Worth 50,000: Day Twenty Two - Seen and Unseen

[momebie]

We rely heavily on the eyes of others. We believe they can tell us if the other person is alert, interested, cagey, lying, and a hundred other gut reactions we form about people before even opening our mouths or giving them a chance to speak for themselves. When we can't see a person's eyes we react to them differently. Sometimes it's a person we trust, like a priest or a superhero and it's a relief to us that we can't see them calculating our sins and misgivings. Other times it's a person we don't trust, like a bank robber or a dementor, and it's all the more frightening for us. In those instances we take other cues and form a decision about whether or not we can be okay with the fact that we can't see the eyes that see us. But even in entirely mundane instances, we take the lack of eyes as a vague threat. It makes us uneasy.

How would your character react to an entity whose eyes they can't see? Is that entity likely to be another person, or something else entirely?



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Comments

[theemdash]

VICTORIANS. HOW ARE YOU SO WEIRD AND INTERESTING.

What did they do with mourning photographs? Did they display them somewhere or just sort of keep a book of mourning? And WHY ARE THE MOTHERS UNDER BLANKETS? (in one of those pictures the kid is frowning and making the same face I was)

[momebie.livejournal.com]

You know, I don't know. I assume they kept them in some sort of photo book. I'll have to do some more research. They also, as yachiru pointed out below, took pictures WITH the dead people, sometimes dressing them and sitting them for the portrait as if they weren't dead at all. I have one saved away in the Collect Your Courage tumblr of a man laying in bed next to his dead wife. It's morbid and fascinating and I can't look away EVEN THOUGH I HATE DEAD PEOPLE.

And from what I know, the mothers are not actually supposed to be in the photos, they wanted photos of just the children but it was hard to get children to sit still long enough to be able to get a good photograph, so they would hide the mothers and let them sit and hold the children still. That one's not nearly as creepy after the explanation. It makes perfect sense. It just makes for weird fucking photographs.