Blind Without 'Em

Art by Maritsa Patrinos for Buzzfeed.

"My glasses! I can't see a thing without my glasses!"

— Velma from Scooby-Doo, pretty much Once per Episode

Nobody who wears glasses in TV ever needs them for minor vision correction, except for reading glasses that are worn mainly to make the character look wise. Almost all TV characters with glasses have such bad vision that if they are deprived of their spectacles, they are practically blind — usually hammered home by showing (briefly) the character's uselessly blurry point of view or the character making a Blind Mistake.

In western animation, when such a character's glasses are lost, their eyes usually shrink down to pinpoints, which indicates either that they are squinting to see, or to point out the jarring real life effect of seeing someone who has huge eyes when seen through heavily magnified glasses without their glasses. An anime variation on this is usually represented with the character's eyes being replaced by 3's or 3_3, which is another stylization of squinting.

Oddly, when a character discards his/her glasses in order to look more attractive or more badass, that character invariably turns out not to be blind without 'em after all (unless it's a parody). Sometimes both will occur, with the character's eyesight varying based on what's convenient for the situation.

This is a Super-Trope to Blind Mistake and Dropped Glasses.

Note: Because special lenses are needed to keep eyeglasses from flashing stage lights or reflecting filming equipment, any time an actor wears glasses onscreen, it's a deliberate character choice, and the glasses will have anti-reflective coating. If an actor needs corrective lenses and it's deemed wrong for the character, they'll either wear contacts or go without and pretend they're not as blind as a bat.

Truth in Television, but with wildly varied degrees of hilarity, if any.

See also Glasses Curiosity, Nerd Glasses, and Universal Eyeglasses. Can overlap with Sunglasses at Night.

Unrelated to the various tropes on the Index Myopia, which are about figurative forms of myopia. Contrast Mistaken for Bad Vision.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Sears Optical Ads:
  • The woman in one ad, who mistakes a raccoon for her cat. "Come snuggles with momma..."
  • Another ad in the campaign shows a woman who yells "Taxi!", gets in a car, and tells the driver to take her to some location. After the car doesn't go anywhere, the camera pulls back to show she's in a police car.
  • A third ad has a boyfriend mistake a mannequin for a teenager checking out his girlfriend. He doesn't seem convinced, even after his girlfriend points out his mistake.
• Specsavers has an advertising campaign based on this; with a sheep farmer shearing his own dog, an old couple taking a relaxing sit down on a rollercoaster, and a couple driving onto an aircraft carrier instead of a ferry.
  Tagline: Should've gone to Specsavers.

