today’s weird pet peeve

[dragonlady7]

via https://ift.tt/2NdSRfM

I’m getting a weird bug up my ass about all this Good Omens content that goes on and on about Aziraphale’s “baby blue” or “pale blue” or even “bright blue” eyes– it’d be one thing if they were bookverse because I really don’t think the book specified, but a lot of them are explicitly TV-verse and good lord Michael Sheen does not have baby blue eyes, nor are they pale, nor are they even reliably blue, depending on the lighting, and it just seems so insultingly reductive to call them that! like oh my gosh, if you’re going to describe something you should really describe it! it’s so much more effective!

i get there are great song lyrics about pale blue eyes and such, I’m not specifically mad about the Velvet Underground thing (and I mean, I’m not mad about any of it, it’s just something that’s poking me strangely), but come on. Actually I’ve got a kind of half-formed long-brewing weird thing I can’t articulate about the conflation of blue eyes with goodness, which I don’t know how to talk about, and how weird that is, and how brilliantly and sinisterly that trope gets subverted sometimes, but anyway, it’s weird to make your angels blue-eyed as a given thing, guys, it’s a weird thing to be invested in and to lean on and to clearly not pay that much attention to (because it’s not! really in! the text! and by that I also mean the TV show! his eyes are not really blue!), and I don’t know how to articulate that any better or make it a deep Thing like I suspect it might or might not be. 

(In case it’s not clear, my objection is not that, like, his eyes aren’t “pure” or whatever, my objection is that if you actually looked at them to describe them that’s not the word you’d most likely reach for and so it’s really strange that it’s clearly being used in a kind of talismanic way at odds with direct observation, like it’s a Thing that of Course the Angel has Blue Eyes and it’s got very little to do with what you’d see if you looked.)

I had (somewhere in Tumblr’s infinite scroll, never to be found in search) seen a great interview with Sheen wherein someone actually asked him what color his eyes were and he answered with a sort of dismissive summary of why they look different depending on the lighting (he’s got varying levels of pigment in different parts of his irises and that makes lighting have a bigger effect than it does on most people) but I couldn’t find it when I Googled, and instead found a great Slate article about the way Sheen acts with his eyes and it tends to elevate his character roles all out of proportion to their presence in a script, so here, enjoy that as a remedy to my crankiness. (No, the article does not get into their color, but does point out how often the ridiculous character roles he takes require him to wear bizarre contacts. it was probably really funny for him to be in a show where everyone else was in the special effects contact lenses.)

Comments

[sabotabby]

This is a Thing in a lot of fic, I've noticed. I don't like it either. I've been guilty of getting characters' eyes wrong because lighting but yeah.

[dragonlady7]

Eye color is a funny thing. I mean, in real life, how well do you have to know someone before you really start to pay attention to their eye color? I remember when I was first dating Dude, it took me rather a while to be like "wait, your eyes aren't blue, what the heck are they?" because it actually is pretty hard to nail down non-blue light-colored eyes, that's a thing, and he was like 'duh green' and I was like... are they???
(They are. But like. Green eyes aren't bottle-green, usually. They're usually kind of hazy grayish-green.)

But they always wind up being so important in descriptions in writing, and then they get this weird propped-up kind of significance. Cerulean orbs and such.
And I just think it's weird, how often Blue Eyes are assumed to Be A Thing, they're so clearly standing in as a cliche for all kinds of other descriptive things, and I can't pick apart what it means.

I have weak murky pale blue eyes, and they've basically never been notable in any way, and even people who think I'm attractive wouldn't comment on them particularly because they're really not any kind of feature in my appearance, but I know if I were a character in a book before you know it there'd be some kind of not-actually-applicable adjective applied to them in no time. They're not like the sea, they're not cerulean, they're not periwinkle, they're not sapphire, they're actually kind of nondescript and while I wear a lot of blue, it doesn't tend to set them off or bring them out, because there's nothing to bring out. (They're not even sky blue, and anyway do you know how many colors of blue the sky is at any given time??)
My dude has really lovely eyes, and I have stared into them a lot over the years (not that much at any one time but you know, cumulatively), and I've never one time been like "ah! his gray-green orbs!" or whatever. He just looks like he looks, and sometimes the light catches his eyes and they're pretty, but mostly they're just irises and what I'm reacting to is the shape of the muscles and skin around them because I'm reading his expression because that's a major way that humans emote. So like. Y'know.

Anyhow, there's definitely some kind of eurocentric white supremacist standard of beauty thing going on where Blue is a Virtue and such, that I am not particularly prepared to pick apart but sure am going to poke with a stick while I try to come up with better ideas.

[chamerion]

It’s tough to untangle from the way that getting a little purple-prose-y about eyes is almost a genre convention of shipfic, and from the occasional weirdness of eye color on camera, but you’re definitely onto something re: Descriptions Of Sparkling Blue Eyes serving as shorthand for a lot of characterization implications, in a way that might be pretty uncomfortable if stated explicitly. Though tbh it’s brown eyes that I associate with descriptions that make me squirm. Personally I do notice eyes IRL, and deep warm brown ones are indeed lovely so I get the impulse to write odes to them, but every now and then there’s a certain exotifying vibe to those odes that is...icky.

[krait]

That's interesting! I haven't seen the show, so I wasn't aware what colour the actor's eyes were, but I'm guilty of paying less attention to eye colour than I ought. (I once wrote a line I was pretty proud of about a character's brown/hazel eyes, only to belatedly check canon and find they're blue! Oops. So much for my awesome line. Blue wouldn't work, so I had to scrap it entirely.)

[shadaras]

I feel like the last time I mentioned eye color in fic being blue specifically was about it being eerie/creepy, because really it isn't noticeable most of the time?

My brother has blue eyes with streaks of yellow-gold radiating out from the pupil and it's the most striking thing, but you also gotta be pretty close to notice it. I've got hazel eyes and mostly it only matters for the kinds of light where the sun hits and they look closer to gold. Eyes are great and beautiful but honestly you're only gonna notice the details if you've got good lighting and are specifically looking.

But yeah the thing where angels tend to be all pale and blue-eyed is deeply frustrating because brown eyes are lovely too, and striking eyes are more about intensity than color anyway.

[szzzt]

Back in Gundam Wing fandom in the early 2000's was a great era for gem colors applied to eyes. I got pretty overexposed to it and basically resolved to never make a jewelly eye metaphor. (Or refer to anyone as "the blond/brunette" ever.) I should probably look forward to breaking that rule someday.

I guess eyes are things that people pay a lot of attention to for expression and characterization even though, unless you have an artist who is explicitly engaging the kind of attentive looking that you need in order to realisticly render another human on paper, we don't actually *look* very hard at what is really there. We look at the overall impression of the face, which is made in a split second by regions of the brain that exist to only make image/feeling impressions of faces. When writing, we've got to somehow use words that somehow pull up an image/feeling impression with the right feelings -- maybe eye color descriptions are a shortcut for doing that somehow. (As well as hooking into the stereotypes we carry around, yuck.)

[szzzt]

At the moment I'm enjoying glorifying a protagonist's eyes by writing descriptions of him from the viewpoint of aliens who don't have visible irises or pupils. So humans look SUPER WEIRD and eye contact is UNCOMFORTABLE because where he's looking is SO OBVIOUS. I love science fiction.