The follow-up question

[james_davis_nicoll]

What is it with green-eyed Asian women in fantasy novels, anyway? Why green? It's not impossible (except under some sort of No True Scotsman rule) but green eyes appear to be very rare in Asian populations.

Not that they are exactly common in other populations (leaving aside the People Who Have Green Eyes group, which have a high percentage of members with green eyes).


[Added in a hurry]

That turns out to be something you shouldn't google for images of if you are at work.

Comments

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

Blue is a baby-animal color, and grey is probably associated with cataracts or eye injuries. Just guessing.

<--- member of People Who Have Green Eyes group

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Apparently there are actually only two eye pigments, blue and brown. One is in the front of the iris and the other is in the back, and all eye colors are different combinations and concentrations of the two pigments. It *does* explain how me and the Sibling ended up with hazel eyes when Dad has green eyes and Mom had blue...

Grey is an old "strong intelligent female" stereotype, while green is "firey and spirited" and blue is "innocent and not necessarily intelligent". I forget what brown is. Probably "unremarkable".


<--- member of People Who Have Mostly Green Eyes group

[daedala.livejournal.com]

Brown is boring. Why else would you want to make your brown eyes blue?

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Yup. It's just like being a brunette. Says the brunette. ;-)

[daedala.livejournal.com]

Brown-eyed brunettes are THE WORST. Says the brown-eyed brunette...

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

My favorite paranormal fantasy heroine has brown hair and brown eyes but she's half Blackfoot so she's still technically exotic, although the author takes pains to point out several times repeatedly that she looks Hispanic and thus nobody considers her looks to be out of the ordinary.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Here's the funny thing: My daughter, who is almost 3, has blue eyes and light, light blond hair, as little blond kids sometimes do. Lately she likes to play a game in which I edit Miis (doll-like avatars) on the Wii and she gives me instructions. Her fantasy selves always have brown eyes and brown or black hair.

Usually, they also wear black clothing and dark glasses. She's not that picky about skin color.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

You have a baby goth!

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

Brown seems to depend on shade. Very dark brown or black eyes usually seem to indicate extreme anger or evil, and occasionally they indicate a trickster.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Oooh, right.

Hmm. Do we know if a person's pupils dilate when they are angry?

[(Anonymous)]

Brown seems to depend on shade. Very dark brown or black eyes usually seem to indicate extreme anger or evil, and occasionally they indicate a trickster.

John Colicos, who played villains galore, had those extremely dark eyes that usually look black.

We have a cat (siamese looking but essentially mixed breed) whose eyes are extremely light blue. There is so little colour his irises appear white and he looks a bit deranged.

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

A cat with Meg Foster eyes? Cool :)

[snurri.livejournal.com]

Perhaps the question is whether or not this trope began with (or was greatly impacted by) Big Trouble In Little China.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Green eyes are the usual genre sign of a "spirited" heroine, but I was wondering about the movie tie-in myself.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

That turns out to be something you shouldn't google for images of if you are at work.

This would be something akin to hawkwing_lb's comment about looking for genre novels with protagonists with non-normative sexualities and getting as far as typing "lesbian fantasy" into Google at work but realising just in time that most of the results would probably not answer the desired question in a bad way ?

[rosefox]

I recommend "Lambda Award nominees" as an alternative.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

That turns out to be something you shouldn't google for images of if you are at work.

Any search terms that include the words "Asian" and "women" probably shouldn't be investigated at work unless the rest of the search terms are VERY specific. And even then, possibly not.

Green eyes are exotic (as are redheads, unless you're in Ireland or Scotland, or in the UK in which case redhead is usually synonymous with Irish or Scottish). Green eyes on (in?) a person who is racially not otherwise likely to have them is even more exotic.

I have mostly green eyes. Technically they are hazel with a brown inner ring and a blue outer ring and then the middle is a fairly vivid green, but mostly what you see is the green. Otherwise I am quite frightfully not exotic in the slightest.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Green-eyed isn't safe, either.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Thank you for throwing yourself on that grenade. ;-)

[t-guy.livejournal.com]

I am told my eyes are Hazel. Is this rarer than green?

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

The articles I have found (mostly in the Wikipedia bibliography) suggest that green is the rarest.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

Rarer than Violet? I doubt that. I can see one or two green eyed people a week if I ever go out in public. I think I have met three people with violet eyes in my life.

[thette.livejournal.com]

I've met two people with yellow eyes, both at the same course. (Of course, the yellow was a really, really light brown-green colour, so amber might be more correct.)

[seawasp]

1) Big Trouble in Little China.

2) Green is an unusual, exotic color (especially in an Asian Woman context) which will have significance.