Anime & Manga

• Aikatsu Stars!: This is a problem shown for Koharu. She first meets her idol Yozora when the latter hands her back her glasses after she drops them. This is also reflected upon a character she acts out in a Show Within a Show in episode 13.
• Akame ga Kill!: A Running Gag with Night Raid member Sheele. There's even a short dedicated to it.
• Hida Sayuri in Best Student Council has a habit of having her glasses ("megane" in Japanese) knocked off so that she can meander about the ground mumbling "megane... megane...". Surprisingly, they have only been stepped on once. She's not just blind without 'em; she seems to lose all sense-abilities and tunes out the world completely when she loses them. The first episode alone has her apparently patting the same square foot of land saying "megane... megane..." for hours before being fireman-carried home, still in her orz state.
• Black Butler:
  • Mey-Rin the maid is so farsighted she doesn't need a sight on her sniper rifles. However, that makes ordinary tasks as a housemaid rather difficult. She's Blind Without 'Em, barely functioning with 'em.
  • This is also true of all the Grim Reapers. The "Story of Will the Reaper" OVA shows the workshop of the craftsman who makes all of their spectacles — he is a highly respected legend. The Shinigami Haken Kyoukai Theme Song from the second musical says that their #1 rule is that all reapers must wear glasses. In regards to actually seeing them fumble around for a dropped pair, the stoic, straight-edged William gets that sort of scene the most. About thirteen minutes into episode 9 of Kuroshitsuji II, he loses his glasses and starts fumbling around on the ground Velma-style—even admonishing a brick wall that he thinks is his partner. It also happens to a lesser extent in the aforementioned OVA.
• Downplayed with Riruka Dokugamine from Bleach. She refuses to wear her glasses due to vanity, but her nearsightedness is brought up only once, in a dark room when Ginjo refuses to turn the lights on, and she shows no obvious signs of needing glasses at any other point.
• Uniquely zigzagged in Brigadoon: Marin and Melan. Marin is a rare example of a character who's far-sighted rather than near-sighted. She does need glasses, but she can see well enough to get around without 'em. The trope later gets exaggerated halfway through the series; Marin becomes literally blind and can only see with a Monomakia acting as her glasses.
• Candy♡Candy: Both Patty and Stear. One adorably hilarious scene has both of them losing their glasses during a ball and trying to dance without them on anyway.
• Normally averted yet still invoked in Case Closed to maintain Conan's Clark Kenting. He doesn't need the glasses to see, but he fakes this anyway to keep his identity secret. The dub made it one step further by making him say he has retinitis pigmentosa.
• The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan: While her original Haruhi self only wore glasses for appearances and later stops wearing them entirely, the alternate universe Yuki Nagato does need glasses and very much suffers from this trope, to the point where she can't make out Haruhi on first meeting her from a few feet away.
• Doctor Slump:
  • Arale has this problem, due to a flaw in programming. When she's without glasses, Blind Mistake ensues.
  • Obotchaman is created with the same programming behind Arale's creation other than being male, so he shares the same need for glasses as Arale, though, unlike Arale, we never see him losing his glasses.
• Dr. STONE:
  • Suika has terrible vision in the equivalent of the Stone Age, so glasses aren't exactly an option. Instead, she uses a helmet with peepholes to help get around this, though she doesn't understand why it works. As a result, whenever she takes the helmet off, she squints so hard that her head shrivels up like a raisin. Senku later manages to fashion some lenses for her helmet that act as glasses.
  • It's later revealed that Kinro's vision isn't the greatest either, which hampers his ability as a warrior. When he borrows Suika's helmet during a fight, he immediately Takes a Level in Badass due to actually being able to see his opponent clearly. Senku later makes proper wire-frame glasses for Kinro, although Suika still prefers to keep using her helmet.
  • Dr. Chelsea, despite being a geography pro, managed to head the opposite of where she was supposed to go after reviving herself, due to her glasses having disintegrated over the 3700 years of petrification, meaning she couldn't read the sign Dr. Xeno left for her telling her to go north.
• Issei Tsubaki in Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, while still being functional without his coke bottles, doesn't recognize either Sōsuke nor Kaname without them, and it leads him to almost kill the janitor after going through the entire class just to find Sōsuke who had missed their duel on the roof.
• Sacchan from Gintama has a tendency to lose her glasses often, leading to such situations as poking Gintoki's eye out with a chopstick full of natto or mistaking a time bomb for a giant breath mint. What makes her plight all the more disastrous — or hilarious — is that she's actually a ninja.
• Nowy in Glass Fleet is apparently blind without 'em, given that his Dropped Glasses moments are frequent enough to become an Overly Long Gag — but a scene near the end of the series suggests that he may be intentionally exaggerating it for Eimer's amusement.
• Integra Hellsing from Hellsing, in the anime at least, is shown at a couple of points to have extremely poor eyesight without her glasses.
• Hetalia: Axis Powers: In a series where the majority of glasses-wearing characters don't need them for vision problems, Estonia is a notable exception, as character notes mention his poor eyesight without them. As he's a nerd with a penchant for computers, it could overlap with Nerd Glasses. They also help conceal his expressions, as he's said to always have a lot on his mind.
• The girls from Hidamari Sketch are delighted to see Sae without her glasses for once, but when it turns out that she cannot even distinguish between a clam and a soup ladle anymore they quickly make her put them on again. (The reason she wasn't wearing them in the first place was because the steam was fogging them up, so the benefits of putting them on again are unclear.)
• In Horimiya, Akane Yanagi keeps losing his glasses and contacts and it is Played for Laughs - he bumps into walls, mistakes one person for another, and is generally hopeless without them.
• In the Kimagure Orange Road story, "Manami-chan's Big Adventure", Kyōsuke's sister loses her contacts while enjoying a day off from everyday household chores and is subsequently rescued from shady characters — in the manga they're lecherous guys, in the anime it's sukeban (girl gang) members — by Kyōsuke (in the anime, Madoka saved her from the gang and Manami wasn't even sure the girl was her friend Madoka, even when she stood directly in front of her). He fails to recognize his dressed-up sister, and she fails to recognize him without her glasses or contacts (and he has a slight sore throat, which changes his voice), and they end up on a date together. (It makes sense in context and isn't squicky in the least.) In the manga story he's just being nice to a sweet girl he's met, but in the anime he does finally recognize her and treats her to the memorable day she wanted to have — with Manami never realizing that this kind, gentlemanly boy she spends the day with was in fact her brother.
• Keitaro and Naru from Love Hina are both so blind without 'em that they don't recognize each other from two meters apart. In Naru's case, most of the time she wears contacts. It's only when she's studying or, in the case mentioned above, running away from home that she puts on her glasses in lieu of the contacts. The only times when she has neither are in the bath or when her glasses are broken. The time running away from home, she said that she spent the entire night crying. Contacts are not so good after that for a while. In the Anime both of their glasses soon break, leading to them having a nice time unknowing who they were talking to till Hilarity Ensued when they were fixed.
