Antigreen - Blog Posts
thanks for responding to my ask! i'd be interested in moodboards for Antigreen, i'd love to find out more about other inspirations for it. (also, is Calliope's last name an intentional reference to mondegreens?)
Alright fasten your iridescent seatbelts because I'm about to ~yap~ about Antigreen (AO3)
First up: what's in a title? Food (flavor) colouring, for one:
Quarks are the fundamental building blocks of matter, and there's six flavors: up, down, charm, strange, top (formerly truth), and bottom (formerly beauty). They all carry colour charge, which can be red, green, or blue, or for antiquarks their opposites: antired (cyan), antigreen (magenta), antiblue (yellow). The core six in AG (Callie, Ettie, Sawyer, Annette, Erika, Michael) all get a color and a quark each. (Which is which is left as an exercise to the reader lol)
Magenta is most interesting to me because it's not a spectral color: it's the only one of the six that's not monochromatic, or 'real', it's an illusion we perceive when something has high amounts of both red and blue light.
The visible spectrum: you won't find pink here!
That's the kind of dichotomy I was going for with 'Antigreen': the word evokes both greenness (the Earth, growth, but also stagnation, a toxic color that often meant death ) and antigreenness (pink, irreality, something unnatural and alien). It's the perfect word to marry the two together; it represents CalliEttie themselves to me!
Pink/magenta also has a history of being used to represent the titular Colour Out of Space, one of Lovecraft's better short stories, about an unnatural alien hue that arrives on Earth. It's used this way in a few adaptations, below which is a gif from the 2019 film version:
(The Colour Out of Space, 2019, IMDB)
Pink is used for various eldritch stuff in other media too, once you notice it once you kinda start to see it everywhere, beware...
The 2019 Colour is good, but I honestly think Annihilation (2018) is a better expression of similar ideas. It concerns a group of women investigating a meteorite that's landed at a lighthouse and is slowly warping the surrounding area:
(Annihilation, 2018, IMDB)
Shit does indeed get warped as fuck; I recommend.
Annihilation has some really great examples of the Gothic sublime . Think glimpsing a tidal wave, staring up at a mountain, or being on the edge of a black hole. Something so great and terrible that it overwhelms the senses, the kind of awful beauty that brings tears to your eye, and can't be easily described in words.
That's what cosmic horror's all about! imo, anyway: Antigreen is about what happens when a(sapphic)n earthly and unearthly realm meet, and I've hopefully made Esther seem suitably sublime.
Anyway that's the inspo behind the title, and why Esther's strongly associated with the color pink (of my made-up/constructed color names, nemaphlox would be the applicable one I guess).
I'd leave it here for now, with plans to do another of these for Callie and Ettie, but I have to also answer your question: (remember that? It was so long ago and so many pixels above, sorry)
> Is Calliope's last name an intentional reference to mondegreens?
Yep, again, spot on! A mondegreen is the English term for misheard lyrics, and is autological: it describes itself. I swapped the last two letters, making Mondegrene, for a few reasons:
- obscures the origin to make a slightly more plausible surname
- enables various bad French calembours like mond de grené ("grainy world", fitting for a little speck like Calliope). Disclaimer: I rather suck at French
- also similar to French grenade (pomegranate), a fruit with very gay associations
Lastly (I promise!) I'll link the cover art I had made with the ambigram I designed. The swirls are intended to evoke tracks in particle-detecting cloud chambers!
Thanks for putting up with this~ I will do more of these if people enjoy them!