beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I had some thoughts about eye color, mostly in fic. Mostly unlikely to interest many people.

(just noticed I typed that the American way out of habit. I keep up like this, all my brit cred will go bye bye. Um, I use phrases like go bye bye, I pretty much lack cred anyway.)

Eye color, in fic, is pretty important. If its a new character then telling us their eye color gives us important clues if its a Mary Sue or not (green or violet, run away now). If an established character its often used to get around the pronoun problem (too many 'he' things in a sex scene... um, you know what I mean...). So Spike's 'cerulean orbs' ...ack, gack, noooo... um, this is one of those pet peeves I have. They are blue. This is sufficient. ANYways, blue eyes look into brown (or sometimes 'chocolate', which oddly I tolerate better than cerulean, possibly because chocolate is inherently of the good), and that tells you who is who. Or of course yellow eyes look into red, and that tells you who is what.

The thing of it is when I look at someone, eye color is rarely among the things I notice. I mean on TV JM has blue eyes. Very, very blue. Blue as a very blue thing and really pretty with it. But in person I tend to notice more that he has arms. And is noteable 3 dimensional in key areas. Even on television I'm not likely to stop and zoom in to check who has what color eyes.

But when someone makes a mistake, that bugs me. Like, Buffy's eyes are not blue. Spike's eyes are, and Nina's, so its a fun kind of freudian mistake for Angel to make, but it rather undermines his 'forever love' case if Mr Photographic Memory cannot actually remember Buffy's eyes are hazel. Like, what part of her was he looking at all those years?

Or in fic if someone says Giles has blue eyes. Well, he sang 'Behind Blue Eyes'. But his eyes are not actually blue. So there are perfectly good fics I have read that bumped me out of the story every other paragraph because, not blue.

It is pretty trivial. But it is one of the few things that can actually be said to be plain wrong, not even characterisation or canon but observeable fact.

So, I get paranoid I'm going to write characters with the wrong color eyes.

Trouble is, I then find a certain lack of consensus about what color eyes people actually have. Brown is usually brown, but sometimes just 'dark' or, for maximum effect, 'obsidian' or 'jet'. I knew a guy who had eyes so dark that even up close you couldnt really tell the pupil from the iris. It looked really sexy actually. Like, permanent maximum dilation. So characters eyes being deep and dark does actually sound like fun.

But then you get the fact that eye color sometimes conveys important information. When Willow's eyes go dark, we are in trouble. Black eyes, bad magic. So should Xander's eyes be described as dark? Maybe if his character is in a bad place right then, otherwise it seems to me to drag in the wrong associations. And eye color definitely has associations. I mean the zany world of mary sue eyes demonstrates how special eye colors are used to denote specialness in a character. Green eyes, pay attention. Boring blue, not so much. But blue is still likely to be morally superior to brown. Which is, really, pretty strange.

And with characters you get connections from when more than one has the same eye color- like they are looking out at the world through the same eyes. I very much doubt actors are cast based on eye color, so this is less likely to figure on TV, but still, you can make patterns. In writing it can even be fairly subtle.

So, eye colors in my fics.
I have decided-

Giles has green eyes, with bits of brown. Technically you could call them hazel, but they are interestingly varied, asymmetric and mixed. Not quite one thing or another. Hazel sounds more monotone. Forest eyes. And forest is a theme I want to play with for him, along with branches.

Ethan has dark eyes. Dark, for his character, is a perfectly good description. The actor probably has brown eyes, but by fiat I decide that Ethan's eyes are basically grey. Then we get to storm cloud comparisons, darkening to night sky. It more or less fits the observeable facts, and its a fun set of imagery. Rayne rain. British skies.
Of course if I made his eyes brown then Giles would have little bits of Ethan in the way he sees the world, which would fit nicely. Trouble is I'm going for a very sky based color theme for Ethan, and brown skies are pretty rare.

Andrew has blue eyes. Andrew Wells, basic water imagery. Very emotional, always filling up. Tears, other feelings. Fits nicely. Wells water from below, link to Rayne rain from above. But more contained.

Oz has green eyes. I'm not sure if this would be the case if I walked up to him and looked, but it is the case in my stories. I want Giles and Oz to be connected right from the start. Since Giles is tall and dark and Oz is small and... well, basically ginger, sans bottle, this is a bit difficult to do. Eyes make the connection. See the world the same, green eyes. Also I want to play with deserts and mountains in his color themes, marginal survival zones, not enough water, not enough shade, parched places. But in the middle of all that, little sparks of green. Survival in harsh environments.

So we get green-and-brown, grey, blue, different green- forest, sky, water, little spiky plants. Which works the way I want it to.

Problem then becomes, anyone with brown eyes is going to be overlapping Giles a bit. Well, since the point of the stories is to tell things about Giles, introducing a new character is only to show bits of Giles, so they have to overlap Giles somewhere. So hopefully that should work out too.

Yes, I spend a lot of time thinking about colors and clothes and light and stuff that is real easy to put into TV shows but going to be a pain in the neck to make subtle in writing. Its how my brain works. In the absence of a multi million dollar budget to actually film the thing then words are all I have to work with.
*reminds self to buy lottery tickets just in case*