• Lucky Star averts the "shrinking eyes" effect when Konata pulls off Miyuki's glasses, and disappointingly admits that "it doesn't work that way in real life". They do, however, show her having to squint to read the board, and she says her vision without 'em is "way below 20/200."
• Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Astray has Riika Sheder, who like the Geordi La Forge example below is literally blind without her special glasses. In the main series, the purpose behind the experiments leading the creation of protagonist Kira Yamato is that sometimes genetically engineered "Coordinators" don't turn out quite as "perfect" as they're supposed to. Riika exists as living proof of how true this is. But since the cybernetic technology in the "Cosmic Era" is just as advanced as the genetic technology, she's able to be a mobile suit test pilot anyway.
• The Class Rep in My Bride is a Mermaid is pretty much blind without her glasses. She's also unrecognizable, when The Glasses Come Off she's far more attractive. Natrually, this means that she ends up spending a whole afternoon with Nagasumi with neither of them recognizing each other (as she can't see him, and he doesn't recognize her with her hair down.)
• Jean Roque de Baltique in Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, including the obligatory Dropped Glasses scene. To the point that without the glasses, his eyes are drawn much smaller than the usual "anime" size.
• Tsukuyomi of Negima! Magister Negi Magi Rather than use her specs for pure cuteness, the author made it a slight plot-point when she is interrupting Rival swordswoman Setsuna from rescuing her charge, to which Setsuna responds by tossing the impeding enemy swordswoman aside, unintentionally knocking her glasses off. She is no threat afterwards.
• Although a "my glasses!" scene never happens to him in the canon of Neon Genesis Evangelion, Kensuke Aida hasn't had the same luck in non-canon stories, such as Shinji Ikari Raising Project:
  Kensuke [when accused of peeking on girls in the pool at one point while not wearing his glasses]: I didn't see anything! I'm innocent! Everything's just massive blur of skin and lycra!
• At one point in Nichijou, Mai decides to do the "my glasses, where are my glasses" routine to troll Yuuko — except not only is Mai already wearing her glasses, she also has an extra pair perched atop her head. And she's wearing contact lenses as well.
• Occult Academy: Kozue, likely as a shout-out to Velma, constantly loses her glasses throughout the series. Her glasses are literally a part of her soul; without them, she's nothing like her true self and gets trapped in a dream looking for them.
• Lieutenant Tashigi of One Piece is so nearsighted that when she puts her glasses on her forehead to read, she easily mistakes random bystanders for her commanding officer.
• Only the Flower Knows: Arikawa has terrible vision without glasses or contacts.
• Pastel: Moe Haruno drops her glasses a few times, as part of being a klutz.
• Ayaori in Penguin Revolution has incredibly lousy eyesight and can barely see anything without either his Nerd Glasses or contacts. Which is fortunate for the Sweet Polly Oliver who rooms with him, since he has a tendency to wander into the bathroom while she's bathing.
• Ping Pong: The reason Sakuma can never excel at ping pong is his severe astigmatism.
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • Early into the anime's run was a character-of-the-day named Seymour who gets tripped by Meowth, loses his glasses, and is essentially rendered incapacitated until he finds them.
  • From the Pokémon the Series: XY, there's Ash's companion Clemont, who ends up walking into and frantically apologizing to a giant rock after a Pancham swipes his glasses.
• Sunao from Potemayo, when running to school with a large group of people but without his glasses, somehow ends up in a restaurant. That's not even open. And resembles a school only in that both have doors and chairs.
• Nino Nakano of The Quintessential Quintuplets usually wears contacts, and is so blind without them that she mistakes Fuutarou for her sister Miku (and to make things worse, she's just come out of the bathroom wearing only a towel).
• Mousse in Ranma ½ is so dependent upon his glasses that without them he can mistake a bright green houseplant for the purple-haired girl he loves. This isn't helped by his tendency to take them off any time he tries to be cool/dramatic. He even has a pair of glasses sized for his duck cursed form.
• Mari in Rebuild of Evangelion 2.0 claims to be this although given her subsequent actions and somewhat erratic personality suggests she may well be lying.
• Risky☆Safety: Safety breaks her glasses in one episode and spends the next floating about aimlessly and crashing into various objects.
• Tenpou in Saiyuki Gaiden, despite being a god, suffers from this problem, to the point that he's only able to be killed once his glasses are knocked off and broken (he even admits the fight's lost once his glasses are gone).
• Sgt. Frog:
  • Kururu mutters "megane, megane" after he loses his glasses; whether they were dislodged by an explosion or shattered by boob missiles. While he is a nasty little cur, just break his glasses and he's mostly harmless.
  • This also seems to be true for Chiruyo, if her fumbling around for her glasses while they're on her head is any indication.
• Sorcerer Stabber Orphen: Revenge: This is a Running Gag with new character Licorice. The first episode alone has her gushing to a statue she thinks is Orphen after she drops her glasses.
• Matsuri from Strawberry Marshmallow is already quite clumsy, but it gets throttled to near-catastrophic proportions when she doesn't wear her glasses. She almost gets herself (and Nobue) killed during a visit to the public bath, for one.
• Thriller Restaurant: Anko nearly has a conniption fit whenever she loses her glasses. However, she ends up takes a level in badass without them, as when she's unable to see in the fifth episode, she's not scared of the ogres attacking her and manages to get her and her friend to safety - albeit not before running into a wall.
• Tokyo Mew Mew had Retasu. Actually, she could see without them when she was transformed as Mew Lettuce, but in civilian form, small blurry eyes and feeling around still reigned supreme.
• In Tonari No Randoseru, Kasumi is this; she's a elementary student who, under undisclosed circumstances, loses her glasses and has to spend God-knows how long helplessly crawling around and blindly feeling around for them Velma-style. When the protagonist finally returns her glasses to her, she can't tell the difference between him and a lamp post, and her own glasses and a pair of ice cream container lids.
• Sort of subverted in Witch Hunter Robin where the title character needs glasses only for correctly using her magical abilities. And it's really not as stupid as it sounds.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • Shou of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX cannot tell the difference between a giant koala and his friend Hayato without his glasses. It's surprising he can even WITH them.... In all fairness, Judai mistakes Hayato for a giant koala upon meeting him.
  • Carly from Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds also can't see a thing without her glasses; except when her Superpowered Evil Side is in control. (In fact, Jack finds her half-broken glasses in the ruins of the Arcadia Building after she is recruited into the Dark Signers, and they play a big part of getting her to snap out of it later.)
• Furi Ten of Muteki-Dan in Zoids Genesis, tripping and trying to find her glasses in her introductory episode and continuing it as a running gag through the rest of the series.

