What happened to the colour?

So, I have this odd little bit of story that grew out of a random picture I found on the internet. It's set in a city where everything is kind of drained of colour and individuality. Everything is grey and all the people are the same. The main character not only doesn't know her own name, it doesn't even occur to her that she should until she stumbles through a portal to somewhere outside the city and one of the people there asks her. There's also a bunch of faceless not-quite-people who roam the city and occasionally eat people. All in all, it's kind a fairly even mix of creepy and depressing.

My problem is that I don't know why it's like that. Anyone want to throw out some ideas about why and how the city ended up the way it is?

Thanks :D

A fractured timeline, a dead fragment that fell through the cracks between seconds. It's drifted into a universe that's now an afterimage, fading away to eventual nothingness like the sparks of a firecracker. The energy of their existence leaks into the void, taking with it their reality. Color is merely a symptom. Others should start to appear as the energy drain continues. Tangibility of matter may be next, not completely ghostly, but translucent at first and partly malleable depending on the speed of the interaction. Fast moving objects may find themselves embedded within other things, overlapping them but not damaging either. Another effect could be sound. The distance it carries becomes reduced, and it no longer echoes. The atmosphere will begin to get colder as this progresses, and the light of the sun will fade a small degree each day. Eventually it will provide no more light than the moon.

Someone dripped too much turpentine on this land.

It could be the shadow world with the portals to and from the normal world being shadows. Something along those lines maybe

Could be an afterlife scenario, either heaven, hell, or purgatory. It could be a world held hostage by a sorceror with some awesome powers. Could be the dream of a sick girl. A parallel universe. It could be an in-between time. It could be a metaphor for a coming of age story about finding one's identity. It could be an experiment.

Could be perfectly normal and other worlds with colour, life and inquisitiveness are the weird freaks of nature where something extra got into the mix. Perhaps worlds like the one we live in are actually the heavens, but being eternally cynical the inhabitants long for (an imaginary) better still?

I did something a little like this and had it be in the future where people were pretty much all the way controlled by the government and everything was government-y. (Which is kinda what I'm afraid is going to happen but that's just what I think because I'm crazy and think weird things. XD)

You have just described Obama's America...drum roll......

Sounds to me like you have a half-formed dreamscape there. It's a world fueld by the unconsious desires of some random bloke with serious issues. Get your people out of there before the sleeper awakens!

First off, I love this idea. Have you ever read The Giver? I'm eerily reminded of The Community that Jonas grew up in when I read your description. Anyways, on to your question. I second the idea of it being a fragment of the timeline that fell between the cracks.

Some sort of post-apocalypse society, where the people and the society are not fully functional?

You've pretty much described the world of "The Giver," with one difference: the people in that story have names (which are assigned to them at birth by officials who are not their parents).

A city where everyone is the same is not self-sustaining, since it takes different people to do different jobs. If colors are not visible, food won't look or taste good (assuming people there even eat real food). So it's not terribly realistic, but it might fit into a surreal story.

I agree that it sounds quite a lot like 'The Giver' but hey, nothing is new under the sun.

Well, you say everything is grey. What if the colours did exist, it's just nobody could see them? They're all colourblind? (Did this happen in the Giver? I don't remember...) I mean, maybe it's some sort of disease(?) that infiltrated the society, or... something like that.

This reminds me of the Wii game 'De Blob', where the inky corporation has sucked all the colour out of the city and turned the radians into graydians who do boring jobs and are allowed no individuality. Enter a giant anthropormorphic paintball to bring colour and life back to the city!

Seriously, though, this has quite interesting imagery. Maybe it's the black-and-white world created when cameras took black-and-white photos. These people are only imitations of the real world and lack meaning or individuality, and they struggle to break the roles they were snapped in.

Ooh, lots of interesting suggestions.

I have indeed read the Giver. The way I understood it, the people in that book were more or less colourblind. My people can see colour, there just isn't any there to see. The main distinguishing feature of the portal is that it isn't grey.

The lack of individuality they had was also more a result of socialisation and government regulation. What I'm going for is more a case of some force sucking away the colour, both literal colours of things and metaphorical colour in the form of emotions. It isn't the natural state of the world, because the main character has vague memories of things having been different. She understands that there's something not quite right in the world, even if she can't quite place what it is

Maybe they are in a black and white painting ? Kind of Mary Poppins style, but darker.

Are you familiar with the film "Pleasantville"? Two modern teens get sucked into the old black-and-white TV show they are watching. The whole world in the show really is black and white, and gray, and all the characters look and behave like TV cliches from the 50's. There are no toilets the restrooms at the high school, because no TV character ever used one. The books in the school library are all blank, because they're just props. There is no sex -- until the modern girl seduces a local boy. Then he suddenly can see colors, and as other characters discover sex, color starts showing up everywhere. The library books even become real books, because the modern teens insist that they're full of stories -- and so they are.

I went into so much detail because I loved the film. Perhaps your character is trapped in a fiction, too -- a drawing, a painting, as was suggested, or even a rough draft of a story ...

Could have been an otherworldly gate.

Cool idea. Reminds me of a story I wrote in middle school that was supposed to be a myth of how colors came to exist. Which is completely pointless for your story, but I just wanted to mention it. I'd never thought of actually making a *cool* story with that idea before. :)

Could it be that something's sucking the magic out of the world, and the loss of color is just a symptom? I mean, what use would an outside entity have for a bunch of random colors? Magic, however, I can see someone wanting to collect as much of as possible. And it might also explain why the society has become so blah - nobody has any metaphorical magic left in their lives either.

Though I really do like the idea of it being some sort of shadow world, or the laws of reality breaking down & eventually resulting in objects going through each other. Which, for that matter, could be a symptom of *too much* magic - if anything can happen, than anything *does* happen.

Or maybe this is the world the magic originates in - people in the "real" world draw magic from this other dimension or something, and have recently started depending much more on magic than they used to. So they're basically emptying the world the magic comes from, and it doesn't have time to regenerate. This could eventually cause breakdowns in the laws of physics & so on.