waging an absolute war with myself between capturing a realistic textural effect in an evocative way vs Making Thing Look Pretty
oh I can contextualize this now. eyes don't have specular highlights underwater.
since eyeballs are wet and irises are very smooth, eyes open in normal circumstances will reflect basically everything around them, especially light sources - usually as bright points or shapes visible in the top half of the iris
but for whatever optical reason - probably because the wetness of the eye is equivalent to the wetness of the water, so the refractive properties change - eyes open underwater don't have that sparkle to them. it helps contribute to the weird underwater dead-eyed corpse effect.
this also makes it super easy to spot which of the google image results for "eyes open underwater" are unwelcome AI slop because they get this wrong every time
anyway this is a real and cool effect that contributes a lot to cue us in that we're seeing someone underwater that I nevertheless elected to one thousand percent ignore in this chapter because shiny eyes are prettier to draw
art!
![[Image ID: the phrase "eyes aren't shiny underwater" in the style of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles logo. /. End ID] Metric breaks are as follows: eyes aren't shiny under- -water](https://64.media.tumblr.com/dcc19d49abde3bf324f065f476bfbe26/98dfff1ae9b74f82-e1/s1280x1920/eae6246b390a9f49363a8bccac3d75aef1d48974.png)
ALT🎶I had never known that! Missing highlights!🎵
THANK YOU TETRAMETER BLOG GUY
