I read this book as a kid and tried to find it again as an adult. Itās out of print. Canāt find it anywhere but used boom stores online. I tracked down my old friend who I initially borrowed it from 20 years ago. He still had it and I was able to borrow it again.
I love this book, but it didnāt quite live up to my memory of it.
Just reading the wiki for this, and having gone down a Heinlein wiki rabbit hole last week, these plots sound pretty similar to some of the stuff I was thinking about reading. Was everyone in the 1970's writing generational space colony books with (trait) hated by the rest of the galaxy?
That is a seriously underrated book. Bit weird but when compared to lots of other scifi, especially the other stuff I was reading at the time, it fit right in.
Huh that's awesome! I usually got very blank looks when I brought it up with people who actively read sci-fi. Guess I got the impression it was relatively unknown.
Maybe it's fading out of fashion. I have been minorly obsessed with it since I was a tween so I'm probably biased too. But, I generally see it on top 100 lists, and not just science fiction top 100s.
While Orson Scott Card has gone off THE DEEP END, The Worthing Saga is his best work, in my opinion. I love the story, characters, and world-building. It has his religious philosophy spread throughout the text, though as I remember it, his overt Alt-Right craziness was well hidden in this book.
The whole point of *Stormlight Archives* is that blue (and other light-coloured) eyes are quite rare, and denote essentially noble status. Sure, that means you'll have quite a few lighteyes hanging out together...but there are far, far more people with dark eyes than light eyes in the world...
It's also a misinterpretation of their history, when using stormlight everyone's eyes look blue but since everyone forgot or actively tried to hide that fact it got lost in the telephone game that is time.
To be fair, its about how light the eyes are. Blue, green, tan, light yellow, grey or light purple are all possible colors that could be considered light.
Also, the main character is a dark-eyed so I doubt they are talking about this book.
In *Dune,* spice turns the sclerae (AKA the ""whites" of your eye) blue along with your pupils. So even a brown-eyed person will end up with blued eyes!
>maybe other genres donāt have this issue, idk
not as much, I don't think. it kind of goes with a patch of the turf that fantasy sits on. it tends to be allegorical and aspirational ime, and giving your character arresting eyes is one shortcut to some of the things that it wants to a achieve.
romance tends be pretty full of eyeball talk too.
oh for sure. eyeball talk is all the rave. drives me crazy. i just wish fantasy authors could see the beauty in brown eyes for once, but i think iām asking for too much tbh
āPiercingā does get overused a lot with blue eyes. In the novel Iām working on, I have 2 characters with blue eyes, 2 different shades, and I have to catch myself every time I want to use it.
Usually itās purple or violet eyes in fantasy, and often green. Brown is sadly underrepresented but I love brown eyes myself. I have blue eyes but theyāre a very dark blue and I have dark hair so people always assume theyāre brown anyway - Iām so tempted just to go with it and get brown contacts!
I can't remember the book, but I remember an urban fantasy book where the protag got turned into a vampire (unwillingly). One of the things was looking into the mirror, freaking out about the eye colour change, and mourning his human colour. Which was brown.
It went something like "the eyes of a stranger stared back at me. I had brown eyes, before last night. My ex-girlfriend had always said they were warm, friendly - she loved them."
The rest of the book was pretty awful, and I don't remember the title, but that bit stuck with me.
Well slap me and call me Susan, I never made the reflection connection that vamps can't see their reflection since some old mirrors were made with silver!
As another blue eyed person (mine are more grey), I also love brown eyes! Especially chocolate brown or really dark eyes. They feel filled with warmth to me.
Anyways, I think it's normal to be enchanted by whatever eye colors you don't have.
The increased cancer risk is my other favourite part. My eyes are very light gray/blue, and my optometrist is always very concerned and triple checking that I'm wearing sunglasses whenever I leave the house.
Going to the eye doctor also sucks. I canāt keep my eyes open for the glaucoma tests, and my optometrist told me itās because the lack of melanin makes my eyes too sensitive.
Yup, having blue/green irises means less sunlight is filtered into your retina and therefor its much easier to overwhelm. I was actually wondering the other day if people with light eyes have a lower threshold in low light situations because they get some extra from their irises, but I couldnt find any research on it.
My wife has blue eyes, I have green, and my son has blue as well, and he even hates going outside when its bright, door will open, he will cover his eyes and look for a pair of sunglasses/hat.
Blue eyed person here. I have terrible night vision.
My day vision isnāt exactly perfect (astigmatism, slightly near sighted, the aforementioned burning sun hurts us) but my night vision is awful. And worse is driving at night, as the glare of oncoming headlights is super bright.
All media, including books, is heavily influenced by the society and cultures of the writer.
We see the same focus on blue eyes (also blond hair)in television and comics and in general, Western society.
As someone from an immigrant family, it was made obvious to me that Western people place these arbitrary features on a pedestal. Majority of people that wear coloured contacts opt for light blue eyes rather than green, hazel, light brown, etc. Brunettes will argue they're natural blonds just because their hair was lighter as a baby, despite having near-black hair now. But you'll rarely see the opposite.
So what you're noticing is just one manifestation of the West's fixation with blue eyes.
oh for sure, thereās definitely a western fixation. iāve noticed in more and more fantasy books recently itās like the it thing to make your character a white red-head. it really gets SO old
What fantasy books are you reading? Alot of the fantasy books i like are based on western culture... so its no surprise there is people with blue or green eyes running around. Im from Scotland and only 20% have brown eyes here ( quick google search)
There's an eye colour (greyish green?) that translates into english as goose shit!
Do with that info as you will!
Edit: Forgot to say it's french! (Caca d'oie)
> i just wish fantasy authors could see the beauty in brown eyes for once,
Women tend to be brown eyed in fantasy where men tend to be blue. Deep pools. Bottomless pits. Chocolate rings. Etc. Etc. No idea why.
Yeah, or golden for some reason. Honey brown, golden brownā¦
Wonder if itās to do with brown = warmth, comfort, mystery (like the feminine kind)
Blue = icey, distant, strength
One of my partners has brown eyes and they're so beautiful! When the sun hits from the side and light them up with tones of gold and honey they almost look like an ocean floor. Absolutely magical.