Asian Animation

• In Lamput, Fat Doc needs to wear glasses to see clearly. Lamput uses this to his advantage in one episode by repeatedly taking off Fat Doc's glasses and putting them back on to distract him.

Comic Books

• Spanish comic book character Rompetechos is this, but taken to the extreme where he is blind even with them. 90% of the time he reads something (say, "Escuela de perritos", "Dog School") and he believes it's a very different thing (say, "Escuela de peritos", "School for experts"), which coupled with his very bad temper makes him believe the people in the places where he goes to are mocking him, and this lands him in loads of trouble.
  • In Mortadelo y Filemón, by the same author, Mortadelo becomes this when he loses his glasses (or are broken).
• In an early The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones, this is how Indy realizes Edith Dunne is a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing. When a bullet flies past him to hit the radio, Indy assumes the radio was the target as there's no way someone could have missed him at such close range. Unless it's someone who can't see two feet in front of her without her glasses.
• In Batman: Year One, James Gordon uses having dropped his glasses as an excuse not to recognize Bruce Wayne after Wayne saves his son's life.
  • In Batman #356, Batman claims Hugo Strange is as good as blind without his glasses. He uses this to his advantage whilst fighting him: Strange takes his glasses off in order to dress up as Batman and then blows up the fake Wayne Manor they're fighting in, however he can't see Batman and Robin sneak away
• 'Erbert of the Bash St. Kids in The Beano is blind without 'em - as is his canine counterpart 'Enry. In fact, they're largely blind with 'em. Some stories imply 'Erbert doesn't actually need glasses at all, and he only has difficulty seeing because he wears them.
• The Chronicles of Riddick: Riddick himself is literally blind without his own special glasses in the light, though he seems to have no problem fighting in light when the plot calls for it.
• Similar to Riddick, the DC Comics hero Doctor Mid-Nite is an example of literally blind — he can only see in total darkness, otherwise he needs special lenses to filter the light.
• In The Death of Superman this was the Kryptonite Factor towards the Eradicator - the body he made out of various material around Superman's tomb was imperfect, rendering him unable to see in brightness. Thus, he is forced to wear a set of shades to filter the light. He does see the irony of a man whose power is derived from the sun and yet he can't see in the light.
• The version of the Scarecrow/Jonathan Crane appearing in The Sandman (1989) claims to be this, as demonstrated in a scene where he jumps out in full costume at Dream and John Dee, followed by an apologetic pause to take off his mask and put his glasses back on.
• In Sasmira, Bertille is very short-sighted and only sees a blur when not wearing her glasses.
• Brainy Smurf in The Smurfs, both in the comic books and in the Animated Adaptation.
• Spider-Man: Spidey's foe Doctor Octopus sometimes has this problem. Depending on the continuity, it's considered a side-effect of the accident that gave him his powers.
• Cyclops from the X-Men suffers from a variant of the trope in that without glasses, he has to keep his eyes shut and thus be literally blind, because he can't turn his Eye Beams off; without his visor or specialized specs, he's either blind or completely wrecking everything he's looking at.

Comic Strips

• Conrad, Capt'n Crazy's brother, is even almost-blind with 'em.
• One of the iconic drawn-in-the-margins characters of Cricket, a children's magazine, is Zoot, a pygmy shrew who's blind without 'em. A good thing too, else he might have caught on too soon that the "puppies and kitties" he'd been hanging around with were actually various insects, worms and snails that he rightly ought to be preying upon! Instead, he became so fond of them that he converted to vegetarianism when he learned the truth.
• Many early Dennis the Menace (US) strips portrayed Henry Mitchell with horrible eyesight without his glasses. He can barely find his son Dennis in the same room if he doesn't have them on.
• Peanuts: Marcie was once told by Peppermint Patty that she would look more sophisticated with her glasses up on her forehead, resulting in her bumping into walls, a lamppost, etc. Marcie: "Before I became sophisticated, I almost never had headaches."

