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Twilight: How Edward's Eye Colors Destroy the Story
Edward Cullen's irises are sometimes black. Black irises aren't that uncommon among humans, but they are extremely uncommon among humans with light pink skin. I've never known a white person with black irises. Still, I wouldn't think there was something strange about one white human with them. An entire adopted family of humans who were supposedly not related by blood and yet all had black irises would be another matter.
Edward's eyes change color. Not a big deal, a lot of people's eyes appear to change color, like from blue-gray to green to hazel. However, Edward's eyes change from black to ochre. No one's eyes change from black to ochre. It doesn't happen.
Ochre itself is an unusual eye color, but not an impossible one for a pink-skinned person. Itis can be basically light brown with yellow and orange tones*. However, Meyer also describes Edward's eye color as butterscotch, golden, tawny and honey.
Edward has yellow irises. Sometimes they're yellow-brown, but often they're flat-out yellow. People do not have yellow eyes. An entire family of adoptees, supposedly not genetically related, do not have yellow eyes.
No one but Bella has noticed that the Cullens have black and/or yellow eyes. This is flat out impossible. Bella herself doesn't think it's weird that Edward has yellow eyes -- she's too busy swooning over them. She does notice that they change from black to yellow, but she thinks the change is odd, not the yellowness.
The reader makes a deal with the writer. You tell me a story, and I will believe in it for a while. It would be ungenerous and silly of a reader to complain that a vampire novel has vampires in it. But the writer must do her best to help the reader believe in the story. Creating a family of yellow-eyed people in what is supposed to be our world plus vampires and werewolves, and not having the people around them notice that the family has yellow eyes, is a breach of the contract between reader and writer. A writer who does that is deeply lazy, and yet wants the reader's time, attention, imagination, and money.
This is not a small mistake -- the entire world of the Twilight novels depends on people not knowing about vampires. But the vampires have eyes which change from black to yellow. The entire world of the Twilight novels therefore depends on most of the people populating it being so abysmally inattentive it's a wonder they don't walk into walls on a regular basis. And that is insulting.
Twilight is a story at odds with itself. When most stories make continuity or logical errors, I can forgive them. Those errors are usually small things, things that I can understand a hard-working, competent but imperfect writer missing or glossing over. Further, a couple errors normally don't disrupt the whole story, so they're easily ignored. In Twilight, however, foundation-wrecking errors are ridiculously common. To keep the characters and plot going, the reader is required to do the writer's job, imagining reasons for the world Meyer has created to cohere even though she keeps throwing things in it that make it incoherent. I can't imagine how a writer can allow herself to do this. If she doesn't care about her story, why should I?
*Check this out. There are a lot of different colors there. Some are golden-brown, some are red-orange, and some are bright yellow, with many variations in-between. Here is Wikipedia's first paragraph about the color ochre:
Ochre (
/ˈoʊkər/ oh-kər; from Greek: ὠχρός, ōkhrós, pale) is the term for both a golden-yellow or light yellow brown color and for a form of earth pigment which produces the color. The pigment can also be used to create a reddish tint known as "red ochre". The more rarely used terms "purple ochre" and "brown ochre" also exist for variant hues. Because of these other hues, the color ochre is sometimes referred to as "yellow ochre" or "gold ochre".
That's a pretty complicated color. My skim around Google images showed me that the color ochre is rarely mentioned without another color modifier, like yellow or red. Also, people hardly ever use the word "ochre"; those who do use it often are even more likely than the rest of us to stick a color modifier in front of it, because they're artists and pigment-makers. When your hero's eye color is important, it might be a good idea to choose a color that you're reasonably sure will create the image in your readers' minds that you want them to have. Honey, gold, and butterscotch are fine. Tawny is sort of acceptable, though it sounds strange when applied to eye color. Ochre is right out.
Edward's eyes change color. Not a big deal, a lot of people's eyes appear to change color, like from blue-gray to green to hazel. However, Edward's eyes change from black to ochre. No one's eyes change from black to ochre. It doesn't happen.
Ochre itself is an unusual eye color, but not an impossible one for a pink-skinned person. It
Edward has yellow irises. Sometimes they're yellow-brown, but often they're flat-out yellow. People do not have yellow eyes. An entire family of adoptees, supposedly not genetically related, do not have yellow eyes.