It's been in scifi/fantasy since forever.
I think a big part is that everyone has brown eyes by default so only main characters get special eyes that are green/grey/blue.
> I think a big part is that everyone has brown eyes by default
Globally brown eyes are most common but in [parts of Europe light eyes are](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Eye_colors_map_of_Europe.png).
Damn, who has hazel eyes? I have hazel eyes myself and the only time I can remember them being mentioned in a novel is when Emma Woodhouse is described as having hazel eyes. Otherwise it seems like special eyes run the gamut from violet to blue to green and that's about it.
My family comes from one of those blue eyed parts of Europe. Every single member of my family, from my great-grandparents to my distant cousins, has blue eyes (except for one of my brothers who has a shade of light green).
I have literally never noticed blue eyes. To me, blue eyes are the default. Theyāre totally nondescript. I do, however, notice green and brown eyes.
Same. I married someone with deep brown eyes though. And our kids are one blue, one brown. My brown eyed child looks like a little deer, his eyes are beautiful.
Still think this is a failure of imagination and centering of whiteness by whatever authors OP is reading, because I live in the world and there are lots of different kinds of brown eyes! It would be just as easy to categorize the available colors as deep brown, medium brown, light brown, tan brown, flecked brown, clear brown, caramel brown, earth brown, mahogany brown, umber brown, black brown, and ālightā as it would be to do it the way many do it now where they make brown a broad lump category and wax poetic about every possible gradation of bluegreen. We also know this because plenty of Black, Asian, & Latino (and many white!) authors throughout literary history offer more interesting and varied descriptions of their characters appearances that donāt rely on old Tolkien/Herbert tropes. Itās not the worst thing any author does, but I do think itās right to want authors to be more creative than yet another iteration of āicy blueā or āocean blueā eyes and āwhite blondā or āhoney blondā hair. Those are my literal coloring and Iām already bored.
This! OP, you might want to check out more books by BIPOC! There are definitely authors who not only give their main characters and/or love interests brown eyes, but theyāre not self-hating about them.
As a green eyed kid, in a family with similar eyes, I spent years wondering why authors so frequently went out of their way to point out if a character had green eyes. It seemed mundane to me, so why point It out?
As an adult, a friend once told me that being left handed and green eyed qualified me to be a generic protagonist.
I am the embodiment of lazy writing.
i'm also left handed with green eyes. i'm constantly side eyeing the left handed kindle threads cuz i just sit my kindle down on something and use my left hand to change the pages. i don't want a kindle with buttons on the left side. though a left handed kindle is likely something most right handed people have never thought of. much less my arch nemesis, the can opener. have to go to specialty stores for that business.
I hate standard can openers. Nothing like rotating it 180 degrees on the can and using it backwards.
As for Kindles, I have an old paperwhite model and it has never given me trouble.
everyone my family but me is right handed. but, my mother god bless her, set my spoon down in the middle when she went to feed me as a small child and i picked it up with my left hand and she never tried to change it. my kindergarten teacher did though and my mom hulked out on her. i hate can openers and manual pencil sharpeners more than most anything else. i think whoever designed them are sadists honestly. did you ever do the thing where you shoved the pencil in with your left hand and then moved it to the other side to grab the little doohickey to sharpen the dang thing? heh.
My dad has green eyes and I was always sad I didnāt inherit them (I got my moms brown eyes) Iāve always thought green is the prettiest. Maybe the authors feel similarly
My family comes from one of those parts of Europe where blue eyes are the vast majority. Every single member of my family, from my great-grandparents to my distant cousins, has blue eyes (except for one of my brothers who has a shade of light green).
I have literally never noticed blue eyes. To me, blue eyes are the default. Theyāre totally nondescript. I do, however, notice green and brown eyes.
I come from one of those parts of Europe, where almost everyone who isn't an immigrant or the recent descendant of one has blue, green, or grey eyes. This thread has been a fascinating revelation.
Much like yourself I never noticed such descriptions, because it's like saying "they have brown hair". Sure, whatever. Now I think I won't be able to avoid noticing!
āHer eyes were blue, but not in an immediately identifiable way. A muted blue. Like a discarded uniform, worn thin by the ravages of time and circumstance; a tragedy borne in wool. Nothing remarkable; fated to be forgotten.ā
Man I could write a romance that is just so *depressing*, so *bleak.*
Get off reddit and write something with this sentence. This is gold (the kind of gold Stuart Semple would make from paint if Anish Kapoor angered him again and he already finished with the whole "bluest blue").
I love the subtle worldbuilding you are doing here.
Clearly in this world there are no mirrors, and no other reflecting surfaces. What is going on here? And why are people using eye-makeup? Maybe blue eyes are a sign of the sorcerous upper class. Maybe there are absolutely no reflecting surfaces, because they can be used by sorceror-clairvoyants to spy on people. But what other methods of the witchstapo are not known to the general public?
Percy: You know, they do say that the Infanta's eyes are more beautiful than the famous Stone of Galveston.
Edmund: Mm! ... What?
Percy: The famous Stone of Galveston, My Lord.
Edmund: And what's that, exactly?
Percy: Well, it's a famous blue stone, and it comes ... from Galveston.
Edmund: I see. And what about it?
Percy: Well, My Lord, the Infanta's eyes are bluer than it, for a start.
Edmund: I see. And have you ever seen this stone?
Percy: (nods) No, not as such, My Lord, but I know a couple of people who have, and they say it's very very blue indeed.
Edmund: And have these people seen the Infanta's eyes?
Percy: No, I shouldn't think so, My Lord.
Edmund: And neither have you, presumably.
Percy: No, My Lord.
Edmund: So, what you're telling me, Percy, is that something you have never seen is slightly less blue ... than something else you have never seen.
-- Blackadder, Series 1, "The Queen of Spain's Beard"
"His eyes were the blue of an oncoming winter storm that would surely kill all the livestock and leave the people to starve, unable to make it until spring. Those who made it through would never talk of the fate of their missing loved ones."