Fan Works

• Sister Marisol from Sister Floriana. Deconstructed in that replacing her glasses is much more difficult now that most doctors are serving in the war.
• In Star Of Wonder Star Of Night, Tsubomi can’t see after her glasses are knocked off by a snowball, she accidentally slips on ice and hits a tree.
• Date A Live: Altered Timeline: Nia's vision gets blurry if she isn't wearing her glasses.
• A Single Mistake Can Topple All the Dominoes: Played for Drama when Max is almost akumatized through his glasses from keeping quiet about a horrendous crime that Lila committed in a previous school until the school faculty finish their investigation and reveal the truth to Lila's mother before Chloe takes the glasses and breaks them so the akuma can be captured. When Isabella Rossi arrives at the classroom to check what was going on, Max, not able to see clearly without his glasses, thinks that Isabella is actually her daughter, snapping in fury at "Lila" about her lies, manipulation, and other crimes.
• X Men Evolution Season 5: Cyclops' has to close his eyes when he loses his glasses or risk shooting everyone around him, forcing him to rely on his hearing to find out what is going on.

Films — Animation

• In Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart, Miss Acacia claims she can barely see even with her glasses.
• Monsters University reveals that Randall's sinister squinting is a case of this. Mike points out his camouflage ability would make him very scary, but his glasses ruin the effect, so he ditches the glasses to gain a perpetual squint. Though "blind" is an exaggeration, since he doesn't seem to have much trouble seeing after that point (contact lenses do exist in that world, so maybe he got himself a pair). On the other hand, a constant headache from everything being out of focus could explain his surly personality.
• My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Friendship Games: Unlike Pony Twilight who's almost never seen wearing glasses in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Human Twilight really needs them, as demonstrated when she's seen squinting and looking for them after bumping into Flash Sentry. We even get a P.O.V. Shot when Flash gives her back the glasses, showing just how blurry her vision is without them.
• Edgar the Mole from Once Upon a Forest. He is a mole after all.
• The Caliph in Scooby-Doo in Arabian Nights. When he breaks his glasses, he doesn't bother getting a new pair and does away with them, and ends up squinting and with blurry vision for the remainder of the movie.

