Color-Coded Speech

I'm the caption box. Hi!

When text and speech bubbles (or boxes) use color to help differentiate what other characters are saying. Colored speech can also help people read what the characters say as colored text is easier to see against a light background.

Writers might utilize colored speech to add symbolism and personality into the character's text. If different colors are being used to indicate what emotion the speaker is experiencing (like red for anger or blue for sadness), then Colour-Coded Emotions is in play.

In some works, colored text and speech bubbles are used to differentiate telepathy and Black Speech from normal dialogue.

Sometimes, subtitles for a show/film will be colored in this way in order to let deaf viewers know who is talking, with one color being assigned to each person. Incidental dialogue (such as machines, crowd speech or characters with only one or two lines) tends to share a singular color.

A Sub-Trope of Colour-Coded for Your Convenience. May overlap with Color-Coded Characters if the colors are being used to distinguish characters from each other.

Compare Rainbow Speak, which is when plot-relevant words are colored to indicate their importance.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: In official colored editions of the manga, characters have their own text colored to indicate on which they belong to. In Steel Ball Run, Johnny's are blue and Gyro's are purple.

Comic Books

• In the Animorphs graphic novels, every character has differently-coloured speech bubbles when using thought-speak. Jake is orange, Marco is grey, Tobias is yellow, Cassie is green, Rachel is pink, Elfangor is blue, and Visser Three is red.
• Asterix: In "Asterix and the Roman Agent", those who fall under the influence of the manipulative Convolvulus speak with green colored speech bubbles. In one scene, Obelix has fallen for Convolvulus' tactics but gradually comes to his senses, shown by having his bubbles get progressively lighter.
• Starting with his first solo series, Deadpool speaks with yellow speech bubbles.
• Firefly: The Sting: Starting from chapter 2, each character's narration boxes and their speech bubbles when talking over comms are in a specific color. Zoe is blue, Inara is orange, Saffron is green, Kaylee is purple, and River is pale pink.
• In Gargoyles: Clan Building, sound effects produced by gargoyles ("ROAR!", "SNIFF!". etc.) would be rendered in the color of the gargoyle making the noise.
• Justice League (2011):
  • Black Manta's speech bubbles are black with white text, representing how his voice is distorted while he is wearing his super suit.
  • The outlines of Johnny Quick's speech bubbles resemble red lightning. This is done so the reader can differentiate his lines from Atomica's, his microscopic partner who often hitches a ride on his shoulder.
• Marvel Rising (2019): Each character has their narration boxes in a different color. Ms. Marvel's are yellow, Inferno's are black with orange outlines and light orange letters, Quake's are dark purple, Morgan's are green, and Squirrel Girl's are brown.
• New Super-Man:
  • Being the story of the Super-Man of China, the characters ostensibly speak Mandarin, even though the book is published in English. On those occasions when the characters switch to English, the text turns from black to blue to indicate the switch. As the characters began to travel the world later in the series, other colors were used to indicate other languages.
  • When he guest stars a book of the traditional Superman, the color pattern of the text is reversed: blue for Mandarin, black for English.
• New Warriors: When in his Speedball form, Robbie Baldwin has yellow speech bubbles as opposed to the white ones other characters have.
• New X-Men: Jean's speech bubbles turn black when the Phoenix speaks through her, and red when she transforms into the White Phoenix of the Crown.
• Spider-Man's foe Delilah had an odd speech pattern; some of her words would be colored purple and written in a formal, flowery-looking Font.
• Superman Smashes the Klan uses red speech bubbles for dialogue in Cantonese and green for Kryptonese.
• In Warrior, there are three colored narration boxes on the Terrain of Testament: one for Warrior's aggressive side, one for his philosophical side, and one for his inner monologue. To make things even more confusing, the aggressive and philosophical colors were inverted in the first issue they appear. Rather than go with the colors as already established Warrior put a Note from Ed. in his introduction in the next issue explaining the mix-up.
• Crisis on Infinite Earths voiced the Anti-Monitor with black dialogue balloons and white lettering. Ink bleed often made it nearly impossible to make out the words.
• In some comics, Venom speaks with an all-black text box to differentiate him from his host, although this is Depending on the Writer.
• In Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse, human characters have black-on-white dialogue balloons and supernatural beings have black dialogue balloons with the words in various colours (usually red, but Medusa has white, Buer has green, and the Calamari Brotherhood have purple). The robotic Mr. Pendulum has blue-on-black.

