#neverhood

White: purity, forgiveness, eternity White is the highest virtue on the Neverhood. It is associated with good, as in having good faith (trusting transgressions were made in error and not in malice) or a good nature (being ready to let go of negative emotions and grudges). White is thinking in the long term, not poisoning the well, not creating any more evil than you have to. White makes eternal life possible, although outsiders commonly confuse it with naivete and childlike outlook.

Red: passion, games, novelty Red is the virtue of keeping oneself and one’s friends entertained. Red stands for everything new and exciting. It spurs Hoodians to refine old games and invent new ones, and it leads their hand to create ever more sophisticated works of art. Red is what makes your heart race. It makes you want to see another day. Red keeps eternal life interesting. To outsiders, it makes Neverhoodians appear reckless and starved for novelty.

Brown: patience, skill, law Brown is the quiet virtue of doing the same boring thing every day and still doing it well. A brown Hoodian finds comfort in routine, and he follows rules and habits even if he thinks they’re a bit silly. He is consistent, fair, and has a good grip on himself. Brown is about dealing gracefully with the repetitiveness of eternity. It isn’t readily visible to outsiders, but it can be inferred from the fact that Neverhoodians haven’t all gone mad yet.

White-red-brown moral code When the myth of white-red-brown personality traits began emerging, Hoborg co-opted it to teach his sons about the virtues they should cultivate. To lead a happy eternal life, one needs all three: purity, passion, and patience. Ideally, they should come in equal measure, but in practice one colour often dominates and one recedes. Let’s take the triplets as example.

Krevel: Patient (brown) and invested (red). Krevel’s greatest strength are long-term projects, such as making maps of the underground every ten years. He has both the zeal to start them and the grit to finish them. His idea of personal growth is, however, very un-white. White teaches us we were already made perfect. Krevel believes, in contrast, that we were born careless and stupid, and only become good through lived experience. This causes him to hold on to grudges (his personal mantra is “an evil forgotten is an evil repeated”), and the more bad things he remembers, the more terrified he is of the evil he is yet to cause. This is not a mindset equal to facing eternity.

Nike: Truthful (white) and principled (brown). Nike’s brothers look up to him for leadership, because they know Nike will always stay his course. He isn’t easily distracted by passions and cuts right to the heart of things. His lack of red, however, makes Nike susceptible to boredom. Failing to appreciate the finer things in life, he feels as though living on the Neverhood forces him to go through the same loop every day. The entrapment (his “golden cage”) once exacerbated his claustrophobia to the point of constant panic and suicidal intent. Nike ultimately leaves the Neverhood, in part, because the great outside offers more variety. Having enjoyed meeting different people every day, Nike can no longer consider it a virtue to strike every last spark of enjoyment out of the thirty friends you’ve known all your life.

Nehmen: Passionate (red) and childlike (white). Having ample of the two most important Hoodian virtues, Nehmen feels right at home on the Neverhood. He is a party boy. He could charge straight on and years would roll by without him noticing. However, Nehmen cannot lose himself in fun and friends all the time, and the breaks between parties are where his lack of brown emerges. Nehmen isn’t good at taking care of himself, nor of his friends and belongings. He keeps falling out with his pals because he said something he shouldn’t have. He can’t comport himself when he’s bored, becoming whiny and annoying. He relies heavily on Krevel for the mundane necessities of life, which eventually grows into a childish dependence that causes a rift between them.

Judging a book by its cover There is a strong common temptation to assign a Hoodian’s virtues according to his physical colours. Part of the reason why Krevel keeps himself obsessively clean is so his white clothes lend him some illusion of purity. The rainbow-coloured Guardians fell victim to this thinking for a long time, especially the green Arig, who was considered ugly and a cold unfeeling monster. The truth is, however, that you can’t judge someone’s personality from the colour of his skin. There are Hoodians whose temperament matches their appearance, and Hoodians whose looks have nothing to do with their virtues. The urge to conflate the two is ever-present, but the real colours of virtue are always on the inside.

White is the best, obviously Hoodians perceive a hierarchy and interaction between the three colours of virtue. White and red are locked into a rivalry where being too white stops one from being too red and vice versa. (Consider these dualities: innocence versus sin, tranquillity versus force of feeling, forgiveness versus fury.) Brown is the third wheel which moderates this primary antagonism. Ultimately, one needs brown the most to get through every day. But brown is an unassuming virtue. White is ostentatious in its association with good. Red is prominent and eye-catching. Brown is the Cinderella, the ugly sister. Nobody wants to be boring. But sometimes you’ve got to regulate the insanity and ground yourself in the prosaic reality of life. Sure, you could cut your head off, but then you’d miss dinner.

White, Red, Brown The game White, Red, Brown provides grounds for philosophical debate of the three virtues. A player is prompted to name something, say, white. Then he must explain why he thinks it’s white. (Example: “Gratitude songs are white because we sing them exactly the same way every year. Plus they praise our creators!”) If his answer is deemed satisfying, the successful player asks his neighbour to name something of a different colour. Players take turns until they can’t think of more original answers or until the debate turns into a fight.

Colours of vice While the inversions of white, red and brown aren’t used nearly as much in common parlance as the colours of virtue, they do carry negative connotations and can be used to symbolise bad personality traits or bad events.

Black: bad blood, malice, evil Black is the wellspring of evil in the world. Watching the black sky means one is yielding to evil thoughts. Looking into the watcher’s black eyes is unsettling; brushing her black hair brings ill luck. Calling someone black is calling him rotten, hopeless, and best to be avoided.

Green: disfigurement, sociopathy, sickness Green is all that is stunted and lacks vigour. Calling someone green is calling him vegetative, made wrong, inhuman. A green person sucks the life out of others. He never smiles. He is not evil by intention, but because he cannot love. He must be cured, fixed, before he can live with others.

Blue: depression, despair, weakness Blue is the crumbling of one’s life, the inability to walk under its weight. Blue accessories are sometimes worn as a plea for help: I’m feeling terrible, save me. Blue is the least negative of the colours of vice, and the most common one. “Feeling blue”, unlike “feeling black” or “feeling green”, is a turn of speech a Hoodian may describe himself with.