#(the pupil always has that red sheen it just doesnt always show)

[undefeatablesin]

Hello! Hope you're well. I have a mildly silly question, but does Ruza have heterochromia?

I've been staring at your art of her and been puzzling over it.

I figured her reference pics would be best, but while it's true in her Thorn Uniform, her eyes don't looked colored in on her Hunter Garb page, and I figured her eyes both being depicted as the sort of red tint was more of an artistic choice but it could also just actually change, Yharnam does weird stuff to people, and I hope you don't mind me asking you directly.

No such thing as silly questions here, my friend! I don't mind at all, I'm only too glad to answer any questions people might have 💙

But anyways, yes, Ruza does in fact have heterochromia. Her right eye is brown and her left eye is blue. I haven't made any HQ refs of just her face, so its understandable that it might be a bit confusing to puzzle out from just my regular artwork alone or from the really small face scale on my garb ref sheets. The clearest depiction of her heterochromia that I have in my works at the moment is this sketch-but this indeed is the correct colouration for her eyes across all of her designs.

While I'm here though, I'd like to share a little about this design choice; I mentioned this briefly in the tags of another post, but initially I had planned for Ruza to have started with both her eyes being brown, but for the left to have changed to its pale blue hue after becoming tied to the hunter's dream. Individuals are already "marked" by the Great Ones in some fashion in the canon of the game, such as the characters that drop the Oedon Writhe rune after death and like everyone commenting that the Hunter has a specific strange "moonlit" scent. I thought it would be interesting to take that idea a step further by introducing a physical indicator of the hunter's moon-bound state-and given the game's most prevalent theme of eyes, that was ultimately what I felt appropriate to change.

The pale blue of her left eye was, none too surprisingly, therefore meant to evoke the colour of the moon, and it was no accident that the pupil of that eye is depicted as red in some panels and lighting. It was all part of the idea of her connection to the dream and the fact she, as all paleblood hunters are, is presently under the Moon Presence's thrall.

However, I wasn't entirely sure whether to keep this idea, if it blended well with the lore or if it was maybe too on the nose or cliche, so I haven't really canonised it entirely as part of my lore specifically. Even so, heterochromia has become something I feel Ruza would have regardless, so it remains as one of her features across all of her incarnations and still receives these stylistic nods and hints in the comic and such.