“But Medic, why is your Volt yellow?”
Readers new and old have probably seen a recurring pattern on this blog. Many pictures of Warframes used in my articles have a pretty bright colour. Most of my gear is coloured yellow, using a strong yellow from the free Halloween palette. Depending on the Warframe, I’ll add black and a tertiary colour, so I’m not 100% a banana. The question though is WHY do I look so derpy, in my nearly-banana look? I could have some actual decent fashion sense, but I am dedicated to yellow.
Why though?
To stand out from a crowd
The most obvious reason is so that I actually stand out. While players can be insanely creative with their Fashionframe, there are a lot of popular colours. Black with a highlight colour is common, as is doing Prime-like Orokin look. The pseudo-Umbra style is very popular, especially with the matching armour. Gold and silver metallics are also pretty common.
However, yellow overall isn’t a popular colour. In the 4 years I’ve been playing Warframe, I haven’t seen many players who use yellow as their main colour. And I have seen only a handful of players using the same yellow, black and blue Fashionframe that I use.
“Where do the blue and black bits come in?”
Well, I don’t want to be completely yellow. A flat one colour on all colour channels looks weird. In fact, it looks so weird that traditional Pink Rhinos will use different pinks, just to make themselves more textured.
In my case though, I generally have blue on metallics and trims, and black as the secondary colour after yellow. As much as I like the colour, I also want to see the cool details on my Warframe. I prefer a dark blue as my metallic colour, to make things not completely bright and in-your-face. Black on the other hand helps balance the fuckton of yellow I normally use.
Black on yellow is also pretty cool, giving me a bumble bee look. Although I have also been described as “Kill Bill”-looking. My Nova in particular pulls off the Kill Bill look nicely.
A convoluted reason based on years of my fictional writings
There’s a more obscure reasoning, and it involves the Phoviverse, my fictional writings. One of the main protagonists is Arkay, a being whose colours are mostly black and yellow. In Arkay’s case, he has organic armour plating coloured yellow, with black skin underneath. When I first realized I could customize the colour of my starter, I could see some sort of resemblance. This however was something I couldn’t do at first, because I didn’t have any colour palettes. So I ended up helping a friend and opening some relics, and traded them to get a decent colour palette.
These days, there are a lot more colour palettes, and many of them have been free. In fact, my main look in Warframe can be done for free. The main colour is a Halloween-palette yellow, alongside a black from the Smoke palette that I got for free, and a blue that appears in a lot of different palettes. But I still keep the main yellow, based on Arkay.
Ironically, my Tenno is called Retvik, and Retvik within the Phoviverse has a very different colour scheme. The red, gold and black look is what Retvik of the Phoviverse uses, and I did switch to it after I hit MR30. However, I wanted to feel more unique, and switched back to Arkay’s colour scheme.
I just like yellow as a colour
Finally, the last and simplest reason. I really like the colour yellow Not every yellow, just standard bright yellow. It’s bright and warm and cheerful. Sure, the colour yellow has some negative views (bright, sickly and often a warning colour) but all colours have negatives attached to them.
Really though, I just like being unique. Being unique is cool.