Fan Works

• Destiny Intertwined: Both the speech bubbles themselves and the text within them are colored to help distinguish which character is talking. These typically match the color-coding of the characters themselves; Hayze's black bubbles and blue words, for instance, are the same shades as his scales and highlights, respectively.
• The God Empress of Ponykind: Conversation in the Warp is done in color, to identify who is speaking: Celestia/the Emperor speaks in gold, Tzeentch in blue, Nurgle in olive, Slaanesh in purple, Khorne in red, Isha in green and Horus in silver. Luna is not powerful enough to have a significant Warp presence, so her text is not colored.
• Oversaturated World: Group Precipitation: "A Glut of Rosy Pastries, by Jenna Cipher": Based on their skin colors: #EA80B0 for Pinkie Pie, and in the Author's Note, #A66EBE for Twilight Sparkle, and #BE7A43 for Sunset Shimmer.
• Sunsplit Saga: From Sunsplit: A journal with multiple writers indicates writer with this, based on their coat colors. #A66EBE, a.k.a Amethyst, is Twilight, #E6B91F is Sunset, and #E97135 is Sunburst.

Films

• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has yellow subtitles for Xhosa, blue for Maya, and white for other languages like French and Spanish. It is useful for a couple of scenes such as when an undercover Nakia switches from Spanish to Maya to convince a Mayan elder to speak to her.
• The Handmaiden has both Korean and Japanese speakers and some characters are bilingual. In order to differentiate between the two languages for the subtitles, Korean is in yellow and Japanese is in white. For audience members who speak neither language, this distinction is crucial to following what's going on.
• Riddle of Fire: The subtitles for the Compelling Voice used by Anna-Freya and Petal are purple rather than the usual yellow.

Literature

• The Bible: Many versions of The Bible, known as "Red Letter Editions", have Jesus's words coloured red, usually those spoken during his corporeal life on Earth, a process known as Rubrication. This is derived from the practice of medieval script-making in which headings, leading sections of text and important words were marked in red ink, usually for emphasis.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Do-It-Yourself Book: In the comics section, Fregley's comic "Trevor" has speech bubbles colored white when Doug is speaking, and yellow when Trevor is speaking.
• The Animorphs graphic novel adaptation uses colored speech bubbles when characters use thought-speech to differentiate it from spoken dialogue. Each character has their own color to indicate who is speaking. Jake has orange, Rachel has magenta, Marco has gray, Cassie has green, Tobias has yellow, Elfangor has blue, and Visser Three has red.

Live-Action TV

• Los Espookys: Spanish-speaking characters have English subtitles with white text, while English-speaking characters have Spanish subtitles with yellow text.

Roleplay

• In Rain Quest, nearly every character's dialogue is written in a different color, although additional text effects are used for characters who share a color:
  • Nina's text is gold (yellow).
  • The lightning bolt's text is purple.
  • The comet's text is normal (black), but italicized.
  • Stanley's text is cinnamon (brown).
  • Hummer and the other hummingbirds' text is green.
  • Mayor Ferdinand's text is normal, but bold.
  • The airplanes' text is cinnamon and bold.

Tabletop Games

• The fiction in Eclipse Phase rulebooks uses colored text in brackets to represent characters using Electronic Telepathy. Each character has their own color.

