A Study in Color through the Lens of ASD
How does Magic: the Gathering's color pie reflect the experience having Autism?
Magic the Gathering has been around for more than 30 years now. In this time, it has seen many changes and developments to its core concepts and ideas, and none have flourished quite as strongly as the color pie. Magic’s five colors, White, Blue, Black, Red, and Green have come to embody many universal human wants, and they express these wants well in both gameplay and flavor. Entire essays have been written on color philosophies, and how the colors interact with and reflect on each other as well as real world concepts and human experiences.
By integrating color theory as a lens through which to view real world ideas, we can come to understand the colors more, and maybe even view those ideas from a slightly different angle. A prime example is how by analyzing the colors with respect to Autism Spectrum Disorder, we can come to understand both a little more deeply.
To give proper context to this discussion, I will briefly explain Magic’s color pie. Magic’s five colors each represent a different set of beliefs and ideologies that guide the motivations and actions of Magic’s characters and organizations. White is the color of peace, law, and selflessness. Blue is the color of knowledge, deliberation, and perfection. Black is the color of ambition, self-interest, and amorality. Red is the color of passion, freedom, and action. Green is the color of nature, connection, and tradition. Each color has two allies and two enemies based on their position about the color pie. Blue’s allies are White and Black, and its enemies are Red and Green. Black’s allies are Blue and Red, and its enemies are White and Green, and so on. The colors tend to play better with their allies in regards to gameplay and flavor, as their guiding principles line up a little more, where the principles of their enemies are different enough to create tension. Of course, these keywords are not the entire picture, and it would take much longer to delve into the nuances of each color, and even longer to explain how they interact with one another. However, for the sake of understanding, these keywords should give an idea of how each color operates.
Next, I will give a disclaimer about the topic of this article. I have Autism Spectrum Disorder. I was diagnosed relatively late in my development around 15 years old, but it has affected me my entire life. Even still, I am not an absolute authority on the subject. What I have to offer is my perspective molded through my experience with autism, as well as with the counsel of other people on the spectrum who I have spoken to during the writing of this paper. What I am going to describe is nowhere near the universal experience for people with autism. With that in mind, it is worth clarifying that this writing is meant to act more as an analysis of the color pie through the lens of autism rather than vice versa. While I did come to understand my autism more by looking at the color pie and even found some comfort in my conclusions, these are once again not universal to all people with ASD. My hope is that this paper will explore an aspect of the color pie that has gone mostly untapped for potential for narrative and gameplay alike.
The main colors to strongly associate with autism in my perspective are White, Blue, and Red. In order to explain why, it is important to first eliminate Black and Green. Of course, aspects of a color can still be seen in characters or things aligned in other colors, but largely the principles of Black and Green do not align with my or many others' experience with autism as closely as the other three colors do. Black’s lust for power is not shared by many people in the real world. Most people do not put others down in order to bring themselves up. Black in Magic is meant more to reflect a small part of most people, which is the need that rises up occasionally to put oneself before others. Green is the color of tradition and nature, and it believes that all people have a purpose in life. Autistic people do not have the same sense of natural serenity that Green does, and usually must make their own through structure and stimulation. In this way, Green does not align well with the autistic experience. This leaves White, Red, and Blue, but these colors do not need to be together to reflect autism.
White is the color of structure. It is the color that believes most strongly that in order for there to be peace and in order for people to prosper, there must be some sense of order in their lives. It is easy to scale up White’s philosophy to the scale of a society and not a person (it is not helpful that so many White-aligned characters in Magic are leaders or high ranking members of such societies and hierarchies), but White philosophies can still apply to a single person. White values manifest in individuals in the form of selflessness and a reliance on structure, either personal or adopted. This lines up very nicely with autistic people and their tendency to establish structure and patterns. Many autistic households are kept in a specific state of cleanliness and order, and many autistic people have highly maintained schedules. Autistic people can find comfort in structure, which is reflected in White values.
Blue is the color of knowledge. Blue believes that the answer to most problems is contemplation and research. Blue-aligned characters often are incredibly intelligent with an unquenchable thirst for understanding and boundless curiosity for their outside world. Blue can be cold and logical, but is still driven by an almost whimsical conviction that the world is full of opportunity and that dreams can be made reality with research. This curiosity and thirst for knowledge is very common in autistic individuals, even if not in the academic sense. While finding enjoyment in learning is a common human trait, people with ASD can become much more invested in learning about things, developing hyperfixations, satisfying them by consuming as much knowledge about this given thing as they can. Blue reflects this trait, with blue cards often using the imagery of consumption to describe the research that they depict, with cards like “Thirst for Knowledge” and “Thirst for Discovery,” presenting knowledge-seeking to a bodily need. Autistic people and blue both share this endless desire to learn.
