Basic Trope: An ensemble wears different colours as a visual que for their personality, abilities, etc.
- Straight: In the RPG Tales of Troperia, The Team is composed of The Hero, Prince Bob, who always wears his gold armour with his crown-shaped helmet, The Lancer, Prince Charlie, who always wears his brown knight's armour, The Smart Guy, Prince Dave, who always wears his blue Black Mage outfit, The Big Gal, Princess Emily, who always wears her green Karateka outfit, and The Heart, Princess Alice, who always wears her red and white White Mage outfit.
- Exaggerated: The Sixth Rangers all wear different colours too.
- Downplayed: The team all wear similar uniforms, but the piping is color-coded by specialty.
- Justified: The outfits show their different jobs - Hero, Knight, Black Mage, Boxer, and White Mage respectively.
- Inverted: Everyone wears the same uniform, because they all work for the same organization, and therefore have the same colour.
- Subverted: None of them have a Limited Wardrobe.
- Double Subverted: They change their outfits almost instantly.
- Parodied:
- They all wear the same colour, with different accents - their outfits have no differences otherwise.
- Characters are named after their colors, one of them does not even wear the color they are associated with, there is a character who is literally a physical blob of color, and their leader is the Invisible Pink Unicorn.
- Zig Zagged: The hero and his close partner wear colorful outfits, while the teammates they find all wear the same uniform.
- Averted: They don't have any colour-coding system.
- Enforced:
- The writers do this because the game is based on Power Rangers, of which the author is a fan.
- The execs tell the creators to give each character a specific colour because "it will make it easier for the audience to tell them apart."
- NBC told the creators of the 1964-1968 show to give each character a specific Living Color to convince the audience to buy color TVs just to tell who's who.
- Lampshaded: "Hey, that's Alice. I know by her..". "...feathers?" "... No, because she's wearing red".
- Invoked: The heroes decide to dress in signature colours so that they can spot each other easily in a big battle.
- Exploited: The Big Bad knows their weak points by their colours, and creates a Barrier Change Boss.
- Defied: They refuse to wear exactly five colours between them.
- Discussed: "Why do you always wear those outfits? Yellow, Brown, Red, Blue, Green..".
- Conversed: "Hey, you remember Tales of Troperia? Yeah, I could tell Alice was the secret boss from the beginning. Just from her color scheme. Yeah."
- Played For Laughs: Bob joins a super team, and finds out to his horror that the only colors left untaken are pink and purple.
- Deconstructed: The flashy outfits mean that the heroes aren't really camouflaged and the villains can easily take countermeasures because they always know exactly who's coming.
- Reconstructed:
- The heroes change to stealthy outfits with just a splash of color on the back.
- Once they realize the villains have caught on to their color coding, they start periodically switching outfits to confuse them.
Back to Colour-Coded for Your Convenience
