Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-226878-20150710200046/@comment-174.89.110.232-20151115230716

To Cyrania de Bergerac: I'm cool with the name changes; I knew that only two were color-related and needed changing. The color complement fitting a nice range of palette and the Faunus/Merry Men/Jester concept tickled me more. :)  I really like using 'Sherwood' for the leader's surname; great choice! No trampling on Red Ridinghood's hood! Also John Rowan Lincoln, with red berries in the winter.

The trouble with multiple Scarlets in RWBY more or less seems an unfortunate nuisance rather than a real stumbling block. I rather feel as if putting together a character based on Scarlett O'Hara and calling her Harlot O'Hara would be, well, wrong except that it does describe the colleen's personality, besides her being a 'scarlet woman'. But maybe on Remnant 'Scarlet' is a very popular unisex name. I can't count the number of Bonnies, Lisas, Amandas and Kates I know, you know? Dale used to be common for both sexes in the mid-1900s. SFF allows for some inimitable stretches at times. And scarlet is just such a good color for comics and animation.

To Mercen-X: The problem with comparing the leaders on JNPR with the Cardinal group is that each of the JNPR members allude to leaders. Each of Cardinal's members do not allude to, um, leadership birds. They'd all have to be big raptors, dino-birds (like archaeopteryx) or mythical birds (thunderbird, for example), not a Dove in the bunch. Russel Thrush as he turned out in the end just isn't a leader, and he'd be so OOC if an allusion to Robin Hood that I'd propose him for a team of antagonists; only he'd still have to be a leadership bird. Hey, a Grimm Thrush. It could work....

Your theory that robins are associated with red because of DC's Robin is putting the cart before the horse. 'Robin Redbreast' predates DC by half a millennium, going back to the 1400's. DC stole from legend; it did not create the connection.

I'm not actually looking for expies. The thread called for allusions and I read a number of ideas proposed which were interesting, but I saw potential in Cyrania of Bergerac's Robin Hood idea that I thought went beyond the neat and simple. I started with the classic team of FOUR from the 1200's, ditching Maid Marian along the way because Maid Marian. Then I worked on the colors, character names, team name and outlook on life (Jester) and genus/species/whatever (Faunus).

It did not all come in a thundering rush like Niagara Falls. As I worked on one aspect, I found myself interconnecting others. The fact that two of the members of Robin Hood's band already had colors in their names--Robin and Will Scarlet-- made the choice of colors easy, attractive and almost mandatory. As for 'Friar' not being linked to a color, it's an allusion to the friar's brown habit. Little John, or Cyrania's name John Rowan Lincoln, is the obligatory Lincoln green character. If I'd done all of them up in Lincoln green, it would have failed to describe Scarlet and Tuck as the ballads described them, and everyone would have been green. (That may be something I feel more keenly about, accuracy in writing I mean, than you do. Not wrong, just different. Working backwards to erase a few blatancies to mystify the reader/watcher is where you end, not where you begin.)

But, you know, I didn't just make this stuff up out of whole cloth.