believes in the power of emotion. Your body speaks to you, and it's crucial that you not only listen but act spontaneously and with passion. The key to happiness is listening to your gut and never having to live with the regret of not chasing your dreams. Follow your heart, for it will always guide you down the correct path.

In short, this is the classic battle of the head versus the heart. Do you listen to your intellect or your emotions? Are you guided by what you think or how you feel? Should you act with caution or abandon? Which will guarantee more happiness: carefully executed logic or passionately followed impulses?

To blue, this is an issue of taking the time to get the details of your life correct. Blue thinks of red as needlessly brash and dangerously negligent. Blue sees this conflict as carefulness versus recklessness.

To red, this is an issue of understanding and acting on the things that matter most to you. Red thinks of blue as cold and detached. Red sees this conflict as passion versus indifference.

At its core, this conflict is about how we live our lives.

Intellect vs. Emotion

Blue embraces intellect, but red embraces emotion. Blue believes that the key to victory is knowledge. Red believes the key to victory is passion. Blue thinks before it acts; red just acts.

Thought vs. Action (Cold vs. Hot)

Blue is about the coolness that comes with the distance of thought; red is about the heat that accompanies the fury of action. Blue plots. Red acts. Blue plans. Red smashes. Blue anticipates. Red destroys.

Caution vs. Impulsiveness

Blue believes that mistakes come from rushing. Red believes that mistakes come from not listening to your gut. Blue sits and studies; red charges and kills. Blue thinks red is dangerous and must be controlled, whereas red thinks blue is threatening and must be destroyed.

What do the two colors have in common?

To understand what two enemy colors have in common, we always begin by examining the core conflict between them. For Red and Blue, it's a classic conflict: emotion vs. intellect (a.k.a. the head vs. the heart, thinking vs. feeling, speculative vs. intuitive, the mind vs. the gut). On one side we have Red. Red is the color of impulse. It follows its heart. It does what feels right. It lets its emotions be its guide. Blue, on the other hand, is the color of the intellect. Blue likes to think. A lot. About everything. Blue makes its decisions on logic and forethought. Their styles could not be more different. Red acts impulsively in the moment. Blue waits until it has examined every side of the issue before it gets involved. Red comes out swinging. Blue avoids conflict, if it can. Red acts. Blue reacts. Red is focused on the present. Blue is focused on the future. Each color acts in a way that is the antithesis of the other.

So how does a guild encompass both sides? Easy. By taking aspects of each. Red/Blue is a thinking guild, but unlike other guilds with a Blue element, Red/Blue embraces the tools of emotion. They think, but they think passionately. Their emotion allows them to leap to ideas and thoughts that their logical cousins would never encounter. They find rationality in the heart of irrationality. They make intuitive leaps. They slay sacred cows. They connect things that no one else would think to connect. In short, they embrace creativity.

You see, creativity mixes elements of logic and emotion. It finds connections in things that most people wouldn't have given a second look. But Red/Blue lives to find those connections. To them, life is about seeking knowledge and freedom. And how better than by examining the knowledge that no one else will explore. Thinking things that no one else would dare think. They search for the knowledge that cannot rationally be discovered.

In addition, the two colors find that they have some similar tools. For example, both colors enjoy messing with the opponent. Blue tends to do it more out of trickiness while Red does it out of playfulness, but in the end, Blue and Red are the two colors that most mess with other players' spells. Red/Blue is tricky/playful and creative. As you will see, this is a potent combination.

How do the two colors differ? What is the guild's internal conflict?

Based on their key conflict, the two colors seek opposite things. Red is focused on following where its emotions can lead, while Blue wants to follow its intellect. Red wants to feel and experience things. Blue wants to learn and understand them.

The internal conflict that arises from this is one of split focus. The Red half of Red/Blue is obsessed with the exploration of the irrational itself. The Blue half wants to make sense of that irrationality. The Red side will never focus on any one task and keep extrapolating forever. The Blue side will latch onto one issue and never move on to the next.

This disconnect makes Red/Blue appear crazy to any outsider. You can't count on them to be rational, yet you can't count on them to be irrational. They randomly (at least to an outsider) seem to switch back and forth between irrationality and rationality. On second thought, do they appear crazy or are they crazy? No one will ever know.