Video Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: Each major character has their names colored in subtitles when speaking; Ann's text is blue and Ayane's text is pink.
• BoxxyQuest: The Shifted Spires: When Forever Alone Guy is mimicking Princess June, the text is pink.
• In Call of Duty, several games have the names of allied speakers colored green or blue while enemies are colored red.
• Child of Light: Characters' name tags and dialogue are color-coded. For example, Aurora's is red, Igniculus' is blue, and the Lady of the Forest's is light brown. Incidentally, Aurora has red hair, Igniculus is blue, and the Lady of the Forest wears a light brown hooded coat. That Norah's name tag and dialogue are black gives a hint to her true personality.
• Conker's Bad Fur Day: While almost every character has black subtitles with white speech bubbles, Gregg the Grim Reaper has the opposite. The lyrics for Sloprano are also in white subtitles.
• Conker: Live & Reloaded: The multiplayer characters have white subtitles compared to the original game's multiplayer modes.
• The Fairly OddParents: Breakin' da Rules and The Fairly OddParents: Shadow Showdown: Timmy Turner's subtitles are colored white. Wanda's is colored pink. Cosmo's is colored green.
• Freddi Fish: Freddi's subtitles are colored yellow. Luther's subtitles are colored green.
• Gold And Glory The Road To El Dorado: The subtitles match the colors of the characters. Red for Miguel and blue for Tulio.
• Hades: Every major character has colored subtitles, save for Zagreus, whose subtitles are white. The colors are almost always a reflection of the character's main trait, like Aphrodite being subtitled in pink. However, a few characters use similar colors, which can be confusing to follow if those characters have a conversation, like Thantos and Nyx, who are both subtitled in similar shades of purple.
• Illusion of Gaia: Each main character has their own text color.
• In Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, every character has different colored subtitles while speaking. For example, Indy is orange, Sophia is purple, and Volodnikov is green.
• In I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, Vace speaks in red text, Anemone and Dys in orange, Tammy in yellow, Cal in green, Rex in teal, Marz in blue, Tang and Nomi in purple, and the other colonists in plain bold.
• Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out!: In the VGA version, each character has a different color for the speech window, generally matching the background color of their portraits as well: white for the narrator, yellow for Larry/Rose/Cavaricchi, light green for Merrily, pink for Burgundy, etc.
• The SNES/Genesis game The Lost Vikings gives each character colored speech boxes to clarify who's talking in the end of level banter.
• Overwatch has different colored subtitles for each team so players can tell if an ally character is speaking, or an enemy. By default, the colors are blue (your team) and red (enemy team), but these can be altered for those that are color blind or just dislike those colors.
• Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen have an aesthetic feature not in any other Pokémon game: male characters have blue text, while female characters have pink text.
• Poker Night 2: Each character has an unique color for his or her subtitles. Brock is red, Claptrap is orange, Ash is a greenish gray, Sam is blue, GLaDOS is cyan, Winslow is peach-orange, Max is green, the Paranoia Core bounty is blue as well, and Steve's "Heyoo!" is yellow. However, the subtitles at times can be unreadable depending on the skin.
• Police Quest 1: In Pursuit of the Death Angel: In the VGA version, some characters have a different color for the speech window than white while speaking. This gets a frightening effect when you discover one of the characters in the game is the Death Angel, causing their window to go from brown to red.