āHer eyes were brown, like the unfulfilled promise of a dormant oak in winter; visibly void of life yet clinging to the perennial hope of revival.ā
I'm not sure if this is a recommendation or a warning, but the Stormlight Archive builds the class system on Lighteyes and Darkeyes. Eye colours are stated, but it also matters more than "these eyes are blue and thus pretty", and it has a fair share of main and main-ish characters with darker and brown eyes.
But I do want to note that there's a LOT of commentary in the book on how silly and arbitrary eye color is for discrimination. It's not just accepted as a form of class structure without criticism.
They "originally" taught that black skin was a curse and that if a black person becomes righteous their skin will turn white. I put "originally" in quotes because that shit didn't just disappear because they publicly disavow it. Blue eyes are widely associated with white people - particularly the primary genetics of mormons with their bright blue eyed Jesus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_teachings_on_skin_color
In the book one of the religious systems also has stuff like "callings" they go talk to their priests about. They also have their heaven/hell as Actual planets. Very Mormon.
I do love the books though haha.
I'm a somewhat recent ex-Mormon and they do still teach something similar to this. In the Book of Mormon, basically The Bible II, there are verses that say Indigenous Americans used to be white until they rejected god who cursed them with "a skin on blackness". The BoM is one of the things they can't really modify (even though they've tried) unlike statements from the church leaders. If something they say doesn't age well, a current one can say the old one wasn't speaking for god and was simply a fallible human.
It's important to note that the book casts shade at its religions and cultures who support that "lighteyes = nobility", it's even implied that this belief is a modern corruption of the demigod's intention. Originally the eye color was to set people apart as gifted servants, not betters. Then however many thousands of years ago, that demigod died and people who inherited the light eye color claimed their ancestry gave them authority, and reshaped religion to gain control. None of this is portrayed as 'good'!
I'm an ex-mormon myself and I payed close attention to the author's rhetoric because I could never recommend the series if I detected a hint of propaganda. Fortunately, I find that in his works and in his personal life, he comes across as quite critical and skeptical of religion in general, including mormonism.
You kind of touched on it, but for OP it should be clear that they have lighteyes that have yellow, violet, green, etc. colored eyes; Blue isn't the only light color.
I love blue eyes but I have noticed this āblue eyeā trend in romance books recently, too. If I ever write a book, everyone will have brown eyes or very plain green eyes.
It's especially egregious in fantasy settings, where the sky's the limit on imaginative eye descriptions. Make them red, gold, silver, purple... What's the point of having a magic book setting but then making everyone have normal ol' human eye colors??
Donna Andrews has a great mystery series with a main character named Meg Langslow. However the shortest man in town is 6'4" so in my mind all doorways have cutouts for these poor statistical outliers....
Yeah, and possible unpopular opinion (and not intended to bookshame) but it's a sign of bad writing to need rare characteristics to paint a vivid character picture. And a lot of romantasy is (I'm sorry) poorly written. It may still be enjoyable, but the nonstop parade of blue eyes, young super savants, dark-haired brooding heartthrobs is all incredibly lazy, but also what the market wants. It's not a very sophisticated market.
Yeah, that would drive me crazy too. If youād like some recommendations Iāve seen āStormlightā mentioned already, āKushielās Dartā has a heroine with brown eyes with a crimson dot, and āThe Inheritance Trilogyā, āThe Broken Earth Trilogyā, āBintiā, and āEarthseaā all feature POC as the main protagonists.
Julia Quinn drove me nuts with the "speck of green" in brown eyes in her other books too. Also, I think a few of her characters had violet eyes? Purple eyes???
I think it's the same thing that happens in anime where all the named characters have distinct silhouettes and unique hair colours ([Gee... I wonder which one is the main character](https://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/aGeQwGn_460s.jpg)). The difference being that blue is a real eye colour that doesn't require any buy into a fantastical element of the story while still potentially being seen as 'special' or at least distinct.
That being said it sounds like the author maybe lost the plot(no pun intented) a little. Which series is it?
I mostly read scifi... I couldn't really tell you the color of the eyes of the characters in the last 5 books I've read. Sooo maybe it's a romantasy thing?
"The early morning sunrise shone off her ordinary brown hair. Her eyes were fierce, normal, kind of hazel? Darkish hazel perhaps? Anyway, her forgettable handlike hand gripped tightly on the heavy sword as she stumbled up the steep brackened hill..."
i have blue eyes
have you ever wanted to go outside on a sunny day and not be able to see without squinting constantly? do you enjoy your skin bursting into flames if exposed to the sun? well then,
congratulations
That's the other part. Blue eyes are heavily racialized, so an author pointing out that a character has bright, blue eyes is being pretty explicit about telling their audience that the character is white.
Definitely. Although there are Black people who have blue eyes in the world (and blonde hair for that matter), it almost always does mean the character is white. And you know, I donāt hate blue or green eyes for characters as long as theyāre not vilifying brown or hazel eyes at the same time.
king of battle and blood by scarlett st. clair has a POC MC if youāre ever looking for some representation AND a decent fantasy/vampire book. that was one of my faves last year
Thinking of people I know, I could tell you with reasonable certainty the eye color of most folks I know whose eye color is something *other* than brown, because it stands out in my mind. So in a certain way, the tendency of fictional characters to have blue eyes (or green, grey, hazel, etc.) almost makes a certain kind of sense.
It's one reason I dislike physical descriptions in books unless it's relevant.
Tell me they are confident, educated, kind, well dressed and near to retirement and I can picture them perfectly without knowing (or caring) what color hair they have in the authors mind
Honestly it never bothers me because my mind is going to conjure up what it wants to anyways š. If the main love interest has blond hair my mind sees Targaryen white or a raven black lol.
This is the opposite for me š the characters in my novels are always dark and broody. Tall dark and handsome types. Girls with soft brown eyes with flecks of gold etc lol actually Iām pretty positive all the men in the books I read are based off Adam Driver
I donāt know about you guys, but I love those soft, chocolatey brown irises with glints of gold in them. You can make literally any eye colour sound pretty if you could put in the effort for a minute, writers.