What does the guild care about? What is its end goal? What means does the guild use to achieve these ends?

To understand the guild's goals, let's look at the goals of each of the colors. Red seeks freedom. Red is all about Red doing whatever it wants. Red follows its heart wherever that might lead it. Blue seeks knowledge. Blue's solution to life is to completely understand it. With knowledge, as the saying goes, comes power. This means that Red/Blue seeks out knowledge, but in a manner that follows one's heart. Rather than a systematic approach, Red/Blue seeks to learn by jumping around from issue to issue. By doing so, they believe that they will stumble across important information that could not be found by any other approach.

The most interesting thing about how Red/Blue functions is that each individual finds his own path. Every Red/Blue mage is guided by a combination of his own emotions and his own thought process. The jumps, the leaps, the juxtapositions that are made by each one are unique to that mage. That said, as Red/Blue prizes this way of thinking, they do enjoy interacting with other members of the guild. This doesn't mean that two Blue/Red mages will walk away with the same conclusions, but they enjoy the interaction nonetheless.

The tools that Red/Blue uses most are impulse and analysis. The impulse to connect two unlikely things and the analysis to find a connection between the two. By interchanging between these two opposite ends of the spectrum, Red/Blue travels a path that cannot be seen (or most of the time understood) by anyone else.

What does the guild despise? What negatively drives the guild?

To understand what an enemy color pair despises, you need to look at the enemies of the two colors and find out what those two have in common. Red's other enemy is White. Blue's other enemy is Green. What do White and Green have in common? Community, a respect for tradition, and a desire to keep the status quo. Red/Blue will have none of that. With an emphasis on how it thinks and how it feels, Red/Blue is very focused on the individual. Red/Blue is not interested in repeating the past, but instead focused on forging the future. And the status quo is the last thing Red/Blue wants to maintain.

Red/Blue is about change. Red/Blue is constantly reinventing itself and its environment. Thus, anything that Red/Blue sees as barring its path to discovery is a nuisance. If it blocks long enough, it becomes an enemy. Red/Blue wants to discover and to explore. It doesn't want boundaries or limitations, but if need be, boundaries can be broken and limitations can be overcome. Forcefully, if necessary.

What is the color's greatest strength and biggest weakness?

Red/Blue's greatest strength is its ability to solve problems. With numerous tools in its arsenal, Red/Blue is set up to find answers. Even to the questions that it never asked.

Red/Blue's greatest weakness is its lack of focus. Red/Blue gets so caught up jumping around from idea to idea that often it is hard to get Red/Blue to stop from moving onto the “next big thing”. This makes Red/Blue very unreliable. In addition, because Red/Blue doesn't censor its areas of discovery, it has the potential to get involved with some pretty dangerous forces.

Passionate Thinkers

Finally, a few pop culture references to add the dash of controversy that I enjoy in many of my columns:

Doc Brown (from Back to the Future) - Inventors in general (and the absent-minded professor archetype in particular) fall into the Red/Blue camp. Doc Brown shows all the signs of Red/Blue. He's a thinker and a scientist, yet highly prone to emotional outbursts. His greatest invention, the time flux capacitor, was the result of a burst of impulse.

Indiana Jones - Indiana Jones is an interesting mix. He's an archeologist because he clearly has a quest for knowledge, yet he has a great passion for what he does. Even more so, he makes many decisions based on emotion. It is this combination of a desire to learn with a need to do things his way that lands him in the Red/Blue camp.

Fred (from Angel) - Another example I wanted was a passionate thinker. My love of all things Buffy led me to the character of Fred from the Buffy spinoff Angel. Fred is a brainy girl who is obsessed with science. Yet she wears her emotions on her sleeve. She thrives on knowledge yet is incapable of separating her brain from her heart.

Dr. Seuss - Yeah, yeah, I know I tend to stick to fictional characters, but I like to think of Dr. Seuss as Theodor Geisel's alter ego. I'm not sure if I could come up with an example of a real person that more embodied the mixing of head and heart. Dr. Seuss's writing is very thoughtful and concise, yet also passionate and impulsive. In each and every book, you can see how much he thought about the topic as well as how much he felt about it. So I'd be remiss talking about Red/Blue without a nod to Sam-I-Am's papa.