No one but Bella has noticed that the Cullens have black and/or yellow eyes. This is flat out impossible. Bella herself doesn't think it's weird that Edward has yellow eyes -- she's too busy swooning over them. She does notice that they change from black to yellow, but she thinks the change is odd, not the yellowness.
The reader makes a deal with the writer. You tell me a story, and I will believe in it for a while. It would be ungenerous and silly of a reader to complain that a vampire novel has vampires in it. But the writer must do her best to help the reader believe in the story. Creating a family of yellow-eyed people in what is supposed to be our world plus vampires and werewolves, and not having the people around them notice that the family has yellow eyes, is a breach of the contract between reader and writer. A writer who does that is deeply lazy, and yet wants the reader's time, attention, imagination, and money.
This is not a small mistake -- the entire world of the Twilight novels depends on people not knowing about vampires. But the vampires have eyes which change from black to yellow. The entire world of the Twilight novels therefore depends on most of the people populating it being so abysmally inattentive it's a wonder they don't walk into walls on a regular basis. And that is insulting.
Twilight is a story at odds with itself. When most stories make continuity or logical errors, I can forgive them. Those errors are usually small things, things that I can understand a hard-working, competent but imperfect writer missing or glossing over. Further, a couple errors normally don't disrupt the whole story, so they're easily ignored. In Twilight, however, foundation-wrecking errors are ridiculously common. To keep the characters and plot going, the reader is required to do the writer's job, imagining reasons for the world Meyer has created to cohere even though she keeps throwing things in it that make it incoherent. I can't imagine how a writer can allow herself to do this. If she doesn't care about her story, why should I?
*Check this out. There are a lot of different colors there. Some are golden-brown, some are red-orange, and some are bright yellow, with many variations in-between. Here is Wikipedia's first paragraph about the color ochre:
Ochre (
/ˈoʊkər/ oh-kər; from Greek: ὠχρός, ōkhrós, pale) is the term for both a golden-yellow or light yellow brown color and for a form of earth pigment which produces the color. The pigment can also be used to create a reddish tint known as "red ochre". The more rarely used terms "purple ochre" and "brown ochre" also exist for variant hues. Because of these other hues, the color ochre is sometimes referred to as "yellow ochre" or "gold ochre". That's a pretty complicated color. My skim around Google images showed me that the color ochre is rarely mentioned without another color modifier, like yellow or red. Also, people hardly ever use the word "ochre"; those who do use it often are even more likely than the rest of us to stick a color modifier in front of it, because they're artists and pigment-makers. When your hero's eye color is important, it might be a good idea to choose a color that you're reasonably sure will create the image in your readers' minds that you want them to have. Honey, gold, and butterscotch are fine. Tawny is sort of acceptable, though it sounds strange when applied to eye color. Ochre is right out.
no subject
When I write fiction, I write about eye color because I notice eye color. It's a very important trait to me, so it's gonna be in my writing. I don't find it particularly easy to describe, because I want to get the shade/s exactly perfectly right, especially if I'm writing from the perspective of one person who's attracted to another.
Some people might not notice brown eyes or blue eyes or hazel eyes -- but I think they would notice yellow eyes. I think most people would also notice black eyes on a white person, and the fact that those eyes actually change to yellow, especially in a school of only 350ish kids who see each other every day. Plus, lots of girls think Edward is dreamy -- they would notice his eyes pretty much immediately, like Bella does. We gloss over things in our lives that don't stand out, that aren't different, but yellow eyes are very different.
One thing that irks me is how easily Meyer could have gotten around this while keeping the yellow eyes. Maybe Jasper could mind-whammy people to look away from them. Vampire eyes dissolve regular contacts because of the venom, but Dr. Cullen could have created special contacts for them. There could be some kind of sparklefield all vampires have that make normal people unable to register details of their appearance, but Bella's immune to it.
no subject
Actually, that's not harsh enough. Meyer genuinely seems to think her imbecilic viewpoint character is brilliant, and the ridiculously laborious process Bella goes through, including being directly told "the Cullens are vampires," is the very least the most intelligent human would ever require to realize that the Cullens are vampires.
(The big oh-jeez-is-she-even-trying moment for me was in Midnight Sun, where she reveals that the Cullens get perfect grades, in all their classes, always. I suppose we should be glad they don't play on school sports teams and openly use their strength and speed to make the rest of the teams irrelevant...
...or at least, we aren't explicitly told that they do.)