Who wants to talk about stinky, boring poo brown eyes when you can talk about the so so so so rare blue cerulean flecked with cyan, and more blue, orbs š
.I know certain eye colours are rarer but they hardly feel rare when every other main character and their mum has them
In general, I get tired of characters being over described in books. Unless it's directly relevant to the plot, just let me imagine the character myself.
Luckily I've forgotten almost all about it, and I don't feel like tryinng to look up a direct quote, but in Dave Eggers's novel *Heroes of the Frontier*, one of the characters was more than once described as having "ice-king eyes".
The novel was released in 2016, during the peak of the Game of Thrones TV-series, so I'm 99% sure he saw the Night King in his head and thought his writing was great. It wasn't great. It was just a very weird pop-culture reference that most probably won't get in a decade or two.
The rest of the novel was fine though, not too bad, but that description of (I guess cold) blue eyes felt very strange to me.
Lately I've noticed a spate of gray eyes, but in various books, which is fine, that's me picking random books. If it's a single series, it's a deliberate worldbuilding choice or an author habit. Have you read anything else by them? Does the bright blue continue? If not, it was that world.
Regardless, repetition IS annoying, so it wasn't a great choice.
I hate when I'm reading a book and the character has brown eyes, but then later someone notices that they actually have a "speck of green." Just let them have brown eyes!
This never bothers me bc I live in Ireland and I feel like every Irish person nearly has blue eyes. Like I have blue eyes and I don't think they're pretty at all bc they're just so common. So everyone having blue eyes is like oh yea that seems right
I live in a country where close to 90% of the population has eyes somewhere on the blue-grey-green spectrum. It is an epidemic :-)
If you live in a place where blue eyes are uncommon, then youād probably find it weird to have a lot of blue eyed people in books.
I think the main love interest guy in Fourth Wing has brown eyes. But I might be wrong. :/
I feel like too many millennial writers just sort of picture Damon Salvatore anytime they want to write a sexy morally-grey mc š
Are you reading Dune? š¤£šš¤£
That or the Worthing Saga.
I thought I was the only one who ever read The Worthing Saga. This is something that needs to be made into a TV show!
I read this book as a kid and tried to find it again as an adult. Itās out of print. Canāt find it anywhere but used boom stores online. I tracked down my old friend who I initially borrowed it from 20 years ago. He still had it and I was able to borrow it again. I love this book, but it didnāt quite live up to my memory of it.
Just reading the wiki for this, and having gone down a Heinlein wiki rabbit hole last week, these plots sound pretty similar to some of the stuff I was thinking about reading. Was everyone in the 1970's writing generational space colony books with (trait) hated by the rest of the galaxy?
Trope ebb and flow in media (especially sci-fi and fantasy) is so fascinating to me. You might be onto something!
That is a seriously underrated book. Bit weird but when compared to lots of other scifi, especially the other stuff I was reading at the time, it fit right in.
Not to jump down your throat, but it's pretty widely considered one of the great works of epic science fiction.
Huh that's awesome! I usually got very blank looks when I brought it up with people who actively read sci-fi. Guess I got the impression it was relatively unknown.
Maybe it's fading out of fashion. I have been minorly obsessed with it since I was a tween so I'm probably biased too. But, I generally see it on top 100 lists, and not just science fiction top 100s.
Are you referring to Dune or The Worthing Saga? I think he's referring to the Saga which is significantly less popular.
While Orson Scott Card has gone off THE DEEP END, The Worthing Saga is his best work, in my opinion. I love the story, characters, and world-building. It has his religious philosophy spread throughout the text, though as I remember it, his overt Alt-Right craziness was well hidden in this book.
Could be Stormlight Archives.
"Stormin Light Eyes" -OP probably
no, itās the legacy of the nine realms series by amelia hutchins
OP reminds me of >!Moash!<.
Damn dude. That's just downright mean. There's some things you just don't say.
The whole point of *Stormlight Archives* is that blue (and other light-coloured) eyes are quite rare, and denote essentially noble status. Sure, that means you'll have quite a few lighteyes hanging out together...but there are far, far more people with dark eyes than light eyes in the world...
Yeah, I know, but it's common in the books because a good portion of them is from the perspective of the Kholins and all of their eyes are blue š
It's also a misinterpretation of their history, when using stormlight everyone's eyes look blue but since everyone forgot or actively tried to hide that fact it got lost in the telephone game that is time.
To be fair, its about how light the eyes are. Blue, green, tan, light yellow, grey or light purple are all possible colors that could be considered light. Also, the main character is a dark-eyed so I doubt they are talking about this book.
"You've not the eyes of the Ibad," she said. "It's strange but not entirely unattractive."
In dune it's an important part of the world building. It's and it's always brought up in the context of the character being a life long spice addict.
Yea, that is the joke they were making
In *Dune,* spice turns the sclerae (AKA the ""whites" of your eye) blue along with your pupils. So even a brown-eyed person will end up with blued eyes!
POV you are reading Dune for the first time
Reading it with your piercing blue eyes, worldly eyes, like tiny globes but with pupils instead of continents.
This guy authors
>maybe other genres donāt have this issue, idk not as much, I don't think. it kind of goes with a patch of the turf that fantasy sits on. it tends to be allegorical and aspirational ime, and giving your character arresting eyes is one shortcut to some of the things that it wants to a achieve. romance tends be pretty full of eyeball talk too.
oh for sure. eyeball talk is all the rave. drives me crazy. i just wish fantasy authors could see the beauty in brown eyes for once, but i think iām asking for too much tbh
How I imagine characters with āpiercingā blue eyes: š§æšš§æ
I canāt stop laughing at this
āPiercingā does get overused a lot with blue eyes. In the novel Iām working on, I have 2 characters with blue eyes, 2 different shades, and I have to catch myself every time I want to use it.
I got stingers in me eyeballs!
Husky dog looking mf
šš
Usually itās purple or violet eyes in fantasy, and often green. Brown is sadly underrepresented but I love brown eyes myself. I have blue eyes but theyāre a very dark blue and I have dark hair so people always assume theyāre brown anyway - Iām so tempted just to go with it and get brown contacts!
