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can-i-see-your-passport-please · 1 year

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SWEET VOICE COLOR HEADCANONS BECAUSE I'M NORMAL AND FINE

Now, I think that Sweet Voice... can't FULLY be encapsulated in English. The colors do mean general emotions, yes, but also different shades of one color can mean different things, and most importantly, every bubble of Sweet Voice is a thought. You can't just generalize a stream of consciousness into a rhyme without cutting out a lot.

Tommy's rhymes work, but they aren't the whole story. What EXACTLY Benrey's trying to communicate depends a LOT on context, and relying PURELY on the rhymes can mean a lot is lost in translation. This can also be at least confusing when it comes to a color like orange, which is notoriously hard to rhyme, but can be very important to communicate.

However: once again, colors mean specific emotions, and remembering combinations through rhymes can be helpful, and also it's just easier. Context matters, of course, and relying completely on the rhymes can be very unhelpful, but... it's like knowing that a recipe needs specific ingredients. Like, a cake generally needs sugar, flour, eggs, and baking soda/powder. Specific quantities may vary, and there may be more or less of an ingredient, new stuff may be added, some may be removed. And of course, what KIND of cake you're baking can change the ingredients a lot. But knowing the base of what a cake needs can be helpful.

I'm not completely sure if this metaphor is getting what I mean across. What I mean is: knowing the base emotion behind a color can be helpful, though it won't get the exact stream of consciousness across. A translator can elaborate on the thoughts in each bubble (with permission of the SV user), but generally knowing the colors and what they mean is helpful. But again - context matters.

With that being said...

THE WHOLE PRIDE FLAG

Red - Fear and danger. Often used as a warning, like a caution sign. Light shades of red can mean just nervousness, but vibrant red is a sign of fear. Tastes like medicine and caffeine.

Orange - Pain. The pain can be mental or physical, but no matter what the type, orange means pain. If the SV user is singing in orange, it's a sign they need some kind of support. The taste is hard to figure out, because it burns like acid. Best guess of any taste is blood.

Yellow - Guilt and self-hatred. While orange can be used for physical or mental pain, you still need to guess which one, and the singer can easily lie about which kind of pain it is. Yellow sidesteps that. If you see yellow, the SV user is in mental distress and needs comfort. Tastes like mango.

Edit (12/04/2023): I'm changing yellow to something different! I'm a better writer now, and have a better definition that can be used more.

Yellow - Power. It can be the type of power that corrupts you, that tears you apart from the inside out. But power is not exclusively bad. It can and must be used, dare I say it, responsibly. To protect, to support, to help others and make their lives easier. Tastes like salmon.

Green - Safety and reassurance. Used as a white flag, or a way to reassure someone that they're not going to get hurt. Can also be used as a sign of feeling safe and happy in your surroundings. Tastes like chocolate.

Blue - Thoughts and relaxation. An indication that the person is thinking about something, turning it over in their head. One of the most common colors used. Lots of blue usually means the person is thinking very deeply. Tastes like blue raspberry. Blue is a bit of a unique one in the bunch, as it can actually affect one's body. All Sweet Voice can do that, to an extent- being hit with red makes you feel some of the fear they do, and orange makes you feel a smidge of the pain they feel- but blue is the most effective at this. Being hit with blue will make your muscles relax, and usually helps your thoughts calm down as well. It can sometimes even dull pain (though not healing it).

Teal - Healing and recovery. Closely related to blue- teal can affect the body quite strongly when combined with black or green, and helping someone relax is helping them recover, in a way. However, they ARE different. While blue is most effective at calming someone down by itself, teal is most effective when combined with another color. Tastes like mint.

Teal and green (heal beam) will usually help speed up a healing process, helping cuts stitch themselves back together, bruises fade, broken bones heal. There are limitations, of course. Heal beam speeds up a healing process to help you recover, and can't help you, say, regrow limbs. Using heal beam consumes energy as well (it's one thing to just use Sweet Voice, it's another to use its power to heal someone.)

Purple - Joy and blissfulness. A sense of peace and happiness with the world, with oneself, even just with the moment. Lighter shades of purple usually mean more energetic happiness, while darker shades usually mean more calm, sleepy peace. Tastes like ice cream.

Pink - Love. Platonic, familial, romantic, pink means love. Different shades of pink can mean different kinds of love, but as there are basically infinite types of love, you cannot nail down specific shades to mean specific types of love. It's fluid. Indescribable delicious taste. [He tends to use this when trying to protect someone - literally surrounding them in his love to keep them safe. He uses this a lot around the team especially.]

