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

[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.