Musing Museum

Well, the most important thing to know about visual design (in this context) is that the eye is drawn to contrast, particularly color contrast. Color contrast can take three primary forms: light/dark, saturation (intensity), and hue (placement on the spectrum/color wheel). Congratulations, you now know 90% of color theory.

Pip has a very high-contrast color design: a light, intense yellow-green and black. Obviously a relatively light color is going to contrast strongly with black, but another color theory thing is that the closer a color gets to white or black, the less saturated it becomes. (In general. There's some nuance to this.) For science-y reasons I don't know in depth, this kind of yellow-green is also more high contrast with black than an equally light/saturated red or blue would be. Basically, Pip inherently has both high light/dark contrast and high saturation contrast.

Furthermore, the Katolis scenes in general are done in very warm colors (reds, oranges, and yellows), both to establish a color association and to contrast with the cool colors (greens, blues, and purples) of the Moonshadow elf forest scenes:

There are exceptions, of course: the high mage's office and secret dungeon are overall cool-colored, which is fun. Harrow's scenes, however, trend toward warm. Harrow himself is also warm-colored, with his primary color being red. So it's a little strange that Pip acts as such a strong pop of a cool color in those scenes. A red color scheme* would associate him more with Harrow and Katolis, but... well, look at how these just hit different:

Not only is green a cool color (though color temperature is very relative, and Pip's yellow-green is on the warmer end of green), red and green specifically are complementary colors: they are at opposite points on the color wheel, meaning they have very high hue contrast. Combined with Pip's inherent high-contrast design, we have a situation where he attracts a lot of visual attention in any scene where he appears, particularly with Harrow. We notice Pip, and we are meant to notice Pip, for reasons that become clear 59 episodes later.

But there are other important reasons for Pip to be green, related to both overall and contextual color associations. Fortunately, one of my favorite YouTubers just did a video about green:

(She's fantastic, by the way. I love her. I have played exactly 1.25 Persona games and have zero (0) investment in the series, but I watch all her content with utter delight.)

The gist of it is that green is a color with profoundly dualistic associations: it can strongly reference both the natural and the unnatural. Green is growth, green is nourishment, green is paradise, green is life. At the same time, green is poison, green is sickness, green is (digital) technology, green is the slow but persistent death of the natural.

Pip's black-and-green leans much more to the "unnatural" side of that dichotomy. Compare with Rayla, the main "green" character:

Rayla is entirely cool greens, and her green and black (actually a very dark blue, compared to Pip's very dark brown) is relatively low-contrast. I'll definitely do a Rayla design analysis at some point, because she's really cool. (As in awesome, not color temperature. But also color temperature.)

Pip's vibrant yellow-green is a color we see very rarely in the series, particularly in Arc 1, but we do see it. And when we see it... boy, do we see it:

Lore-wise, we think of dark magic as purple... but in Arc 1, it gets a lot of that "unnatural" green. Pip is essentially done up in the secondary color scheme of dark magic. I wonder why.

Along those same lines, Pip's design has a couple other interesting features:

First, the slit pupil eyes. There is a bird species with vertical slit pupils like that, but it's an extreme outlier—slit pupils are just not a useful adaptation for the ways birds use vision. This means that they are a very deliberate design choice for Pip. Slit pupils generally evoke cats... or snakes. (I actually think of snakes, first. I actually forgot cats have them until I was looking up whether any birds do.)

Needless to say, there are some strong associations between dark magic and snakes, as seen above. Also this, obviously:

I assume they didn't make the soulfang green because it would be a little too on-the-nose. They do have a green version in the artbook, and it's honestly pretty meh:

Ultimately I think they made a great choice in going with the design that adds the stripe of pink on the head, evoking the snake's mouth/tongue even when you can't directly see it. (That's not really related, but I think it's very cool and wanted to point it out. Back to Pip.)

Secondly, there's the double-oval shape on Pip's crest. Given we just looked at slit pupils, you could call this an eye, or just straight-up point out that it's rather... yonic. Not going to go too deep on that, except to point out its similarity to another rather yonic design:

However, what it really resembles is the same crest/forehead marking on another black-and-brightly-colored "creature":

So to recap: Pip's design is associated with dark magic in like... at least three distinct ways. Pip is ultimately representative of Harrow's relationship with dark magic, which has begun to haunt him throughout s1e2/s1e3. A relationship that was once positive or indulgent, but he now (as death closes in) feels trapped by.

Hmmmmm. Good question.

So yeah, put this in the "Hindsight is 20/20" column opposite my previous "no, they've been committed to the Bird!Harrow thing the entire time" essay.

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*There's also a possible reason for Pip to not be red, specifically, which is the shadowhawk arrow. In the artbook, they describe the shadowhawk arrow's visual effect as having to be "appropriately sinister, but visually distinct from dark magic," which... I don't know that they were super successful with that in the context of Arc 1, but given everything we later know about the Blood Moon and such, it's not completely out of line with Moon magic.

That being said, the visual similarity between the shadowhawk and Pip is definitely intentional, because they're maniacs. Also I guess technically it means they probably didn't need to craft an entire separate "bird" model and animation rig from scratch.