Films — Live-Action

• An important plot point in 12 Angry Men (and the play on which it was based, of course): Juror #9 recalls that a key witness in the murder case had marks on her nose suggesting that she usually wears glasses, though opted not to in court. He points out that she was unlikely to be wearing them in bed late at night when she claims to have seen the murder from all the way across the street, thereby making her less than credible as a witness.
• Brenda in Adventures in Babysitting, having her glasses stolen, wanders around the bus station blindly and mistakes a rat for a kitten. (The bag lady who steals them is actually able to see better with them; ironically, in Real Life she'd likely be even blinder trying to wear glasses not prescribed to her.)
• Adventures in Dinosaur City: Jamie has her glasses knocked off in a bar fight and is left to crawl around trying to find them. Subverted when one of her friends accidentally steps on them before she can find them; while she's clearly troubled by it, it's not a massive deal to her.
• Blood Bags: When Tracy and Alex first meet, one of the first things she does is ask him to retrieve her glasses, since she can't see, and doesn't want to run into the killer.
• Sheriff Albert Earp in Carry On Cowboy — although he is not really much better with them on.
• Subverted for the Children's Party at the Palace. The premise is that the characters from over 100 years of British children’s literature have to embark on a quest to retrieve the Queen’s handbag, which has her reading glasses needed to read her closing speech. Without those specs, then Her Majesty can’t read the speech ( turns out the speech itself was also in the bag). The Queen, however, isn’t completely blind without them, just farsighted.
• Delicatessen has a woman who removes her glasses in order to look better for a man she's about to see. She is almost completely blind without them and many times knocks something over or overpours tea. We are given a view of her vision a few times and she's pretty blind.
• Sir Charles from Doctor at Large is, which causes problems when he leaves his glasses to go for a swim, causing him to enter the wrong changing room and get screamed at by some French women.
• The title character of Dr. Cyclops. He can't see at all without his coke-bottle spectacles; that's why he summoned the team of scientists to his island, because he needed to use a microscope to perfect his shrinking device, and couldn't use one while wearing them. His miniaturized victims try to take advantage of this by breaking them. They only manage to break one lens, but that blinds him enough for them to trick him into chasing them to a mineshaft, where he plummets to his death.
• A mall employee from Eight Legged Freaks, who proved himself Too Dumb to Live by repeatedly taking off his glasses, even when on the run from giant spiders. Eventually, he blindly walks up to one and is killed.
• Olivia in Final Destination 5 appears to be this. When she loses her glasses on the bridge she is unable to do anything but stumble around and cry for help. The audience is also shown a brief glimpse of her vision — it's pretty dire.
• Gattaca has Vincent lose his contacts and is thus utterly helpless when he tries to cross a main drag (which is plain dumb in the first place).
• Geek Charming: It is revealed halfway throughout the film that Dylan secretly wears contact lenses. However, she accidentally loses one of her contacts and is forced to wear her glasses to school. She tries to not wear them resulting in this trope.
• Sinistra, the bikini-clad temptress in the '60s beach-party film The Ghost In The Invisible Bikini.
• The Goonies. Stef loses her glasses early on in the adventure. While she complains a few times about not being able to see, she doesn't seem to have much of a problem throughout the rest of the movie.
• In Guest House Paradiso, Richie donned Eddie's glasses as a disguise. They were both rendered nearly blind as a result.
• Harry Potter:
  • Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban averts this trope nicely when Harry gets his glasses knocked off by the Whomping Willow. This leads to a fuzzy but still somewhat intelligible P.O.V. Shot that's pretty close to what the world looks like through myopia.
  • In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 Hermione does however tell Harry “Your eyesight really is awful.” before putting on glasses when she and six others magically transform themselves to look like him as part of a escape ploy.
• After Olive's glasses are smashed in Holiday on the Buses, she can't find her way around and has to rely on her husband Arthur to guide her.
• In How to Marry a Millionaire, Pola (Marilyn Monroe) is blind without her glasses, and vain enough to always take them off around men. This leads to scenes like pretending to read a book, which she's holding upside down.
• Major League: Pitcher Ricky Vaughn can't make out the strike zone until he's fitted with an embarrassing pair of glasses.
• Minority Report has a man say this to very creepy effect. He is standing over his bed (that he caught his wife with another man in) and as he puts his glasses on he's raising a pair of shears about to stab them. Thankfully Precrime foresaw this and arrived in time to stop him.
• Done very scarily in The Mummy (1999). When Mr. Burns' glasses get broken in the tunnel, he must feel his way in the dark. He sees the mummy ahead of him, but his eyesight is so bad he's not sure he sees anything. He looks away, then back, only to be sure that someone/something was there because it's now gone. The mummy appears right behind him, so now he can see the mummy up close. He can only scream before he gets his eyes and tongue ripped out. Which then means that the Mummy, having his eyes, is short-sighted. No wonder he later thinks the lead female is his lover. Word of God says this was the idea in the original script, although they never drew explicit attention to it.
• My Cousin Vinny:
  • Subverted when the inept defense lawyer tries to discredit a witness by claiming the man couldn't have seen the perps' faces because he wasn't wearing his vital glasses. The witness replies that they're reading glasses.
  • Also subverted with another witness, who was wearing her glasses when she saw the crime. In this case, though, she's half-blind even with the glasses.
• The Open House Logan switches between glasses and contacts but can barely see without corrective lenses.
• James in Razors: The Return of Jack the Ripper. When the Ripper knocks him down, he loses his glasses. Upon awakening, he can only view the surrounding events as a blur, and is easy prey for the Ripper.
• In The Pink Panther (2006), Clouseau takes off Nicole's glasses and tells her she looks beautiful without them. Nicole thanks him, but after he leaves she squints and falls over.
• Sorority Boys contains what is probably the stupidest example of this trope ever. It's a drag comedy that expects us to believe that a character without her glasses can't tell the difference between a naked man and a naked woman.
• Donald Sutherland's character in Space Cowboys says he only needs glasses for a few things, like "reading, driving, seeing movies, walking..." He nonetheless passes the NASA eyesight test by memorizing the letters: "I may be blind, but I have a perfect memory!"
• The Spider-Man Trilogy. Pete before getting his powers, and when they start failing.
• In a reversal, although not really a subversion, in Strangers on a Train, Alfred Hitchcock wanted the actress who played Miriam to wear glasses with thick lenses so he could show her murder reflected in them, and to make her resemble another character. The actress, Casey Rogers (billed as Laura Elliott), didn't need glasses, and couldn't see at all with the costume glasses on. She wears the thick lenses for close-up and medium scenes, and plain lenses for long shots, but there are still several scenes where she has to depend on other people to make sure she doesn't trip or stumble when she's wearing the glasses. In the scenes where Miriam goes to the amusement park with two men, she is holding both their arms most of the time because she can't see where she is going.
• Stewardess School: Philo has terrible eyesight and needs comically thick glasses. When he wanders into the women’s shower without his glasses, none of the women care because they know he can’t see them.
• Straw Dogs (2011): the male protagonist, although it's done poorly and not even referenced until his glasses are knocked off during the climax.
• Played for drama in Summer Camp Nightmare, as when Donald Poultry drops his glasses into the ravine when he is forced to go across the rope bridge and Franklin has Stanley cut the bridge, causing Donald to hang onto the rope for dear life as the glasses drop and his vision is severely affected.
• Turkey Shoot has a particularly glaring example: Ritter removes one prisoner’s glasses before setting him out on the field.
• Black Comedy example in Wild Wild West. Artemis Gordon has a device that can project the last thing a murder victim saw before he died, but to do so, he has to mount the victim's decapitated head onto the device. Anyway, at first, the image is very blurry (they can see someone who's obviously General McGrath, but not a paper he's holding) until West notices the victim's glasses on the table and puts them over his eyes. Then they can see the document clearly.
• Snake Eyes: Julia Costello witnesses a murder but has her glasses knocked off and shattered in the confused aftermath. Later in the movie, she's shown squinting, and some camera shots show her blurred perspective.