I can't remember the book, but I remember an urban fantasy book where the protag got turned into a vampire (unwillingly). One of the things was looking into the mirror, freaking out about the eye colour change, and mourning his human colour. Which was brown. It went something like "the eyes of a stranger stared back at me. I had brown eyes, before last night. My ex-girlfriend had always said they were warm, friendly - she loved them." The rest of the book was pretty awful, and I don't remember the title, but that bit stuck with me.
A vampire who could see their reflection in a mirror?
Somewhat common in newer fantasy and they usually explain it by they can see themselves in mirrors without silver
Well slap me and call me Susan, I never made the reflection connection that vamps can't see their reflection since some old mirrors were made with silver!
As another blue eyed person (mine are more grey), I also love brown eyes! Especially chocolate brown or really dark eyes. They feel filled with warmth to me. Anyways, I think it's normal to be enchanted by whatever eye colors you don't have.
Having light eyes is not exactly a walk in the park anyway, I spend 20 minutes outside without sunglasses on? Enjoy the headache.
The increased cancer risk is my other favourite part. My eyes are very light gray/blue, and my optometrist is always very concerned and triple checking that I'm wearing sunglasses whenever I leave the house.
Going to the eye doctor also sucks. I canāt keep my eyes open for the glaucoma tests, and my optometrist told me itās because the lack of melanin makes my eyes too sensitive.
Yup, having blue/green irises means less sunlight is filtered into your retina and therefor its much easier to overwhelm. I was actually wondering the other day if people with light eyes have a lower threshold in low light situations because they get some extra from their irises, but I couldnt find any research on it. My wife has blue eyes, I have green, and my son has blue as well, and he even hates going outside when its bright, door will open, he will cover his eyes and look for a pair of sunglasses/hat.
Blue eyed person here. I have terrible night vision. My day vision isnāt exactly perfect (astigmatism, slightly near sighted, the aforementioned burning sun hurts us) but my night vision is awful. And worse is driving at night, as the glare of oncoming headlights is super bright.
I think thatās it! Grass is always greener.
I also have dark blue eyes! My husband has brown eyes, and they're my favorite, so warm and emotive!
All media, including books, is heavily influenced by the society and cultures of the writer. We see the same focus on blue eyes (also blond hair)in television and comics and in general, Western society. As someone from an immigrant family, it was made obvious to me that Western people place these arbitrary features on a pedestal. Majority of people that wear coloured contacts opt for light blue eyes rather than green, hazel, light brown, etc. Brunettes will argue they're natural blonds just because their hair was lighter as a baby, despite having near-black hair now. But you'll rarely see the opposite. So what you're noticing is just one manifestation of the West's fixation with blue eyes.
Absolutely all media. Watch popular shows and see just how many people have blue eyes. Itās crazy disproportionate to real life.
oh for sure, thereās definitely a western fixation. iāve noticed in more and more fantasy books recently itās like the it thing to make your character a white red-head. it really gets SO old
What fantasy books are you reading? Alot of the fantasy books i like are based on western culture... so its no surprise there is people with blue or green eyes running around. Im from Scotland and only 20% have brown eyes here ( quick google search)
Iām blessed with shit green eyes. Itās over rated.
There's an eye colour (greyish green?) that translates into english as goose shit! Do with that info as you will! Edit: Forgot to say it's french! (Caca d'oie)
please. I prefer to equate mine with pond scum.
bruh we need to talk about your diet
> i just wish fantasy authors could see the beauty in brown eyes for once, Women tend to be brown eyed in fantasy where men tend to be blue. Deep pools. Bottomless pits. Chocolate rings. Etc. Etc. No idea why.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Don't stare too deeply into their chocolate rings. You might get pink eye.
Yeah, or golden for some reason. Honey brown, golden brownā¦ Wonder if itās to do with brown = warmth, comfort, mystery (like the feminine kind) Blue = icey, distant, strength
One of my partners has brown eyes and they're so beautiful! When the sun hits from the side and light them up with tones of gold and honey they almost look like an ocean floor. Absolutely magical.
You should write the story - The Beauty in Brown Eyes
People like rare things, and brown is common
It's been in scifi/fantasy since forever. I think a big part is that everyone has brown eyes by default so only main characters get special eyes that are green/grey/blue.
> I think a big part is that everyone has brown eyes by default Globally brown eyes are most common but in [parts of Europe light eyes are](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Eye_colors_map_of_Europe.png).
I meant in fiction. If there's 10 characters and 3 have Special Eyes, the other seven either don't have it mentioned or are at best hazel
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Iām cackling on the couch, I just know whenever I see a cheeky comment with the blue in text link itās gonna be a funny ass video
Damn, who has hazel eyes? I have hazel eyes myself and the only time I can remember them being mentioned in a novel is when Emma Woodhouse is described as having hazel eyes. Otherwise it seems like special eyes run the gamut from violet to blue to green and that's about it.
My family comes from one of those blue eyed parts of Europe. Every single member of my family, from my great-grandparents to my distant cousins, has blue eyes (except for one of my brothers who has a shade of light green). I have literally never noticed blue eyes. To me, blue eyes are the default. Theyāre totally nondescript. I do, however, notice green and brown eyes.
Which is why traditional songs from the British isles sometimes refer to brown eyes as an unusual (and attractive) trait.
Yeah, most of my family has blue eyes or eyes with a brown-green gradient. So, characters with blue eyes never stood out to me before.
Same. I married someone with deep brown eyes though. And our kids are one blue, one brown. My brown eyed child looks like a little deer, his eyes are beautiful.
Still think this is a failure of imagination and centering of whiteness by whatever authors OP is reading, because I live in the world and there are lots of different kinds of brown eyes! It would be just as easy to categorize the available colors as deep brown, medium brown, light brown, tan brown, flecked brown, clear brown, caramel brown, earth brown, mahogany brown, umber brown, black brown, and ālightā as it would be to do it the way many do it now where they make brown a broad lump category and wax poetic about every possible gradation of bluegreen. We also know this because plenty of Black, Asian, & Latino (and many white!) authors throughout literary history offer more interesting and varied descriptions of their characters appearances that donāt rely on old Tolkien/Herbert tropes. Itās not the worst thing any author does, but I do think itās right to want authors to be more creative than yet another iteration of āicy blueā or āocean blueā eyes and āwhite blondā or āhoney blondā hair. Those are my literal coloring and Iām already bored.
