unwanted associations

[ratcreature]

Am I the only one who gets horrible associations if in a romantic scene the POV character describes their partner as having "liquid eyes"? Like horror images of liquefying eyeballs.

(ETA: It does not help if later the eye colors -- don't ask why there are several, it's that "hazel" phenomenon -- are described as "melting" into each other.)

Comments

[auburn]

Ooooooh, hee, yes! Also whenever I see someone write that 'their eyes followed' someone. I see eyeballs bouncing along at their heels now, trailing torn out ocular nerves and such. It's... disturbing. It's resulted in me using 'gaze' a lot more than I used to.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, some images are just wrong. I'm not quite as sensitive about the independently acting zombie body parts (roaming hands etc.), but liquid eyes as an image don't even make sense to me. I know that through some sort of convention it is supposed to be a soft look, I think? But how does that even go together with "liquid"? At best eyes can be sort of wet, if they fill with tears.

But then I have often trouble with eye descriptions.

[calime]

*snickers* Personally, for me, cows (with their huge, soulful, wetly gleaming eyeballs and looong lashes) tend to come to mind, unfortunately, but yeah, the literal interpretation does have some merit.

[ratcreature]

I always thought cows were the *intended* association, because it is meant to convey a soft look or something.

[calime]

Brrr, I'd hope not 'intended' ... or the intenders have never considered what's behind the 'soft look' ... for example, very sharp hipbones at a perfect height to clobber one's spleen ...
Cows, to my experience, tend to believe romance is dead and a way to one's heart is through four stomachs :) Also, there is nothing soft about them, they're very no-nonsense critters.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, though most cows I've met (not that many, I'm a city person) don't seem to be truly vicious at least, unlike goats. Goats are smart and ruthless (and of course they have rather freaky eyes too). I still remember a traumatic petting zoo experience I had when I was little. I have no idea why anyone thought goats to be a great choice for a petting zoo in the first place,even the small ones, but I, intending to do the usual petting zoo exchange of food pellets against allowing petting, was instead overrun by a group of them so that the whole box fell out of my hand and they got the food without submitting to the petting, and then they rifled through my pockets while I was down. Not that I blame them, I mean, it was the most efficient way to get to the food without having to endure yet another annoying kid, but I've been suspicious of them ever since.

[calime]

Mmm, yes, agreed on all counts...cows are mostly too much about energy conservation to be vicious, they're just effiecient. Also, I had a traumatic experience very much like yours, but mine was with sheep on the pasture as a small toddler. I was feeding them bread which unfortunately ran out while I was in the middle of the herd ... It can be a very ... fear-and-respect-towards-natural-disasters-inducing experience to look UP into tens of hungry sheepeyes... To this day, people for some reason don't understand when I tell them sheep can have evil eyes;)

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

I get that image too - especially when "his eyes slid down her body" shortly afterwards!

I have multi-coloured hazel eyes (four distinct colours, I should be a Mary Sue!) and I promise they don't change with my mood, just with the light.

[ratcreature]

It took me some time to get used to eyes being described as "hazel". In German that does not exist as an eye color description, you just pick one from blue/grey/green/brown or at most combine two like some may describe an eyecolor as "greenbrown". So nobody here has "hazel" eyes. For quite some time I thought hazel was just a fancier way to say brown eyes (because hazelnuts are brown), like all the terms for blue that get used in eye descriptions. I mean, most eyes look different depending on the light. My blue eyes can look a nice definite blue in the right light (though never an extreme blue), and in other light they look like some kind of unfortunate greyish mud-like color, and around the iris they have yellowish flecks etc.

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

"Hazel" confused a lot of people when I lived in Japan, too, because while they can deal with "brown" "black" or "blue", someone with distinct parts of yellow, brown, green and a blue ring around the outside was just plain weird! Several members of my family have the same eye colour as me, though, and apparently it's pretty common in Scotland.

[ratcreature]

Eyes with a color mix aren't unusual here either, but they are slotted into one color that fits best in a fairly neutral daylight, and then they are called that color. Kind of like almost everywhere you can only pick from one of two genders, and then that has to fit, no matter that the biological reality of chromosomes/hormones/internal and external organs is so much more complicated (as all the awful stuff that some female athletes who are accused of not being "real women" have to deal with shows, complete with ever more complicated gender tests). At least with eye colors it's fairly benign.