• Rayman 2: The Great Escape: For the non PlayStation versions, Rayman's subtitles are colored blue while the NPC subtitles are colored yellow. Averted with the PlayStation version, where all the subtitles are blue. Regardless of which version, certain nouns are highlighted red.
• In Riddle School 5, text bubbles pop up in the intro cutscene, all with separate colors. Green is Diz, red is Viz, and blue is Quiz. Additionally, when Diz and Viz are seen in game, their speech bubbles are colored green and red, respectively, while everyone else's is gray.
• Sam & Max: Freelance Police: Not only the subtitles match the colors of the characters but their faces are shown on the left side.
  • Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse: The third season of Sam & Max games just uses color coded subtitles instead of just having the character icon alongside it.
  • Sam & Max Hit the Road: The adventure game uses this to help signify who is talking. For Sam, it's blue. For Max, it's white.
• While its predecessor only used yellow subtitles for every character, South Park: The Fractured but Whole uses different color subtitles depending on which main character is speaking in a scene. For example, Kyle's subtitles are teal, Cartman's are pale red, and Mr. Mackey's are green. This comes in handy when characters speak shortly after one another and the previous character's subtitles are still onscreen. Less significant characters tend to just have plain white subtitles.
• Sly Cooper:
  • The subtitles for the dialogue is color coded to the character speaking. If it's Sly, it's blue subtitles. If it's Bentley, it's green subtitles. If it's Murray, it's pink subtitles. If it's Carmelita, it's orange subtitles. If it is a villain or other character, it's grey subtitles. Except for Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, they can't be turned off.
  • In Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, Sir Raleigh and Mz. Ruby's subtitles are colored pink. Muggshot and Panda King's subtitles are colored green. Clockwerk's subtitles is colored grey.
  • In Sly 2: Band of Thieves, Neyla's subtitles are colored lavender and the Klaww Gang members and other characters' subtitles are colored grey.
• Each of the main characters in Style Quest has their speech bubble edged in a different color which generally corresponds with something they're wearing. This means the shy girl gets green to match her shirt, the Perky Goth gets purple to match her dress, etc.
• Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People: As with other Telltale Games titles, the subtitles match the major color of each character.
• The Survivor Timeline games from Tomb Raider all have color-coded subtitles as an option to distinguish who is speaking, although Tomb Raider (2013) also adds speaker tags if the speaker is off-screen. Lara's subtitles are always white, and Jonah's are yellow (except in Tomb Raider, where his are green) and other colors depend on the game and cast.
• This is a staple in Valve games since the debut of the Source engine, which allows for subtitles, usually matching the primary color of each character's design:
  • Half-Life 2: Each major character has a different color for subtitles. For example, Alyx is pink, Barney is light blue, and Eli is brown.
  • Left 4 Dead: Each of the playable survivors has their own color. Louis is white, Francis is grey-blue, Zoey is maroon, Bill is green, Nick is blue, Ellis is yellow, Rochelle is pink, and Coach is purple. The special infected also get their own colors for the subtitles; Boomers are salmon, Smokers are light green, Spitters are yellow, Jockeys are faded white, Hunters are light brown, Chargers are light blue, Tanks are dark yellow, and Witches are light purple.
  • Portal 2: Characters have original colors for their subtitles. For the Space Core, it is orange. For Wheatley, it's blue.
• All subtitles in the The Walking Dead (Telltale) video games are color-coded by character. The player character is always subtitled in white, and other characters' colors are usually based off of a color they are wearing. Although with such a large cast, some of the paler colors can be mixed up.

