Is Blue the right choice for Kanan's Lightsaber?

personally i would love to see orange and yellow. just keep red a sith color.

i actually meant in the new films.

 

I'm no expert on human psychology, but I suspect the reason for this tendency to prefer blue over the other colours you mentioned might have something to do with its rarity in nature beyond the basic sky colour. The other ones are very common throughout nature.

Consider fire. The colour of fire depends on the energy of the emitted photons (light) and their corresponding wavelengths. A shorter wavelength - at the blue/violet end of the visible spectrum - corresponds to a high energy. You tend not to find blue fire in nature, while yellow/orange/red fire or incandescence is ubiquitous. Issues relating to manufacturing and efficiency even prevented the introduction of blue LEDs until the 1990s, while other (longer wavelength) colours of LED were in production by the 1960s. This relative rarity of blueness, and its association with technology/civilisation versus primitivism, might have a subconscious influence on people's colour preferences.

Somewhat ironically given the talk of the Dark Side of the Force being a pathway to "unnatural" abilities, its colour scheme is strongly associated with natural phenomena, though not the most pleasant of them. If you upturn a large rock in a dark woodland, you'd probably find the colours of the Sith: shiny black beetle shells, red millipedes, and pallid larvae. Of course, the Sith colours (as well as the blaster bolts of the CIS and Imperial stormtroopers) are also associated with ubiquitous fire, especially the fire you'd find on Earth out in nature. Blue lightsabers, by contrast, are associated with artificiality and cleanliness. Blue and lightness in general are part of the colour scheme of the clone troopers as well.

 

And lots of fruit are red and black- some edible, some not.

Lightning could be thought of as "lightsaber-blue".

 

I'd say the colour with the most positive natural associations is green, due to chlorophyll. Green is linked to healthy vegetation, the sign of an ecosystem that can support a human or society. Red has the inescapable association with blood, the sight of which outside of a body normally isn't the best of signs for any onlooker.

 

Might be why Qui-Gon's is green, as is Yoda's, and Luke's in RoTJ.

 

Perhaps. The association with vegatation is very likely to be the reason for the green lightsaber colour.

Is it a coincidence that the more obviously aggressive, uptight or impetuous Jedi (Anakin, Obi-Wan, pre-Bespin Luke) tend to wield the blue lightsabers? That may be an indication of what Kanan could be like.

 

That is a possibility. In the Young Jedi TCW arc, if I remember correctly, when a youngling goes to search for a lightsaber crystal they will find just the right one, not by picking up crystals and sorting through their favorite, but by it standing out to them. Perhaps the Jedi who go on to become Temple Guards are all ones who end up having yellow crystals as the ones that stand out to them.

 

In the EU (Riptide) a character "cleanses" a Sith's crystal (turning it completely transparent) then attunes it to himself (turning it yellow) - and it produces a yellow blade as a result instead of a red one.

Mind you, that character's first lightsaber was purple.

The idea of an existing lightsaber's colour being changed by changing the crystal through attunement, is an interesting one - don't know if it's likely to come up outside the EU though.

 

Sometimes I can't even tell if threads are on topic any more.