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07/28/2005: What is it with fanfic and weird eye descriptions?
Sometimes my mind really boggles at the way eyes are described in fanfic. It actually throws me out of stories every so often, because the description seems just so ridiculous to me. Unfortunately that also happens in stories I quite enjoy otherwise, not just badfic. It's not even just the purple prose like color names that some writers love to use for eyes, like "cerulean" or whatever. Though actually at the top of my list is "seafoam green", because to me that evokes singularly unpleasant associations of grayish green algae-like slime residue. But then that's probably just me and the majority of readers has attractive associations with "seafoam green".
No, what gets to me is when character A gazes into character B's eyes and notices that somehow the color of those eyes changes with B's emotions. I admit, there are probably people with much more extensive eye gazing experience than me, but I actually have never seen human eyes to spontaneously change color, much less change color based on the owner's mood. I can sort of buy that eye colors look slightly different depending on the light and maybe the surroundings, like if I squint, my own murky grayish blue irises might sometimes look a little bit closer to actual blue, but it's extremely unlikely that they would suddenly appear to be a clear blue, or an actual gray regardless of any mood swings I have. Likewise, I if it isn't an alien with chameleon abilities it's dubious that a character's eyes would suddenly change from "sea green" to "storm gray" and then to "deep blue" -- btw this is an actual example from the a SW story I just read that jarred me into ranting in my blog. The poor character with a lot mutually exclusive eye colors was Obi-Wan, he seems to be popular for that kind of thing.
I really don't get it. Do other people actually perceive eye colors as changing to such a degree? Do authors think it's poetic license, like the phrases that eyes "harden", "darken", "sparkle" or whatever? But then the latter I tend to interpret as a shorthand for the whole facial expressions to change, just centered around a change in the expression of the eyes, It's not like I visualize the actual eyes to get darker literally. Not like when an author tries to tell me that Obi-Wan's eyes were gray then green then blue, and that somehow that also communicates his mood more or less clearly to whoever gazes at him, instead of telling the other that he's wearing some new color-changing contact lenses...