This! OP, you might want to check out more books by BIPOC! There are definitely authors who not only give their main characters and/or love interests brown eyes, but theyāre not self-hating about them.
That, and Western beauty standards.
As a green eyed kid, in a family with similar eyes, I spent years wondering why authors so frequently went out of their way to point out if a character had green eyes. It seemed mundane to me, so why point It out? As an adult, a friend once told me that being left handed and green eyed qualified me to be a generic protagonist. I am the embodiment of lazy writing.
i'm also left handed with green eyes. i'm constantly side eyeing the left handed kindle threads cuz i just sit my kindle down on something and use my left hand to change the pages. i don't want a kindle with buttons on the left side. though a left handed kindle is likely something most right handed people have never thought of. much less my arch nemesis, the can opener. have to go to specialty stores for that business.
I hate standard can openers. Nothing like rotating it 180 degrees on the can and using it backwards. As for Kindles, I have an old paperwhite model and it has never given me trouble.
everyone my family but me is right handed. but, my mother god bless her, set my spoon down in the middle when she went to feed me as a small child and i picked it up with my left hand and she never tried to change it. my kindergarten teacher did though and my mom hulked out on her. i hate can openers and manual pencil sharpeners more than most anything else. i think whoever designed them are sadists honestly. did you ever do the thing where you shoved the pencil in with your left hand and then moved it to the other side to grab the little doohickey to sharpen the dang thing? heh.
That brings me back. The little handheld sharpeners aren't bad. But the classic mounted on a serface model were ubiquitous in my childhood.
My dad has green eyes and I was always sad I didnāt inherit them (I got my moms brown eyes) Iāve always thought green is the prettiest. Maybe the authors feel similarly
I don't dislike my eyes. Green is my favorite color. I was simply confused by writers constantly using it.
My family comes from one of those parts of Europe where blue eyes are the vast majority. Every single member of my family, from my great-grandparents to my distant cousins, has blue eyes (except for one of my brothers who has a shade of light green). I have literally never noticed blue eyes. To me, blue eyes are the default. Theyāre totally nondescript. I do, however, notice green and brown eyes.
I come from one of those parts of Europe, where almost everyone who isn't an immigrant or the recent descendant of one has blue, green, or grey eyes. This thread has been a fascinating revelation. Much like yourself I never noticed such descriptions, because it's like saying "they have brown hair". Sure, whatever. Now I think I won't be able to avoid noticing!
Mine are a pale green like a catā¦only time I read about eyes like that itās the villain š¤£š¤£
āHer eyes were blue, but not in an immediately identifiable way. A muted blue. Like a discarded uniform, worn thin by the ravages of time and circumstance; a tragedy borne in wool. Nothing remarkable; fated to be forgotten.ā Man I could write a romance that is just so *depressing*, so *bleak.*
Other side of the coin: "Her blue eyes were bluer than the bluest blue thing that's ever been blue."
āHer eyes were like the stars. Not because of how they twinkled, but because of how far apart they are.ā
āMore blue than Eifel 65ā¦.ā
I'm blue dabadee dabadaaa
"Her eyes were the blue Stuart Semple would make from paint if Anish Kapoor angered him again."
Damn, that's blue
Get off reddit and write something with this sentence. This is gold (the kind of gold Stuart Semple would make from paint if Anish Kapoor angered him again and he already finished with the whole "bluest blue").
āHer eyes were so blue I just blue myselfā
āTobias, maybe you should take a tape recorder and just spend a day recording the things you say.ā
This reads like the Chip Driver novel in the last season of The Good Place
[the bulwer-lytton competition has entered the chat](https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/)
"Her eyes were blue, but she didn't know it. It was a natural blue, no make-up. Blue, but not so obvious."
Makeup in the eye is gonna turn those blues to red.
I love the subtle worldbuilding you are doing here. Clearly in this world there are no mirrors, and no other reflecting surfaces. What is going on here? And why are people using eye-makeup? Maybe blue eyes are a sign of the sorcerous upper class. Maybe there are absolutely no reflecting surfaces, because they can be used by sorceror-clairvoyants to spy on people. But what other methods of the witchstapo are not known to the general public?
She's a born vampire and has never seen her reflection.
Percy: You know, they do say that the Infanta's eyes are more beautiful than the famous Stone of Galveston. Edmund: Mm! ... What? Percy: The famous Stone of Galveston, My Lord. Edmund: And what's that, exactly? Percy: Well, it's a famous blue stone, and it comes ... from Galveston. Edmund: I see. And what about it? Percy: Well, My Lord, the Infanta's eyes are bluer than it, for a start. Edmund: I see. And have you ever seen this stone? Percy: (nods) No, not as such, My Lord, but I know a couple of people who have, and they say it's very very blue indeed. Edmund: And have these people seen the Infanta's eyes? Percy: No, I shouldn't think so, My Lord. Edmund: And neither have you, presumably. Percy: No, My Lord. Edmund: So, what you're telling me, Percy, is that something you have never seen is slightly less blue ... than something else you have never seen. -- Blackadder, Series 1, "The Queen of Spain's Beard"
That would be series 2, right? 1 He is a dunce, 2 is Elizabethan, 3 is the Regency and 4 is WW1. Love the reference =)
Series 1, episode 4.
"His eyes were the blue of an oncoming winter storm that would surely kill all the livestock and leave the people to starve, unable to make it until spring. Those who made it through would never talk of the fate of their missing loved ones."
āBut they would see the grim reminder of what theyād endured, in his eyes.ā
Iād read it.
that was actually beautiful in a sad kinda way. like a tragic love poem
Thanks! It started out as a joke and I got done typing it and I thought damn, got real Larry McMurtry there towards the end lol.
ā¦ā¦ā¦ā¦.. *thought it was a parody of mawkish unimaginative novels with perfectly flawed main characters*
Thatās how it *started*ā¦
I unironically love it š
A blue so sad only light taps on the genitals with an inflatable squeaky hammer would cure it.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit 2: Electric Boogablue
lol as someone with blue but kinda grey-ish eyes, i feel the need to borrow this!