OTHER COLORS

White - Numbness. When you feel everything so much that your brain just shuts down, and you can't feel anything at all except lethargy. (Based on the fact that if you put all light colors together, it just makes white.) Tastes like TV static.

Grey - Confusion. Sometimes used as a quick way to ask a question, sometimes used as a quick way to say you don't understand. There is symbolism here. Tastes like noodles.

Black - Anger. Tastes like pen ink. Unpleasant. The most pure anger is completely black, like a void. [Usually, Benrey's anger is playful. Not serious, joking around, silly. When he's pouting, getting overly annoyed about something, whining like a child... It's not genuine anger. And if it seems like he's angry and he's yelling, it's most likely an expression of something else. Benrey's genuine anger is quiet. Silently stewing in the corner, completely quiet, ink-black Sweet Voice leaking out of his mouth. You can swear his shadow is shifting and changing, despite how still his body is. He's not screaming and whining, he's completely silent. His gaze is fixed at a single point. And when he lets that anger out... It is never pretty.]

Brown - Negative emotion in general. Sometimes you're feeling so much negative emotion that you can't just place one label on it all. It's so much hurt that your mind feels muddy. Brown often comes mixed in with other colors meaning negative emotions, but often it can exist by itself. Tastes... confusing.

Rainbow - Basically the equivalent of your brain breaking. Not to be mixed up with confusion- this is more like when you try to say something, but jumble your words together, or when you're feeling so many things at once that no one color combo works. Tastes like everything.

WEIRD LITTLE FACTS AND OBSERVATIONS

Warm and monochrome shades tend to be more negative emotions (with the exception of grey and yellow, but again, context matters), while cooler shades tend to be more positive emotions.

The more vibrant a color, the stronger the emotion. For example, vibrant pale purple usually translates to strong excitement, and vibrant pink translates to deep love. And the duller a color, the weaker the emotion. Going back to purple, dull purple usually means something along the lines of "oh that's cool."

You cannot lie through Sweet Voice. You can lie about what the colors mean, and you can suppress what thoughts are shown, but that doesn't mean the thoughts aren't there. It just means they're quieter. Sweet Voice is pure thought and emotion. It's laying bare your current mindstate, hiding that is hard. The only way to for sure not show someone specific thoughts is through not using Sweet Voice, which is very hard. The safest way to do that is holding back the Sweet Voice until you can let it all out later (which has a high chance of failure with all the Sweet Voice coming out all at once). The most effective way to do that is physically swallowing the Sweet Voice back, which is usually painful.

I cannot stress this enough: SWEET VOICE IS PURE THOUGHT AND EMOTION. Every bubble of Sweet Voice is at least one thought, and depending on how stuffed your mind is, it can be several thoughts. Sometimes it's one thought, repeated in several bubbles. The point is: the color is the emotion, the bubbles are the thoughts.

Sweet Voice is generally used for quick communication of certain things. For example: say you and your gang can all use Sweet Voice, and you're currently separated. From farther away, you hear someone use Sweet Voice. You turn, and see one of your friends is using red. Your group quickly races over, and they explain the danger. Or say someone is trying to explain an idea, but can't figure out how to put it into words, so instead they use Sweet Voice, and you can read their thought process. That is the biggest evolutionary purpose of Sweet Voice.

Learning Sweet Voice is INCREDIBLY difficult, but possible. It's basically a second language, except you're on nightmare mode. After all, learning how to read Sweet Voice is learning how to read someone's thoughts, their emotions, basically their soul. Which is not easy. However, learning Sweet Voice is not impossible. It just takes a fuckload of time.

You can't learn how to SPEAK Sweet Voice. It comes from a gland in the back of your throat that humans don't have, and you can't just put that in the back of your throat or use magic alien hormones to grow it. If you tried to take alien HRT you would probably die lol

If you just took audio of Sweet Voice, you wouldn't be able to translate the exact thoughts. However, if you took video with NO audio of Sweet Voice, you still wouldn't be able to translate it. Translation relies on both audio and visuals, unless you are ABSURDLY fluent.

This is ABSOLUTELY not consistent throughout my art and writing, however I do not have the energy to care. Also Tumblr is so mean for not having a different shade of blue

EDIT (12/04/2023): I HAVE MORE BITCH I HAVE COLOR ASSOCIATIONS WITH THE SCIENCE TEAM

I don't associate Darnold with orange and feel he shoulda been red, and so red he is- red is the color of fear, the color used to signal danger. And Darnold is the most cautious, the only one to take the VERY FUCKING REASONABLE fear of the Rescas and military, and chose to just fucking leave! And fucking good for him!!