The final color in this trifecta is Red, which I believe is the color that takes the most explaining, but can be understood to reflect parts of autism. Red is the color of emotion, energy, and freedom. It is often misunderstood as chaos, but is more a color that wants what it wants and acts to achieve it. Autistic people have wants like anyone else, and feel emotion very love and other emotions very intensely. However, red is also the color of restlessness, fidgeting, and impatience. Many autistic people understand the frustration and panic that can come when they can’t soothe themselves or when they don’t have their usual safe spaces. Red is also the color of passion, which I believe is the thing that most links autism and red. Autistic people very easily can lose themselves in their interests. They have hyperfixations as touched on earlier, but autistic people are also some of the most devoted artists and hobbyists. While Blue is the color that most obsesses over learning, Red is the color that can lose itself in any of its passions and wants, and that is perhaps the most autistic trait of all.
Colors do not usually exist in isolation, and the most interesting conflicts come when they are combined. The colors I’ve described all have traits that are near universal. Most every person finds some kind of comfort in structure, has interests and enjoys learning, and has emotions. However, what is not universal is the tensions that arise when colors come together, and no tension resonates as strongly with the autistic experience than that between White and Red, and that is the conflict I want to focus on as a place where Magic can improve.
If we look at White’s need for structure and order and Red’s desire for freedom and pleasure-seeking, and it’s not hard to see the conflict. White sees Red as dangerous, as pure emotion and impulse actively present a risk to peace. Red sees White as stuffy, believing laws to be restrictions that people should and can do without. This conflict has been explored for years in Magic, and always in this macro sense of Society vs Individual. The groups in Magic’s story that reconcile these differences in color identity, the Boros Legion and the College of Lorehold do so through organizations where Red can express itself within the confines of White’s order. However, the conflict of White and Red on the individual level is the one that people with autism experience very often.
People with autism have very vibrant passions in their lives, but feel anxiety when things are not comfortable for them. While strong reactions and meltdowns are usually something that is tempered with age, autistic individuals can still be distressed just enough to not be able to focus on their interests when they don’t feel serene, either because the environment feels too unpredictable. This is why autistic people create structure in their own homes and lives, designating certain rooms to certain tasks. In the case of someone like an artist with autism, this can be critical to allowing them to fully enjoy their passions. Without the structure, autistic people can feel anxious and unsafe, but with the right structure in place, they can flourish and lose themselves in whatever they want. In this way, people with autism feel the most free and safe with some kind of structure. The tension between incredible passion and the need for structure to feel comfortable is one that has not been presented in Magic very strongly and is one that has so much room for interesting expression.
White/Red are a seemingly one-note color combination as depicted in Magic. Most White/Red cards depict battle, and the combination tends to center around the chaos of war and the patriotic passion of soldiers. This is a completely sensible interpretation of the ways that these colors can come together for a common purpose, but it is only one angle to view the two colors, and it has been used for almost 30 years. Lorehold dug a little deeper by presenting White and Red as adventurous lorekeepers and archaeologists, but there is still a lot of space that can be explored. For example, a new White and Red faction could be an artists guild that allows students to create their own workplaces and offices with magic. Of course, Magic: the Gathering is a game of combat and battle, as that is the entire narrative of gameplay. This is the natural explanation for why White/Red has leaned so heavily on warfare imagery for most of Magic’s existence. However, if the reception to Lorehold is anything to go off of, people are excited to see White/Red explore new angles and expressions of these two colors, so this is another possible step forward to expanding White/Red’s palette.
As a final note, I want to address the elephant in the room: Narset. Narset is a character who has been in Magic’s story for close to a decade now. She is the game’s premier autistic planeswalker, and comes from the warring plane Tarkir. Her autism is very heavily coded into the narration of stories with her as protagonist, and was actually very realistic in describing her sensory problems and pattern-oriented thinking. Narset is three colors in the story: Blue, White, and Red. However, in a trait I find disappointing, her center color is Blue, then White, then Red. Narset is characterized as brilliant both as a scholar and martial artist, hailing from the Ojutai clan of monks, and achieving the rank of master at age 15, the youngest human to do so in her clan’s history. Narset has come under some scrutiny as yet another example of the “Autistic Savant” trope, as a character with autism presented as exceptional to her peers in every way other than perhaps socially. In her story, “The Great Teacher’s Student,” her sensory problems and other such relatable issues for people with autism are quickly brushed aside once she is picked up by Ojutai to study under his draconic wing.
Narset’s characterization may be tropey, but it also opens the door for a larger discussion on the strong association in society between autism and these depictions of Autistic Savants. These depictions which are created by allistic people to (supposedly) bring autistic people up end up having the opposite effect, as autistic people are ultimately not better than anyone else, just different. These stories create expectations that are very difficult to live up to, and this can be frustrating for people with autism to work against. This is why I believe centering Narset, Magic’s premier autistic character, in Blue is not as progressive as it could be. Autism is not just the smartest and most accomplished people with autism, and so I would love to see a future autistic character with a stronger center in Red/White.
While Magic the Gathering is under no strict obligation to provide representation to people with autism, it not only has through the creation of Narset, but also possesses a unique system through which it can represent autistic people in a way that no other medium can through its color pie and through White and Red specifically. By creating White/Red characters and cards with autism and its unique conflicts in mind, Magic the Gathering can not only expand White/Red’s identity mechanically and flavorfully, but also meaningfully contribute to the rise of autistic representation in media as a whole