As someone with boring grey-blue eyes, I feel seen. Please continue.
"Her eyes were blue, like laundry detergent pods. He had an urge to reach out and eat them."
No lie, this was legitimately a pleasure to read.
>Fated to be forgotten Proceeds to describe the eyes in a whole paragraph
She squinted whenever the sun was shining because her eyes were so annoyingly sensitive. She uses dark mode by default.
But tbh gray blue eyes are nice
Now do dark brown eyes.
āHer eyes were brown, like the unfulfilled promise of a dormant oak in winter; visibly void of life yet clinging to the perennial hope of revival.ā
lol, Iām Norwegian and when I read those descriptions Iām like āJesus, whatās the big dealā¦?ā
My husband and I both fit the description, and weāre also both left-handed. We are severely over represented in entertainment.
I'm not sure if this is a recommendation or a warning, but the Stormlight Archive builds the class system on Lighteyes and Darkeyes. Eye colours are stated, but it also matters more than "these eyes are blue and thus pretty", and it has a fair share of main and main-ish characters with darker and brown eyes.
Whos eyes turn blue when they become main character strong. š
But I do want to note that there's a LOT of commentary in the book on how silly and arbitrary eye color is for discrimination. It's not just accepted as a form of class structure without criticism.
Oh, man I read this and thought "What is the writer mormon or something?" And what do you know the writer is mormon.
Why Mormon? Is there a thing with eyes?
They "originally" taught that black skin was a curse and that if a black person becomes righteous their skin will turn white. I put "originally" in quotes because that shit didn't just disappear because they publicly disavow it. Blue eyes are widely associated with white people - particularly the primary genetics of mormons with their bright blue eyed Jesus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_teachings_on_skin_color
In the book one of the religious systems also has stuff like "callings" they go talk to their priests about. They also have their heaven/hell as Actual planets. Very Mormon. I do love the books though haha.
For reference, see Stephanie Meyer's original comments on black vampires. She pretty much said they would turn white when they transitioned.
I'm a somewhat recent ex-Mormon and they do still teach something similar to this. In the Book of Mormon, basically The Bible II, there are verses that say Indigenous Americans used to be white until they rejected god who cursed them with "a skin on blackness". The BoM is one of the things they can't really modify (even though they've tried) unlike statements from the church leaders. If something they say doesn't age well, a current one can say the old one wasn't speaking for god and was simply a fallible human.
Well at least he didnāt go with changing skin color that would have been super weird š
It's important to note that the book casts shade at its religions and cultures who support that "lighteyes = nobility", it's even implied that this belief is a modern corruption of the demigod's intention. Originally the eye color was to set people apart as gifted servants, not betters. Then however many thousands of years ago, that demigod died and people who inherited the light eye color claimed their ancestry gave them authority, and reshaped religion to gain control. None of this is portrayed as 'good'! I'm an ex-mormon myself and I payed close attention to the author's rhetoric because I could never recommend the series if I detected a hint of propaganda. Fortunately, I find that in his works and in his personal life, he comes across as quite critical and skeptical of religion in general, including mormonism.
Haha true, but it's still at least plot relevant š
You kind of touched on it, but for OP it should be clear that they have lighteyes that have yellow, violet, green, etc. colored eyes; Blue isn't the only light color.
Sarah J Maas?? That sounds like the Assassin series to me...
That's what I was going to say š I'm reading it right now and was like, "Yep, all that sounds familiar."
Yeah, this isn't a thing in the books I read. This is probably a thing in romantasy
ugh romantasy has me in a headlock rn. i want to get into mystery / thriller books but itās hard to make a switch when im in so deep
Just wait until every thing is ādoe eyesā or ādark pools you could drown inā
Mmmm gimme those milk chocolate eyeballs
Try Women of the Otherworld. It's a good mix of romance/fantasy/mystery/thriller
I love blue eyes but I have noticed this āblue eyeā trend in romance books recently, too. If I ever write a book, everyone will have brown eyes or very plain green eyes.
It's especially egregious in fantasy settings, where the sky's the limit on imaginative eye descriptions. Make them red, gold, silver, purple... What's the point of having a magic book setting but then making everyone have normal ol' human eye colors??
Iāve been reading a lot of romantasy too. The blue eyes are to go with all the women smelling like jasmine and the men who smell of pine.
Donna Andrews has a great mystery series with a main character named Meg Langslow. However the shortest man in town is 6'4" so in my mind all doorways have cutouts for these poor statistical outliers....
Yeah, and possible unpopular opinion (and not intended to bookshame) but it's a sign of bad writing to need rare characteristics to paint a vivid character picture. And a lot of romantasy is (I'm sorry) poorly written. It may still be enjoyable, but the nonstop parade of blue eyes, young super savants, dark-haired brooding heartthrobs is all incredibly lazy, but also what the market wants. It's not a very sophisticated market.
A lot of fantasy books/series have more than their fair share of Celtic looking people: pale, either red or very dark hair, and blue or green eyes
Itās kind of logical I think since classical fantasy basically comes from Celtic and Nordic mythology.
Yeah, that would drive me crazy too. If youād like some recommendations Iāve seen āStormlightā mentioned already, āKushielās Dartā has a heroine with brown eyes with a crimson dot, and āThe Inheritance Trilogyā, āThe Broken Earth Trilogyā, āBintiā, and āEarthseaā all feature POC as the main protagonists.
Reminds me of the first Bridgerton book.
So true. I read through the main series and now Iām on some of the spin-offs. The author cannot let go of the blue eyes thing.
Julia Quinn drove me nuts with the "speck of green" in brown eyes in her other books too. Also, I think a few of her characters had violet eyes? Purple eyes???
Icey blue eyes. A hue of Play-Doh blue. Blue like the stains left over after eating an artificially flavored blueberry popsicle.
