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Last night as I was lying in bed I suddenly realized that all these fic where people are colorblind until they meet their soulmates (so far in my experience) have completely failed to consider the kinds of effects such a large colorblind population would have on design, industry, and the market.
Consider: What if, say, 70% of the adult population is colorblind? People who can see color, and hence perceive when things clash, are now a minority. Probably one that spends a lot of time wincing at clothes, houses, and everything in the world designed for shades of gray. If color vision is that rare, there's no need to make special provisions to run things for them. Checking that things match is probably a kind of specialty service and most people wouldn't bother to care, which means that the pigment industry will use whichever dyes or paints are most effective for cost/wear to get the shade of gray in their design... which might or might not clash horribly with each other. At the same time, 30% is high enough to make the fantasy of achieving one's soulmate attainable, so color vision is something people freely fantasize about, so color-matching markups can be presented as planning ahead, or a way to appear indistinguishable from the privileged to other color viewers (I'm not quite sure how you'd go about appearing to have color vision to people who don't have it...) Point is, this situation is complex.
And then what if the likelihood of meeting one's soulmate is pretty high, and around 10% of the adult population is colorblind? So the world is set up for people with color vision and now the colorblind are a marginalized group. If you can afford to, you pay extra to make sure your shit matches, so the poor can't, and now color matching is a status marker, which makes paying for it more important for people who can afford it...
...and either way, there's gonna be services set up, or maybe sections of stores where everything already matches, or color codes on clothing tags...
...where's the worldbuilding? Where's the dystopia?????
Consider: What if, say, 70% of the adult population is colorblind? People who can see color, and hence perceive when things clash, are now a minority. Probably one that spends a lot of time wincing at clothes, houses, and everything in the world designed for shades of gray. If color vision is that rare, there's no need to make special provisions to run things for them. Checking that things match is probably a kind of specialty service and most people wouldn't bother to care, which means that the pigment industry will use whichever dyes or paints are most effective for cost/wear to get the shade of gray in their design... which might or might not clash horribly with each other. At the same time, 30% is high enough to make the fantasy of achieving one's soulmate attainable, so color vision is something people freely fantasize about, so color-matching markups can be presented as planning ahead, or a way to appear indistinguishable from the privileged to other color viewers (I'm not quite sure how you'd go about appearing to have color vision to people who don't have it...) Point is, this situation is complex.
And then what if the likelihood of meeting one's soulmate is pretty high, and around 10% of the adult population is colorblind? So the world is set up for people with color vision and now the colorblind are a marginalized group. If you can afford to, you pay extra to make sure your shit matches, so the poor can't, and now color matching is a status marker, which makes paying for it more important for people who can afford it...
...and either way, there's gonna be services set up, or maybe sections of stores where everything already matches, or color codes on clothing tags...
...where's the worldbuilding? Where's the dystopia?????
