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I realized the other day, while reading an excellent new manga which I shall not name for fear of spoilers, that a lot of manga men have one missing or blind eye. There I was, peacefully reading, and suddenly a man whom I had not expected to do such a thing suddenly revealed that he had one fake eye, which he did in the classic manner of popping it out without warning.
And so I bring you the great manga eyeball angst-off! Note that I have not spoiled anything by not naming which eye trauma goes with which character. Do not spoil anything unless you use white-out.
[Poll #925837]
For bonus credit, state your theories on the prevalence of missing eyes, blindness, why it's only men and generally only the attractive ones, etc.
For super bonus credit, name any female characters with missing or blind eyes.
And so I bring you the great manga eyeball angst-off! Note that I have not spoiled anything by not naming which eye trauma goes with which character. Do not spoil anything unless you use white-out.
[Poll #925837]
For bonus credit, state your theories on the prevalence of missing eyes, blindness, why it's only men and generally only the attractive ones, etc.
For super bonus credit, name any female characters with missing or blind eyes.
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Also- extra credit:
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It's probably interesting to note the differences in vulnerability between male and female cyclopian characters- male characters usually get the patch and it just shows how much more badass they are, female characters usually get the patch on some kind of fucked up injury fetish.
(sorry for the repost, I just realized I'm not spoiling anything. Duh)
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One-eyed men are a kink of mine but I never realized why until I misread a kanji in a bubble where the androgynous one-eyed chara asks 'I suppose you wonder what's underneath this cloth of mine.' (Meaning the cloth across his eye.) I read cloth as skirt, and suddenly saw the light- the empty eye-socket is a symbolic vagina and all one-eyed men (in manga- Date doesn't count) are coded hermaphrodites. Like Tiresias, possessing the knowledge of both sexes.
Yes well- I *said* it's a kink. (Not to atone for a mass-murder, in my original one-eyed man manga, but for killing his best pal and buddy. With his eye.)
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(One-eyed manga guys)
I realize that this whole thing was almost 2 years ago, but I must add that Date Masamune, like so many other colorful characters of his era, shows up in Samurai Deeper Kyo. (See the top of this picture.)
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Losing an eye makes him sort-of vulnerable without being actually handicapped. I have no idea why it makes him look so sexy, but I am a serious pervy eyepatch fancier.
(FWIW, my uncle is blind in one eye. Measles or something.)
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See, ditto. And ditto about the sexiness.
Though I think that the other thing about eyes is that they really squick some people. Eyes and teeth are the two things whose removal is really disgusting and torturous (plus fingers and genitals)-- but for some reason, an eye-patch then becomes sexy, where missing teeth never do. Go figure.
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Huh. I guess it depends on how they lose the eye, but I always thought that missing an eye usually means rakish, which tends to imply sexy in a dangerous sort of way.
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Really?
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(Then insert wankery about it being a totally different culture. Freudians need not apply.)
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I can think of some blind female characters, usually psychic or priestess types, but not any one-eyed ones. Hm.
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Who were the three old Greek women who had only one eye to share between them?
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(This was in Perseus' story. They had to give him directions to somewhere I now forget.)
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Oh, there's also the one-eyed old priestess grandmother-type in Inu-Yasha.
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One female character of the manga "EDEN - It's an endless world" loses her eye (and ear; not saying which character for fear of spoilers, but she is one of the major ones), but that was to victimize her and to show the ruthlessness of her agressor. Later she carries a glass eye and there really wasn't that much difference from before...
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It's all fun and games until bishounen lose their eyes.
It can also serve as a "loss of perfection" for beautiful characters so that makes a good villain trait.
As for why women (well, there's a minor character in Gundam SEED Destiny who had an eyepatch and a major character in V Gundam who was made blind) don't generally receive this sort of treatment, it could just be shounen culture and the reluctance to let them come to harm like that unless they were villains, in which case they'd already be marred (or seductive). I think Rumiko Takahashi is one of the only mangakas I know that draws "plain-jane" protagonists (Akane from Ranma and Kagome from Inu-Yasha).
Disclaimer: they're generalizations, and may not be true in all cases.
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2) It's not ever explained, because it's not like you ever thought to explain the whole gender reassignment surgery thing, either.
EVERYONE MUST LOVE SECHS.
My cheap answer: Slight asymmetry is sexy. Hence also scars, tattoos, half-masks, and the droopy-hair thing.
(...okay, what are the "smiling mask" (I'm sure I know that, and it's driving me crazy I can't remember it) and "lost due to a gunshot wound" ones? Because I'm sitting here seriously trying to imagine how that second one would work. I would imagine the eye would be one of the lesser of one's problems in that sort of a situation.)
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"Smiling mask" is Chichiri in Fushigi Yuugi. Super-melodramatic cause for it, too.
"Gunshot wound" is a huge spoiler, as it occurs toward the end of something. It also happened in real life to a local actor/writer in LA: a gunshot to the head destroyed his optic nerve and blinded him. If the angle is right, bullets do sometimes cause various types of damage to the head and face without going through to the brain.
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Technically.
---L.
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Actually I suspect all the ones you've offered in your poll are variations on that same theme.
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Er. Anyway! In Western mythology the one-eyed god is usually a sun god or otherwise associated with the sun, like Odin. Wish I knew enough about Japanese mythology to know if that was universal. I certainly wouldn't call most of the one-eyed bishonen of manga/manwha wise, but....
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"I didn't actually lose my eye. I just didn't want it anymore after I got Dran-o in it."
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(Which eye was that? ... Hmm, her intro in ME never does say. Here I was hoping it'd be her left 'cause she's female, like shirt buttons.)
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Someone here reminded me that Kaede in Inuyasha wears an eyepatch (she presumably lost an eye to Inuyasha in the first chapter). But she is a wrinkly hunched wisewoman type and not meant to be hawt. (Inuyasha later wound up one-eyed for about five minutes.) You can stab a girl through the heart, but don't touch the face!
For another Other:
Give eye as requested reward to your former colleague, because he lost his eyes and his girlfriend in an assassination attempt on your then-living veryveryclose best friend, who was also the god-emperor and whom your former colleague helped you clone, even though you know said colleague now hates you and your now-dead VVC best friend and your VVC best friend's new clone, which will prompt him to steal your VVC best friend's corpse and make a VVC best friend EVIL clone so he can make a play for god-emperordom-by-proxy while screwing over all of you at the same time; but you do get an artificial eye while pissed-off-former-colleague-cum-terrorist is stuck with an unflattering eyepatch
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OK, WTF is the Other you summarized? Use white if spoilery.
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It's The Empty Empire, which is surprisingly awesome. And which was first published in 1993 so it is unlikely that he was stolen from Hakkai, so they are merely secret twins. (so to speak)
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As for theories, is the opposite of the "I'm blind in one eye and strong" theme the "I got something bad in my eyeball and become evil" theme?
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I've since expanded my animanga knowledge, and one of the new series I picked up reinforces the idea of physical blinding in good guys being connected to prior mental blindness to some form of evil.