User blog:VicGeorge2K9/Defining visual scale in the Smurfs world

One of the problems in writing Smurfs fanfiction is defining actual visual scale. Right off the bat, we're told just by mainstream media alone that the Smurfs are "three apples tall", which most of us would accept at literal face value as being true until one actually bothers to find out that it's a translation of a French idiom used in the original comic books to describe something as being really small. In English, the equivalent idiom is saying that a Smurf is knee-high to a grasshopper. This confusion is not really helped in mainstream media when the Smurfs are seen rolling apples that are half their own size while still being small enough to fit into places like mouse holes or being held in an adult-sized human hand with only their heads popping out. This brings up the problem of scale, of how to properly define the actual size of a Smurf, as some are wont to use the literal form of the "three apples tall" description. The literal form in itself would only make the reader assume that it's talking about a regular-sized apple while leaving out the possibility of other forms of apples like crab apples, which size-wise are usually no bigger than an inch in diameter. In the cartoon show itself, Grandpa Smurf uses smurfberries as a measuring unit for how tall the Smurflings are, which as an object would be in scale be half the size than a pea. TV Tropes accurately describes the Smurfs as living in a Mouse World, which is a community that is in scale made for beings no bigger than a mouse. My suggestion for tackling this problem is to pay attention to the scale of Smurfs in relation to other objects or in relation to human characters and write our scenarios accordingly while making adjustments.