Could the Cat King be partially-colorblind?
All of the debate about Edwin's eye color had me thinking: the Cat King has cat-shaped eyes. Cats are generally understood to be red-green colorblind. (They can distinguish yellows and blues pretty easily, but not reds and greens.)
What if the Cat King is red-green colorblind?
And then I did a little bit of research and found that it really wouldn't change much.
The deep yellow and old gold tones that the Cat King favors in his wardrobe would likely be really appealing to him; these colors might pop for him in a way that other saturated colors wouldn't.
And it strangely wouldn't make that much of a difference in his perception of Edwin's eye color; Edwin's irises would still look like a blue background with gold flecks (if slightly more muted), which the Cat King would understand from experience that most humans would interpret as green:
It does mean that "emerald eyes" would likely be a poetic turn of phrase, designed to appeal to Edwin more than as a description of how the Cat King sees them. If he were doing an actual, direct comparison, he would probably find that Edwin's eyes are much prettier than cut emeralds:
For color comparisons I used the DaltonLens colorblindness simulator, using the Brettel 1997 method for deuteranopia. Cat King costumes from this Tudum interview (images there courtesy of Kelli Dunsmore). George Rexstrew's right eye from his headshot photo. Emeralds from the Wikipedia article.
Inspiration for this post thanks in part to the Cat King's tiger-striped sequined jacket and Fenell et al. (2019), which I will forever think of as the "green tiger study".
