There is a quality that stories or media artifacts can have, in greater or lesser quantities, which my intuition keeps wanting to call brightly-coloredness (or “bright coloration,” if you insist).  Possibly because it does in fact correlate, in visual media, with how brightly colored the thing’s visual palette is likely to be.  But it’s not a visual quality, or at least not a purely visual quality.  It has something to do with the nature of the narrative, the conceptual presentation, the atmosphere.  And it’s important; some kinds of art basically don’t work at all without a certain level of bright color, and (less commonly) some things are doomed to fail artistically by being too brightly-colored.

It’s not any of the things that are usually meant by “lightness” or “brightness.”  It doesn’t mean childishness, or for that matter optimism or uplifting-ness or anything of that type.  I mean, yes, Pokemon is very brightly colored, and so are DC/Marvel superhero-type comics.  But so is Persona, which is hella “dark” according to most standard typologies.  Hell, Warhammer 40K, which is the thing whose picture can be found next to the encyclopedia entry for “grimdark,” is very brightly-colored.  And on the other end of the spectrum…Harry Potter, for all that it’s a treacly chirpy wish-fulfillment fantasy for children, is only moderately brightly-colored at most.  Lord of the Rings is not very brightly colored at all. 

My analytic mind is screaming here, because I’m pretty sure this is real, but I don’t actually understand what it is.

The best I’ve been able to come up with, on short notice, is that maybe it has something to do with the sense of agency and comprehensibility inherent in the work.  Being brightly-colored (according to this theory) means that it seems very possible for the characters to do things that are useful and understand things that are meaningful.  A lack of bright coloration, conversely, means that it often feels as though everything is mysterious or that the characters are just getting swept along by things outside their control (which may include their own emotions, depending on presentation).  The application to all of the media properties mentioned above is pretty straightforward.

…does anyone else have any idea what I’m talking about?  Does this seem like a concept that makes sense, that has any critical value?