Bubby is associated with teal, the color of healing. Bubby would definitely be REALLY FUCKED UP after getting out of his tube and getting out of Black Mesa as a whole. He would be going from constant supervision and inability to leave a confined space, to freedom to move around Black Mesa but still constant supervision and inability to leave, to total freedom and no oversight from Black Mesa. Bubby would need to heal really fucking bad after all of that!! Healing and growing and becoming better is a necessity for him, and has been since he was freed from his GOD DAMN TUBE

Tommy is associated with yellow, the color of power (and the main reason i changed yellow). Tommy is one of the most powerful of the team, able to overpower and gun down 300 clones on his own, while also keeping Gordon alive. Depending on your interpretation, he's at least a little nonhuman, being either related to or adopted by FUCKING GMAN. In my mind, he is a representation of the good power can do, while at least in canon not having yet gained control over it (see: this is all instinct mr freeman i'm scared).

Benrey is associated with blue, the color of thoughts and relaxation. And my reasoning for this is fairly simple! Benrey's a chill guy, just wants to play games with his friends. But in my beautiful world, he's jam-packed with so many thoughts (except when he thinks nothing). Benrey's a chill dude who likes chilling, who's also got a buncha thoughts in his silly brain.

Coomer is associated with green, the color of safety. And this does work well for him! Dr Coomer is, at the end of the day, a safe person to be around. He does try to help, even though his AI is SEVERELY bugged out. The clone fight is an exception to this (and there, his text was surrounded by red, color of fear, my god the symbolsim), but even after THAT, he still did move to try and help Gordon, reassuring him that he was safe, and wouldn't hurt him ("Don't let my bloody form frighten you, Gordon. It's me, your friend, Dr Coomer!"). Coomer is a chaotic person, yes, but at the end of the day, he's a safe person. One of these days I will write an essay on how those little moments of kindness in HLVRAI and them so good I'm normal

(Additionally for all the old man yaoi fans: green is safety and teal is healing. Boomer colors are literally safety and healing)

Gordon is a bit of a complicated case. I associate him with orange during and before the Rescas, but purple after it, after he starts healing. And I have good reason for this: orange is associated with pain, and purple with happiness. And during the Rescas (arguably beforehand too), Gordon was constantly in some form of pain. Even putting aside the physical pain of being in The Worst Suit Ever, he was under the stress of trying to keep himself and all his teammates alive. That is PAINFUL.

But (HL2VRAI HAS NOT COME OUT AT TIME OF WRITING AND I AM IGNORING ITS EXISTENCE) as time went on after the rescas... Gordon healed. He got better. He becomes a more self-actualized person, becomes happier with himself. He gets out of the Rescas alive, and heals from it after all the bullshit, with the help of the friends he made along the way who love him so, so, so much.

Which brings me to something else- I associate the Science Team all with specific colors, yes. But as a whole, I associate them all with one color: pink. The Science Team is, at the end of the day, built on love. They all love each other so, so much.

It's shown in how Gordon constantly worries about them all and tries to protect them, keeping them out of the way of danger, letting Coomer use the HEV charger before him. (Hell, even with Benrey, who he despises, he worries about him constantly. He yells for him to not run into danger, and is clearly INFURIATED when Forzen kills him.)

It's shown in how Darnold, someone who clearly doesn't really like Gordon all that much, still moved to help him, to give him back his arm and keep him alive, even when he clearly found Gordon at least somewhat irritating.

It's shown in how Dr Coomer, a minute after trying to murder Gordon in a desperate attempt to be free of the game, upon seeing just how much distress he was in, moved to reassure him: I won't hurt you. I am your friend.

It's shown in how Bubby, after everything, helped Gordon after they reunited (and didn't throw Benrey under the bus for the things that happened).

It's shown in how Benrey clearly loves Gordon in some way, and how he tells the skeletons to not hurt Tommy, and sings pink at Tommy when he first sees him.

It's shown in how Tommy, in an attempt to comfort Gordon after the nightmare that just happened, offered him a soda.

The Science Team is built on love.

#hlvrai #black mesa sweet voice #sweet voice #cassie rambles #🛂can i see your passport? please [benrey freeman]#🧪delete that. delete that right fuckin now. [darnold pepper]#🚀a girl never kisses and tells! [dr bubby]#🧃slower than molasses drips off a spoon! [tommy coolatta]#🥊look gordon! ropes! [dr coomer]#🔫I’M GOING FUCKING NUTS [gordon freeman]

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