Cat Fight In The Kitchen-Wattpad Rant

Things Writers Claim Only Happen in Novels (But Are Wrong About)

I have a rant I think we might have some fun with: Things Writers Claim Only Happen in Novels (But Are Wrong About)

1. Eye color

I got this very long, lovely comment on my rants one time about how no one ever has brown eyes in stories, even though brown is the most common eye color and I can get on board with that. Yeah, most people have dark or brown eyes. I can get that. But the rant went on to say they'd only seen blue eyes photoshopped on people, green eyes are so rare they're almost extinct (is this like the whole red heads are going extinct thing or was she exaggerating?), and gray eyes don't exist.

Okay, you don't have to get your eyes photoshopped for them to be blue. I know tons of people with blue eyes, but it helps that they're mostly in families. Like, my dad and his sister have blue eyes. My best friend and his younger brother and their dad have blue eyes. I was super close friends with a girl throughout school with blue eyes. Oh fuck! The girl I share an apartment with has blue eyes and so does her whole family. One of my good friends from high school has two daughters and the all three have blue eyes. If you know a family, it's not that rare.

Conversely, I know lots of people with green eyes. I know people with orange eyes (that weren't contacts!) Eye color doesn't have to be as simple as blue, green, brown. Do I like when people go into these insanely long winded descriptions of eye color. And I'm not a fan of super exotic colors like purple or red, unless it's fantasy of course, but I'm not going to tell you it's impossible.

Eye color obviously doesn't bother me as much as it bothers a lot of people. What bothers me is when people try to make it all about ethnicity. Like, they assume everyone is white when they don't have brown eyes. That's not cool! I love diversity and I'm all about putting more diversity in novels. But that doesn't mean they all have to have dark hair and eyes. Not at all! You don't have to stereotype just so you get your token diversity person. I didn't mention the ethnicity of the friends from above, but I can tell you, I took into account Hispanic families, Indian families, African American families, and Native American families! Eye color doesn't have to exclusive to ethnicity.

And if you want to have someone with brown hair and brown eyes, do it! I get it's the dominate trait for most people. More power to you! I'm just saying, we shouldn't say not to use other colors when they exist.

As for the gray eyes thing, I'm here to break some news to you. I have gray eyes. That change colors! Gasp. A double impossible, I know. But they do. They go from blue to green (depending a lot of how much sleep I've gotten and what I'm wearing) and when I got my driver's license, they had to put gray because no one could decide what color to say. My brother has them too, but they let him put green, because his don't edge too far into blue. So don't tell people it's unrealistic and doesn't happen. It totally does. I'm the third person I've known that's had to have gray put on her driver's license because the people at the DMV couldn't pick a color.

2. Guys in real life aren't romantic

This one is one of those silly ones I just wanted to include because I like playing devil's advocate. I always, always see people complaining about how guys in books are way better than guys in real life because they're so romantic and while I can agree with it in part (usually there is more romance, because it's condensed into a set number of pages and grand gestures make for better reading), I also have to argue that this isn't always true that only book guys can be romantic.

It always makes people so sad to know that my best friend is actually the romantic in our relationship for two reason: 1. It defies the idea that girls are supposed to be the super sweet, romantic ones, and 2. He's not a romantic person.