Visual Novels

• Higurashi: When They Cry: In Tsumihoroboshi-hen, Rena has her text highlighted in pink to contrast Keiichi's text, which is colored the standard white like the rest of the game's text. Rena's text slowly turns blood red over time as she becomes more delusional due to being infected with the Hinamizawa syndrome.

Web Animation

• In Chikn Nuggit, each character has a different colored speech bubble. Chikn's is orange, Cheezborger's is green, Iscream's is red, Slushi's is light blue, Fwench Fwy's is purple, Sody Pop's is dark orange, Cofi's is pink, and Bezel's is black with magenta text.

Web Comics

• In Agents of the Realm, each agent has her own text color:
  • Norah: Fuchsia
  • Adele: Orange
  • Paige: Purple
  • Kendall: Green
  • Jordan: Blue
• Each character has their own colored speech bubble in Cirque Royale. Furthermore, mime speak has black backgrounds behind the words; their speech is actually telepathic and can't be heard by non-mimes (or those without translators).
• Combo Rangers: Each character's respective Color Motif extends to their speech bubbles. For example, Fox's dialogue balloons are red to indicate his status as the the leader of the heroes.
• In CRUSH3D, the thought boxes for Carter, Scott, and Reuben are colored green, orange, and blue, respectively.
• Deep Rise makes heavy use of colors, both for conversation, and going so far as to color pronouns to clarify to whom these refer.
• Valeria and Rangi from Devil May Care have a supernatural influence on the people they impart advice too, but only when they genuinely mean what they say. This is demonstrated visually when their Speech Bubbles turn different colors; blue for Valeria, red for Rangi.
• Drowtales uses differently colored speech bubbles for different characters. In one panel, Ariel and Chirinide both yell at Kyonne to leave them, and share one bubble with a gradient between their respective colors.
• Educomix has differently-colored text for different characters. Some characters share colors, but use different shades. Different fonts can indicate voice, tone of voice, or even when in time that character is.
  • Dave = Blue
  • Jessica = Pink
  • Qstickman = Cyan
  • President X = Green
• Evil Hall:
  • Tally Hall members have speech bubbles depend on their tie color.
  • Evil Hall members have black speech bubbles. Instead, their text color depends on their tie color.
• Gunnerkrigg Court: Annie's speech bubbles have a slight red tint, and Kat's have a slight blue tint. This was even more prominent in the earlier webcomics chapters, where the bubble colors were deeper and more characters had unique colors.
• In Homestuck, each of the characters are associated with a colour, which is also the colour of their dialogue.
• Inner Dialogue: The inner monologue has blue text in order to distinguish it from the main character's dialogue.
• Every character in Irregular Webcomic! has a standardised colour for their speech bubbles (which, as the annotation for this strip notes, can occasionally cause problems when the different storylines cross over in unexpected ways).
• My Impossible Soulmate uses different-coloured speech bubbles to differentiate named characters (Chiaki is teal, Fumiko is yellow, etcetera). Unnamed/minor characters are given white speech bubbles instead.
• The Order of the Stick has speech bubbles for various alignments and species-. Infernal creatures tend to be black with red text, elemental sprites will be color coded to their element, etc. This is, of course, lampshaded, as when Lien tells Qarr the imp that his "distinctive speech patterns" when he was hiding clued her in to his nature, and Elan tells her "It's okay, Lien, you can just say that it's his red-and-black speech balloon."
• Radio Silence: The band members have text bubble color coordination.
  • Matt = Purple
  • Wren = Orange
  • Colbie = Blue
  • Brent = Green
  • Shy = Grey
  • Liz = Gold
• Sleepless Domain: The color of the text in any magical girl's speech bubble is always the same as their theme color, and all non-magical characters have black text. When Tessa is depowered, her formerly-pink text becomes black. When Tessa then merges with Goops, her speech bubbles become inverted, white on dark purple/magenta.
• Slightly Damned: Angelic speech is always written in blue. When a character is speaking using sign language, the translations are written in magenta.
• In A Souls Tale, each character's speech has different colored text. For instance, Lucas' speech is usually dark blue, while Astrid's speech is usually dark red.
• In Twin Dragons Italian dialogue is presented in green speech balloons, presumably after the Romero twins' scale color.

Web Original

• 17776: Different characters have different-colored speech; Nine is red, Ten is green and Juice is yellow. Minor characters get their own colors too. In 17776, everyone's speech is depicted as colored text on a black background. In 20020, this is switched around for the probes (making the background of their lines colored instead), helping to distinguish them from the human characters.

Web Videos

• Buzz Feed Unsolved uses this for cutaways where Ryan and Shane's conversation is transcribed instead of showing video of them talking. Shane's text is transcribed in yellow and Ryan's is transcribed in blue.
• Highcraft: The subtitles are always color-coded, and usually don't change for the main regulars. Cooper is white, which never changes. Other notable regulars include Boywucci (orange), Barce (yellow), Joko (green), Bollz/Alex (aqua), Logan (light blue), Travis (dark blue), and Irush (purple). Sam is usually pink, though in "2b2stoned" his text is changed to yellow for whatever reason.
• Each game character in Rapid Eyes has a unique color, font, and sound effect as the text types out.

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