wrt to your ROT'd paras - it never occurred to me that Keith would recognise the assailant. I'm dreadfully bad at faces myself. And good as Broster is at describing landscapes, ducks, etc, she does have characters recognising each other by voice rather than appearance a couple of times that I can remember. eg Keith suddenly realising who Ewen is in Edinburgh, and someone has a similar experience in GitN. I wonder if she was slightly face-blind?
Edited (removed spoiler omg hope I was fast enough) 2021-11-28 00:34 (UTC)
I can't speak to Broster herself, but now that you point it out, I would agree that the hypothesis that Keith is at least a bit face-blind is supported by the text!
(omg, what must it be like to be faceblind in the military, when everyone is in identical uniform all the time?)
I got dreadfully confused when watching Band of Brothers. Who is this young, white, dark-haired, uniformed fellow with an American accent who's wearing an enormous helmet? I really had no idea most of the time...
Yeah, my wife is a bit face-blind, and can struggle with TV. A couple of shows (such as The Terror) I've not bothered suggesting for just that reason: a whole cast of medium-build bearded dark-haired white men in very similar uniforms.
As someone who is reasonably face blind, I can never get into any media where there are a bunch of similar looking people in uniforms. The Terror is a good show but I can recognise like three people on it.
I wholeheartedly support the notion that Keith is face blind, however, and am now amused/horrified at the thought of him not recognising Ewen at the shieling until it was too late.
I'M GLAD IT WASN'T JUST ME. I watched it with my brother and had to ask him to identify every character almost every episode, and by the end I could STILL only reliably identify three of them. And one of them was the one guy who had lighter hair, of course.
Oh, I like the idea of Keith (and, yeah, perhaps Broster) being face-blind! Also in the bits where he admires Ewen at amusing length, the focus tends to be on Ewen's body and manner rather than his handsome face (apart from the blue eyes, which I suppose are distinctive enough to stand out even without much face-recognition ability), which fits with that too.
I'm only slightly bad at faces, and the combination of identical uniforms and eighteenth-century wigs/hats obscuring hair makes me find trying to picture soldier characters a bit of a puzzle!
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(omg, what must it be like to be faceblind in the military, when everyone is in identical uniform all the time?)
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I wholeheartedly support the notion that Keith is face blind, however, and am now amused/horrified at the thought of him not recognising Ewen at the shieling until it was too late.
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I'm only slightly bad at faces, and the combination of identical uniforms and eighteenth-century wigs/hats obscuring hair makes me find trying to picture soldier characters a bit of a puzzle!