Last year I posted a bit about the significance of blue eyes in my fictional world, and gave the short answer that it's basically a plot device to help identify magi.
There's more to it, of course, much more. Early on I was toying with the notion of giving my magi an unusual feature that would set them apart from humanity, but couldn't come up with something both convincing and consistent. So I settled on blue eyes as being quick and easy. As I thought about it some more, though, I realized it's not a half bad concept. I was taking something normally regarded as beautiful and attractive and making it an object of fear and hate.
See, things in my world haven't gone well between mundanes and magi. There was a war - a really, really bad one - and one of the things some mundane governments did was to round up magi and put them in camps before they could get really strong. One of the ways they identified magi was the blue eyes. In the process, of course, thousands of innocents were taken away as well, but it was all in the name of "national security".
Of course, we know that could never happen here, don't we?
Don't we?
