Well hello!
You know, one of my most watched videos from back in the day – over a million views at
the time of this recording – is my primer on how teen wolf “color codes” the werewolf eyes.
Video: All werewolves within Teen Wolf start out with golden yellow eyes.
I thought at the time that video was pretty clear.
The default color is golden yellow – all werewolves start out with golden yellow eyes.
Eyes turn blue if you kill an innocent or they turn red if you become an Alpha.
It’s really very simple – or so I thought way back when.
But almost immediately and to this day I get questions like, what about omega eyes or even
some people convinced that all omegas have blue eyes.
That is just not true.
Omega eyes aren’t even a thing on Teen Wolf.
I’m Paul Rea and if you’re enjoying our weekly trips back to Beacon Hills, go ahead
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I don’t know where the misconception that blue eyes denote omega came from.
I mean, so many of the omegas we saw on the show had the golden eyes.
Primarily we had Scott who was an omega from the very start.
He didn’t actually belong to any pack and forcefully refused to join either Peter or Derek.
Then you had the episode called “Omega” with this homeless werewolf.
Gerard actually gave a speech about him and how pitiful it was to be a lone wolf.
Gerard: Because, as I am about to demonstrate, an omega rarely survives.
The writers gave this guy golden eyes to make the point that he was mostly harmless and
had not killed an innocent.
Now, some omegas on the show do have blue eyes - the beast of gevaudan who was a serial
killer before he became a werewolf – had blue eyes.
Even though it is kind of hard to tell with the filters they used for this scene.
Also, the guy who worked for Silverfinger had blue eyes and the twins, so, yeah.
Once and for all: omegas can have golden eyes or they can have blue eyes if they killed
an innocent.
What constitutes an innocent for the purpose of werewolf eye color is still an open question
so I put together a video after talking to Jeff Davis about that.
Check it out at the linked card above.
I always try to figure out where such widespread misconceptions like “omega eyes” come
from and in this case, I can think of a couple reasons.
As I mentioned, the twins had blue eyes and they made a big deal about how they were omegas in the second half of Season 3 after
the alpha pack broke down.
Aiden: We're not just betas anymore. We're omegas,
the bitches, remember?
Both of them had blue eyes at that point so maybe people just started associating the two.
But the twins had blue eyes because they killed innocents before we met them on the show.
Also, I think some of the eye confusion probably comes from Malia?
She was in the woods all alone for all those years.
She had blue eyes from the start and she was an omega.
Then she became Scott’s beta but her eyes didn’t change color... so I still don’t know
why people would think that it was a “pack status” thing.
Malia had blue eyes because she felt she had killed an innocent.
Now, I don't believe Malia is technically responsible for the death of her adopted mother
and sister, but she thought she was and that’s apparently enough to alter your eye color.
Of course, her biological mother also had blue eyes and that fact apparently filtered
through casual viewers to create another big misconception I see about teen wolf eyes.
A lot of people seem to believe that all werecoyotes have blue eyes.
They don’t all have blue eyes, it’s just that all the ones we saw on the show did because
both had darkened souls from murdering people or thinking they murdered people.
Bottom line - according to Jeff and the other writers - almost all the werecoyote mythology
on the show is the exact same as the werewolves.
I say “almost” due to that weird power transfer at birth thing.
Corinne: I want my power back.
That’s unique to werecoyotes but almost everything else is exactly the same.
What else... um... Oh yeah.
A lot of people ask me about Kate’s eyes and what does it mean to have green eyes on
the show.
It means nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
It’s just a thing that happened to Kate because she was evil and the scratch she got
from Peter didn’t turn her into a werewolf it got twisted because she was so twisted
and she ended up with the whole purple and green color scheme.
Of course, I could create some false linkage between the western literature concept of the green-eyed monster.
Shakespeare’s Othello pretty much solidified the term to mean jealousy and we all recognize
Kate’s desire to be valued and loved by her emotionally distant father.
led her to do some awful things.
I mean, she was so desperate to be accepted by her psycho daddy that she murdered an entire
family and became obsessed with killing Scott all just to please Gerard – but I don’t
really think things like that actually came into play in the creation of Kate’s overall look.
It’s far more likely that comic book fans among the writers chose the whole purple and
green thing since that was comic book color code for evil characters since way back forever.
Wait a second, what were we talking about?
Oh yeah, eye color.
Kate’s eyes are green because they’re green – they just are.
The kanima’s eyes looked like that because it was reptilian and Jeff got scared by this
snake god in the movie Conan The Barbarian when he was a kid.
What else falls under the just is category?
Wendigo: I'm just so hungry!
Windego have glowing white orbs for eyes because it is all the more terrifying when they’re
eating your intestines.
Hellhounds have orange eyes because... fire.
And this guy at Eichen had silver eyes because it looked cool.
What did I leave out?
the Anuk-Ite had glowing purple eyes probably because
it looked kind of gross and sick in that skinned-weasel face.
But none of those eyes are coded to tell us anything about the character.
With Werewolves and Coyotes – Jeff came up with the "eye color" thing as a literary shorthand.
You could just look at a werewolf character and know if they were good or a had some murdery
background almost immediately.
For the last time, red means Alpha.
Betas and omegas all start out with gold eyes.
Gold eyes turn blue once you kill an innocent.
Peter: Taking an innocent life takes something from you as well.
Dimming the once brilliant golden yellow to a cold, steel blue like mine.
That actually went longer than I anticipated – but I am very glad I got it off my chest.
Thanks for watching and while you’re here do all the YouTube things that help the channel,
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I’ll see you next time we go back to Beacon Hills.