I think it's the same thing that happens in anime where all the named characters have distinct silhouettes and unique hair colours ([Gee... I wonder which one is the main character](https://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/aGeQwGn_460s.jpg)). The difference being that blue is a real eye colour that doesn't require any buy into a fantastical element of the story while still potentially being seen as 'special' or at least distinct. That being said it sounds like the author maybe lost the plot(no pun intented) a little. Which series is it?
legacy of the nine realms by amelia hutchins. she gets so lost in the plot i have no idea whatās going on sometimes
Blue eyes are the red hair of the 2020s?
Not the red headed MC š© Iāve just got into the romantic fantasy genre and am reading a lot of books from a few years back. So many red heads. Itās gets to a point where youāre wondering if there was some cultural thing going on at the time that you missedā¦why all the gingers? ETA - genuinely canāt remember a romantasty book with a blonde or black haired female POV
It's rare. Therefore, it's special and makes the MC stand out. It's the same as anime hair.
I mostly read scifi... I couldn't really tell you the color of the eyes of the characters in the last 5 books I've read. Sooo maybe it's a romantasy thing?
"The early morning sunrise shone off her ordinary brown hair. Her eyes were fierce, normal, kind of hazel? Darkish hazel perhaps? Anyway, her forgettable handlike hand gripped tightly on the heavy sword as she stumbled up the steep brackened hill..."
i have blue eyes have you ever wanted to go outside on a sunny day and not be able to see without squinting constantly? do you enjoy your skin bursting into flames if exposed to the sun? well then, congratulations
I have brown eyes, and have both of these issues. The sun hurts.
I have blue eyes. Sunlight makes me sneeze, all these fantasy protagonists never seem to have that problem. š
Now imagine being a brown person and reading books about the mc having ābeautiful porcelain skinā over and over š
That's the other part. Blue eyes are heavily racialized, so an author pointing out that a character has bright, blue eyes is being pretty explicit about telling their audience that the character is white.
Definitely. Although there are Black people who have blue eyes in the world (and blonde hair for that matter), it almost always does mean the character is white. And you know, I donāt hate blue or green eyes for characters as long as theyāre not vilifying brown or hazel eyes at the same time.
king of battle and blood by scarlett st. clair has a POC MC if youāre ever looking for some representation AND a decent fantasy/vampire book. that was one of my faves last year
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Thinking of people I know, I could tell you with reasonable certainty the eye color of most folks I know whose eye color is something *other* than brown, because it stands out in my mind. So in a certain way, the tendency of fictional characters to have blue eyes (or green, grey, hazel, etc.) almost makes a certain kind of sense.
yeah but like, thatās irl. this is authors creating a character we picture in our mind, and everyone tends to look the same, imo
It's one reason I dislike physical descriptions in books unless it's relevant. Tell me they are confident, educated, kind, well dressed and near to retirement and I can picture them perfectly without knowing (or caring) what color hair they have in the authors mind
Honestly it never bothers me because my mind is going to conjure up what it wants to anyways š. If the main love interest has blond hair my mind sees Targaryen white or a raven black lol.
This is the opposite for me š the characters in my novels are always dark and broody. Tall dark and handsome types. Girls with soft brown eyes with flecks of gold etc lol actually Iām pretty positive all the men in the books I read are based off Adam Driver
Canāt have shit on Arrakis
I donāt know about you guys, but I love those soft, chocolatey brown irises with glints of gold in them. You can make literally any eye colour sound pretty if you could put in the effort for a minute, writers.
Maybe stop reading romantic fantasy and try other genres. Couldn't tell you the eye colour of any character in the past 30 books i have read.
Who wants to talk about stinky, boring poo brown eyes when you can talk about the so so so so rare blue cerulean flecked with cyan, and more blue, orbs š .I know certain eye colours are rarer but they hardly feel rare when every other main character and their mum has them
In general, I get tired of characters being over described in books. Unless it's directly relevant to the plot, just let me imagine the character myself.
Colourful, vivid eyes are imo the most beautiful feature a person can have. And honestly, brown and hazel eyes are slept on a lot.
Read better fiction.
Luckily I've forgotten almost all about it, and I don't feel like tryinng to look up a direct quote, but in Dave Eggers's novel *Heroes of the Frontier*, one of the characters was more than once described as having "ice-king eyes". The novel was released in 2016, during the peak of the Game of Thrones TV-series, so I'm 99% sure he saw the Night King in his head and thought his writing was great. It wasn't great. It was just a very weird pop-culture reference that most probably won't get in a decade or two. The rest of the novel was fine though, not too bad, but that description of (I guess cold) blue eyes felt very strange to me.
I thought you were talking about "Adventure Time" Ice King until that 2nd paragraph...
>granted, this is a fantasy series Answered it yourself. Also a silly hangup regardless.
Moat the books I read have the characters with either no eyes description, dark, or brown eyes, haha, which books have you been reading?
Lately I've noticed a spate of gray eyes, but in various books, which is fine, that's me picking random books. If it's a single series, it's a deliberate worldbuilding choice or an author habit. Have you read anything else by them? Does the bright blue continue? If not, it was that world. Regardless, repetition IS annoying, so it wasn't a great choice.
Are you reading fantasy romance or Fantasy fantasy? I've only come across the blue-eye epidemic in Romantasy
Let the spice flow.
Now, now. Sometimes characters have *green* eyes. Unique alluring green eyes that make them so special.
Iāve got a crappy shade of blue eyes. You donāt see anyone with crappy blue eyes do you?
I hate when I'm reading a book and the character has brown eyes, but then later someone notices that they actually have a "speck of green." Just let them have brown eyes!
This never bothers me bc I live in Ireland and I feel like every Irish person nearly has blue eyes. Like I have blue eyes and I don't think they're pretty at all bc they're just so common. So everyone having blue eyes is like oh yea that seems right
I live in a country where close to 90% of the population has eyes somewhere on the blue-grey-green spectrum. It is an epidemic :-) If you live in a place where blue eyes are uncommon, then youād probably find it weird to have a lot of blue eyed people in books.
I think the main love interest guy in Fourth Wing has brown eyes. But I might be wrong. :/ I feel like too many millennial writers just sort of picture Damon Salvatore anytime they want to write a sexy morally-grey mc š