Literature

• In Alas, Babylon, Dan is almost helpless after his glasses are broken by muggers, which is a problem for the whole community since he's their only doctor.
• Angela Nicely: Mr. Weakly is revealed to be “blind as a bat” without his glasses in “Matchmaker!”.
• Sophie in The BFG can hardly see a thing without her glasses, which have steel rims and very thick lenses.
• Ingvar in Brotherband is a Gentle Giant and by far the strongest of his Ragtag Bunch of Misfits, but his nearsightedness makes him a liability in battle. Then Hal makes him a primitive pair of spectacles, and he takes quite the level in badass.
• Catherine of Catherine, Called Birdy has terrible eyesight. As she lives in the Middle Ages, she has to just deal with squinting a lot, something she complains about a few times over the course of the book.
• Churchmouse Stories: Parson Pease-Porridge's poor vision comes into play in more than one story:
  • "Peter Churchmouse": Parson Pease-Porridge mistakes Peter for a gray spot and his tracks on a sermon for footnotes before he gets his glasses replaced.
  • "Gabriel Churchkitten": Parson Pease-Porridge can't keep from bumping into things if he doesn't have his glasses on — at least while he's awake. To the animals' dismay, he can sleepwalk without them just fine.
• Tamora Pierce's Tris, from the Circle of Magic series. In a mild variation, she has much worse regular vision without her glasses, but can see magic better.
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time: Only mentioned in passing, but Siobhan, the narrator Christopher's favourite teacher, wears glasses thick enough to induce headaches when 20/20 people wear them.
• Lydia from Dark Shores. Without her glasses, everything she sees is blurry and she squints a lot.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid:
  • Patty Ferrell can't see three feet in front of her without her glasses, meaning when Greg and the other trees in The Wizard of Oz play pelt apples at her (Dorothy) and her glasses break, the play has to be cancelled.
  • Greg is also revealed to be one in Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw. He normally wears contact lenses, but after breaking one of them must wear very thick glasses when attempting to meet Holly Hills at a skate park.
  • In Cabin Fever, Greg shows Manny a magic trick. Manny attempts the same trick, but with Susan's glasses, and he breaks them. It is then that Susan is revealed to also be a straight example.
  • In Old School, Greg goes on a field trip. He gets the idea to start a campfire using his cabinmate Emilio Mendoza's glasses. When Greg high-fives his cabinmates, they break Emilio's glasses, and find out he is also a straight example when he keeps crashing into trees on their way back to the cabin. This becomes a major plot point later in the book, when the cabinmates raid a girls' cabin for deodorant and accidentally leave Emilio behind.
• Semi in Dr. Franklin's Island has pretty poor eyesight. Because she loses her glasses and contacts in the plane crash at the start of the book, she spends much of it in a blur, unable to see things other characters plainly find visible and relying on their descriptions. Being transformed into a fish monster gives her clear vision, but as she's trapped in a pool after that she still has to be told what's happening outside of her range of sight.
• Scobie in Don't Call Me Ishmael! can't see without his glasses, which becomes a problem when he tries to play sports. He once loses them during a volleyball match and can't find them, leading to the match to end in complete chaos because people trip over him as he is searching for the glasses.
• Rosalind Hawkins from The Fire Rose has to wear glasses. She isn't shown as ever losing them. However, she is required to take them off for a ritual to Summon (or rather cajole) a Unicorn (an Elemental of Spirit), and is annoyed that she can't see much of anything. (The Unicorn looks like a white, blurry shape when it appears.)
• Harry Potter has very poor eyesight without his glasses and everything is said to look blurry without them. He almost never drops them, though he breaks the frames a lot, but he does have them removed when he goes into the hospital wing. Paradoxically, Harry's vision is quite good with his glasses on, enough so that he serves as Seeker on the Hogwarts Quidditch team, a position which relies on keen eyesight. Though one of the books does point out that Harry being a glasses-wearer does affect his playing in certain situations — Hermione has to make his glasses waterproof with magic to allow him to play in the rain.
• In The Homestuck Epilogues, John breaks and drops his glasses just before the fight with Lord English. He can't see without them, and he's almost completely useless until he gets his glasses back.
• Subverted in I Am Number Four where Sam's specs used to belong to his (missing) dad. Four tries the glasses on and gets a massive headache for his trouble.
  Four: Jesus, is your vision really this bad?... You know these things will screw up your vision if you keep wearing them, right?
• When Junie B. Jones enters first grade, she finds herself unable to properly read words without them appearing blurry to her. Cue the new glasses.
• Piggy, from Lord of the Flies. He's almost completely blind without them. Poor kid never saw that rock coming.
• The Magic Tree House: Jack. He loses them a few times in the series, the earliest instance occurring in Pirates Past Noon.
• William of Baskerville, in The Name of the Rose, has an interesting version: his distance vision is just fine, but he cannot read without his "lenticules." Since the plot entails a series of murders involving a library and its contents, he is seriously handicapped when they end up getting stolen by the apparent murderer.
• In Phaic Tăn nearly everyone in the country has poor eyesight. Wedding couples even ceremonially exchange glasses.
• In One Cool Friend, Elliot's father wears glasses. During the night, he gets a carton of ice cream from the freezer and squints at the carton while not seeing the penguin lounging on the ice tray.
• Princess Andromeda, from One Good Knight, has been severely nearsighted since early childhood. However, the Sophont who made her glasses designed them to stay on her face (and they do, unless she chooses to take them off).
• In Pendric's Fox, Baron Wegae kin Pikepool is not just blind without them, but is still rapturous about being able to see with his glasses, years after first being fitted with them.
• Pilgrennon's Children: When Pilgrennon, Jananin, and Dana secretly enter London in Pilgrennon's Beacon, Jananin is forced to take off her glasses, because she's a terrorism suspect and the photo of her includes the glasses. Without them, she's so blind that she has to hang onto Pilgrennon's arm.
• This is an important plot point in one Sherlock Holmes story. Holmes deduces that the culprit could not have left through the front door because she would have to walk along a narrow board to avoid leaving footprints, and she is clearly blind without her very thick glasses that she lost while committing the crime.
• 12-year-old Natalie's glasses are taken from her after she's knocked out and kidnapped in Spellfall. The fact that she can barely see makes escape more difficult for a while. It doesn't help that she's being held in the middle of an unfamiliar forest and would have to flee through it barefoot.
• Winter Of Magics Return^note Pamela F. Service. Welly has his glasses knocked off a few times in the book. Near the end, a charm makes sure he won't lose—or break—them again, and improves the prescription.
• The Witch of Knightcharm: Brynne, one of the rookies at Emily's new evil Wizarding School, is virtually blind without her glasses. This causes her problems because she breaks them during a failed attempt to complete the orientation course; the only place to get new glasses is the school store, but new students aren't allowed into the school store unless they first complete the orientation course, and Brynne can't complete it without new glasses because she can't see what she's doing.
• Meg in A Wrinkle in Time is mentioned as having very poor eyesight.