3) Asian women are a relatively unusual, exotic image for much of the target fanbase.

4) The combination is a knockout punch for many readers. Knock 'em down, take their money, repeat.

[srallen.livejournal.com]

Because Jay Lake can make interesting worlds but isn't very good at populating them?

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

Easy there, cowboy. Besides, Green is her name, not her eye color.

:p

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

Well, if google image search is any clue, it appears that green eyes almost exclusively appear in women, and it makes it very difficult for them to wear clothing.

[jamesenge.livejournal.com]

Please give generously.

[aries-jordan.livejournal.com]

I think you answer your own question with the use of the word "fantasy." Women in fantasy must have either green or violet eyes.

[msss.livejournal.com]

To go with the equally improbable purple-eyed Caucasian women? Personally, I want my kids to have bright blue eyes. Pity about the whole genetics thing.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

I knew a green-eyed Chinese-American woman in college. She was a quarter Russian, via Manchuria if I'm remembering correctly. The effect really was striking, and I'm not sure why. (Not looking on Google Images; anyway I've already had my J. Geils moment this year.)

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Standard Mary Sue color (besides violet). The term is usually emerald, and her hair is not black, but raven.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

And they're tresses. Or locks. :-)

[aries-jordan.livejournal.com]

Or curls like bunches of grapes.

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

hair like a flock of goats descending Mount Gilead

[ambitious-wench.livejournal.com]

No, it's breasts, I'm pretty sure, that are compared to grapes in the Song of Songs (Which is Solomon's).

Yep, took a bit, but there it is: Chapter 7, verse seven. But mostly breasts are compared to "twin roes, (deer?)"

[timgueguen.livejournal.com]

Another possible example of a green eyed Asian woman in fiction is Bridget Clancy, who was a supporting character in DC Comics Nightwing. However given that later on her eyes were coloured brown its possible she was wearing green contacts.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

That turns out to be something you shouldn't google for images of if you are at work.

Ah, that brings me back to the days when I assisted in a support classroom for students in junior high who needed assistance. One day, one of my students needed to do research on grizzly bears, and typed in "bears" into the search engine...

[seawasp]

Or the time my father, new to the whole search thing, wanted to go to the website of a certain sporting-goods chain, and went to:

www.dicks.com

This did NOT take him to Dick's Sporting Goods.

[dagbrown.livejournal.com]

Once I wanted to find some documentation about for a project I was doing at work.

Turns out that http://www.python.com/ is not the official web page of the Python programming language at all.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

You know I had to click that link. I was actually a little disappointed.

[cmattg.livejournal.com]

There are two questions here, I think.

1. As others have mentioned, did the proportion written about change after BTILC came out?

2.What are the numbers compared to green-eyed redheads?

The last also bring up the possible class of red-headed green-eyed Asian women but by that point even non-fannish people will start going, "...and a soprano singing voice and a miniature flying unicorn and and and....."

[(Anonymous)]

Red-headed Asian women make me think of Anime rather than fantasy.

Bruce

[connactic.livejournal.com]

I was wondering why you thought it wasn't work-safe, and I then realized I had moderate safe-search on...

[ambitious-wench.livejournal.com]

Green is the new blue.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

As someone who herself has green eyes, I find the perceived risibility of green eyes in fiction to be kind of annoying. OR MAYBE I AM JUST A MARY SUE.


Serious answer: I think it's used when the writer wants to signal "this is a world with lots of interracial marriage/relationships" and the image of someone with what we consider to be an East Asian phenotype with what we consider to be a Northern European eye color is a lazy shorthand for that. I prefer the old-school space-opera technique of calling your first officer Patrice Lumumba Baryshnikov or whatever.


Also, green eyes are the prettiest, and I'll lick fight the poltroon who says otherwise.

[anghara.livejournal.com]

I am one of the "hazel" camp - I've got these greeny/browny eyes with a grey ring around the outside of the iris. But here's the thing - my eyes are a sort of mood ring. They *change colour*. Once I happened to look into a mirror as I was washing my face after a long bout of bawling my eyes out over something, and realised with some consternation that my eyes were cat-green - which probably means I should live out my life being upset, because that gives me the fabled green eyes of legend. Apparently they also sharpen to green if I am really really angry (a fact which someone told me during said period of being mad, so it may have been a little white lie designed to distract me, I don't know, I wasn't buying it at the time, I was mad and I was going to stay mad dammit) Both my parents have brown eyes (my mother has the grey ring around hers, which is probably where I inherited it from). The closest blue that I know of comes from my paternal great-grandfather, who was a blue-eyed blond.

I'm sure there's a genetic pattern in there SOMEWHERE.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

Because green eyes are extra-exotic yet more *seemingly* plausible than blue.