This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Splitting The Clark Kent Effect, take 2 launched as The Glasses Come Off: From YKTTW
There's one man who can kick ass and wear nerd glasses and look inhumanly cool doing it.
That man is Gordon Freeman
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Looney Toons: And they're even heavy black plastic "Buddy Holly" frames, to boot!
LTR: Does a picture even exsist of Gordon without his glasses? He'd look practicaly naked without them
BT The P: There's no in-game art of Gordon, so the total number of images is small. Y'know, that'd be an interesting joke for one of the upcoming HL 2 episodic games: the player's perspective is all blurry, with a global distortion that even covers the menu items. Barney, or some other character goes, "Oops! You'll need these, Doc!" and hands over the glasses.
YYZ: I've seen an interesting variation on the subversion: A comedian on a panel-discussion show who pulled out, not a pair of glasses, but a baseball cap - which, predictably, he proceeded to put on, then whip off and throw down on the desk in front of him as he began shouting.
Silent Hunter: This is possibly Truth in Television. I'll have to check if Tony Blair does it. I think he does occasionally.
Silent Hunter: Yes, he does do it at PM Qs.
Your Obedient Serpent: I've noticed a lot of pages that use The Clark Kent Effect to describe putting on sunglasses before getting ready to kick ass and/or take names (CSI Miami being the most obvious example). The description of CKE doesn't really cover this, and, frankly, the trope of Sunglasses As Visual Shorthand For Badassness is common enough to rate its own entry.
Johnny E: Cool Shades, surely?
Furry Saint: Should it be noted in the Trigun example that yellow glasses are used by shooters because they increase contrast, thereby letting you pick out details better?
Red Shoe: I smell a Fanon; the Doctor not wearing his glasses in "The Girl in The Fireplace" is only a continuity glitch if he's farsighted. If (as seems just as likely) he wears them purely for dramatic effect, it's not actually a glitch.
Sci Vo: This sounds like Cool Shades, so I edited it and moved it there.
- Subversion: In Trigun, Vash the Stampede always puts on his yellow sunglasses right before he stops playing the fool and reveals his actual hypercompetence. Artistically speaking, this is probably to cover up his large, innocent-looking eyes when he's doing something at odds with his normal appearance. Or it could just be a case of Scary Shiny Glasses.
WVI: My lover takes off his glasses before we have sex. Needless to say, it is epic.
Removed the MS T3k suing bit from the Rocky Horror film section because it's well... backwards and wrong.
Prfnoff: Renamed from The Clark Kent Effect according to this YKTTW
. The proposed split may follow.
(Later) I split out Glasses Pull. It had to be done.
Keredis: Are we sure that they have to be Nerd Glasses for this trope? Liquid Ocelot whips off a pair of sunglasses during the pre-fight cutscene in Metal Gear Solid 4.
