Kaleidoscope Eyes/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A character's eyes change color on their own.

  • Straight: Alice's eyes can change from purple to blue to red seemingly at random.
  • Exaggerated: Alice's eyes switch rapidly between different colors so quickly that nobody can ever quite catch what color they are now.
  • Justified: In a world where magic exists, Alice was the victim of a training accident, causing her eye color to change randomly at times.
    • Alternatively, they're a method of indicating different battle modes.
    • They're not random; they're colored contacts. So she changes them every time she goes to the bathroom.
    • The iris is structurally colored, like peacock feathers, and the structure changes subtly when Alice focuses on nearby or faraway things.
  • Inverted: Alice's eyes are the same color, regardless of the lighting.
  • Subverted: It looks like Alice's blue eyes are now red, but then the camera shifts to show the nearby fire that was simply being reflected in them.
    • It was just the lighting.
  • Double Subverted: ...Then, the fire burns out, and the camera returns to Alice's eyes. They're still red.
  • Parodied: Alice's eyes shift color so quickly that the shades blur together and cause them to look dull brown all the time.
  • Deconstructed: The sudden changes in the pigments around Alice's eyes start to affect the rest of the eyeballs, and Alice's sight is severely impaired.
  • Reconstructed: Every few hours, Alice uses her eyedrops to keep her unusual disorder from causing her any medical troubles.
  • Zig Zagged: Alice's eyes were purple, but now they're pink. Wait, no, they're back to purple in the next shot and it's never mentioned, must've just been a mistake. Then they're yellow, but it's just the glow of the rising sun reflected in her eyes. Which, in the next scene, are still bright yellow. Until Alice takes off the colored contacts, asking everyone what they thought of the color. Her eyes underneath are purple again... and swiftly turn bright green before our very eyes.
  • Averted: Alice's eyes stay the same color.
  • Untwisted/Countered: They're literally all of them at once.
  • Enforced: "We need Alice to be special and amazing. But one eye color isn't special enough for her -- she needs to have all of them."
  • Lampshaded: "Wait, weren't your eyes pink yesterday?"
  • Invoked: Alice alternates between several sets of colored contacts to give people the impression that her eyes are changing color.
  • Defied: After a magical accident, Alice's eyes start changing color. She thinks it looks ridiculous, and wears brown colored contacts over them at all times to remove the effect.
  • Discussed: "So, how exactly does that work- your eyes, I mean?" "Don't think about it too hard, I'm just special like that."
  • Conversed: "Oh, come on. Color changing eyes? I'm sensing a Mary Sue here, Bob. Eyes just don't work that way."
  • Played For Drama: As a sign of foreboding horrors, Alice's eyes cloud over and shift to an ominous black.

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