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Blue eyes: Blue eyes represents a sort of detachment from “soft” feelings like love and compassion, and an embrace of feelings like hatred and resentment. Dally is described as having the most blue eyes out of anyone in the novel. Interestingly enough, Sandy is also described as having blue eyes, possibly hinting at her having deeper issues than we get to explore in the book.

Green eyes: Cherry and Pony are the only ones that are described as having green eyes in the novel. Green eyes are representative of people who are soft and sentimental in a way that the world around them is not. At the beginning of the book, Pony wishes his eyes were not green. This is a manifestation of his childish wish to be “tougher” or “cooler” than he is. It is also only after he truly understands Cherry that he realizes she has green eyes too.

Blue-Green eyes: Darry is the only one with a mix of eye colors in the book. I personally interpret him having a mix of blue and green being a nod to how he used to be sentimental or soft (green), but then was forced to grow up and harden himself too fast (blue). He still has love in his life, but he’s had to ignore so many emotions to keep things afloat.

Gray eyes: Two-Bit is the only member of the gang with gray eyes. They are the color of the silent struggler. The type of person who is able to laugh a lot and seems like they have it all together, but they are actually struggling heavily on the inside. Two-bit is presented as a happy-go lucky guy that pony looks up to, so much so that he wishes he HAD gray eyes at the start of the book. Over the course of the novel we learn that he is a functioning alcoholic who is struggling in school and has an absent father. That he’s not as put together as he seems.

Dark eyes (brown/black): Johnny and Soda are the only two who explicitly have dark eyes in the novel. Dark eyes are representative of home, empathy, and high emotional intelligence. Soda and Johnny might not understand what Pony goes on about when he talks about poems and sunsets and things, but they’re willing to try and relate to him, to learn and take his feelings seriously. Johnny portrays this well in what I think is one of the most overlooked scenes in the story; even though Bob was shown to be nothing but an absolute blight on those around him, Johnny still cries over the fact that he killed someone who was “only 17 or 18 years old.” I doubt Bob would have done the same if he had killed Johnny.

There is a parallel between Darry and Johnny and how their sacrifices reveal something previously unseen about them.

Darry gives up his dreams, his life, and his goals for his brothers. Pony says he’s cold and unfeeling, but it’s only in the hospital after Pony truly understands what Darry did for he and Soda that we as the readers realize Darry isn’t cold, he’s maybe the single most intensely loving member of all the gang.

Conversely, Johnny runs into the fire to save the kids without hesitation after Pony spends the whole novel calling him nervous and jumpy and likening him to a sad puppy. It’s only after he dies that Pony (and we) realize that Johnny was secretly the strongest member of the gang because he didn’t let the sheer cruelty of his life poison him into becoming cold and selfish. His strength lies in his love, and he made that love into courage.

There is an irony to Dally being the only one of the gang to not grease his hair, and yet being the only one who’s SO delinquent he’s a full-on hood.

Now compare that to Johnny who has hairthat he TRIES to grease back, but it’s “so long it falls in shaggy bangs across his forehead”.

When Johnny dies, Dally pushes his hair off his forehead and comments on how he never could keep it slicked back right, and then has his big freak out.

At the end of the trailer, we see Ribbit looking up the fake stars with a longing look on her face, talking about regrets.This leads me to believe that she’s talking about regretting entering the circus because while it was fun at first, ultimately, none of it is real life and thus it doesn’t really matter.

Jax, being ribbit’s friend, tries to make her laugh like he used to. Constantly reassuring here that it IS real because HE’S real. Their friendship is real and that means it matters.

Ribbit is tortured by memories of the outside, and is unable to cope with the derealization and abstracts, leaving Jax devastated.

He believes he wasn’t “real” enough for Ribbit to stay sane. That he wasn’t funny enough to keep her laughing and happy and distracted.

He begins to lean hardcore into Ribbit’s belief that none of it is real to cope with his feelings of grief, using the very real reason for Ribbit’s abstraction as an excuse to hold onto the person he used to be before Ribbit abstracted.

“None of it’s real so nothing matters” for Ribbit, versus “none of it is real so none of it matters, so neither did that abstraction of my friend, I’m completely fine and totally unchanged by this event.” For Jax.