Live-Action TV

• Buster Bluth from Arrested Development, who fell in love with a "brownish area with points".
• A.P. Bio: In a second-season episode, Heather's Coke-bottle Nerd Glasses get knocked off, causing her to immediately fumble around the ground groping for them. Since they're far-sighted glasses, she should have stepped back to accurately locate where her glasses fell to first.
• Leonard in The Big Bang Theory. In one episode, he breaks his glasses and tries to sneak into his apartment to get a spare. He has to strap on a camera and GPS unit so that Howard can help him navigate.
• In the short-lived series Big Day, Becca accidentally drinks Skobo's contacts when they're in a glass of water. Skobo has vision problems for a majority of the episodes until he buys a pair of glasses with the same prescription at a yard sale.
  Skobo: I am legally blind without my glasses!
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Santiago, as revealed when her contacts dried out after her being forced to spend 48 hours at the precinct and starts using her back-up glasses, who Peralta then immedietly steals and tries on, to his immediate regrets:
  Peralta: You're a blind cop! How has there not been a made-for-TV movie about your struggles?
• Disturbingly straight multiple times in Canada's Worst Driver, some having undiagnosed eye conditions before appearing on the show or not obeying the vision requirements on their licenses. More terrifyingly, Canadian drivers don't need to have their vision retested until they're 80.
• Subverted in Ronnie Barker's Sitcom Clarence (not to be confused with the animated series of the same name). Clarence claims to be this, but in fact he's pretty much blind with 'em as well. Hilarity Ensues.
• Samantha Samuels on Cory in the House removes her glasses in one episode. When asked if she can see without them she responds that she can without a problem, only for us to show the scene in her perspective. Her eyesight is pretty bad.
• Daredevil (2015): With his advanced age, Leland Owlsley's eyesight isn't the best, which is why he always is shown wearing a pair of glasses.
• Doctor Who:
  • An exception: The Fifth and Tenth Doctors both have only minor vision problems. David Tennant admitted in an interview that he had the Doctor wear glasses to give children with glasses a hero. In the crossover short "Time Crash", the Tenth Doctor explicitly states that neither he nor the Fifth Doctor need glasses to correct their vision — they only wear them to look clever. The First Doctor occasionally did wear proper glasses to improve his ailing vision.
  • Series 10 has a very unusual example: (Major spoilers) The Doctor gets blinded in "Oxygen" after having to lend his helmet to Bill on a spacewalk. For the next two episodes, he uses his sonic sunglasses to partially compensate for the loss. They have significant shortcomings, but when he's not wearing them he can't "see" anything at all.
  • "The Pyramid at the End of the World": In a significantly downplayed example, scientist Erica needs reading glasses to do her work. Said glasses getting broken results in a situation ensuing.
• Duck Dynasty: Silas "Si" Robertson's vision is so poor, with or without his original glasses, that he mistakes raccoon droppings for muscadine berries at one point. And eats them. He soon gets a new pair, though.
• Subverted on Due South. Detective Kowalski appears to be moderately nearsighted. He can read, write, drive his Pontiac GTO without apparent difficulty, and otherwise function as a normal human being without his glasses. However, were he to attempt to shoot the broadside of a barn without his Birth Control Glasses, the safest place to be standing would be directly in between Kowalski and the barn. With his glasses on, he's an expert marksman. Of course, he never actually wears the glasses because he looks like a dork with them. And because they're so bulky, they're always getting stuck in the liner of his jacket when he actually needs to put them on during a gunfight. When asked why he doesn't wear contacts, he claims that they're too much fuss.
• Private Vanderbilt on F Troop, though he's blind with them as well. Appropriately enough, he serves as the fort lookout.
• In Gilligan's Island in the episode with Ginger's double. The girl couldn't see anything without her glasses and was why she failed when she tried to impersonate Ginger in front of the other castaways. It may also explain why we never heard from her again after she left the island with plans on going back to civilization and taking over Ginger's life.
• Sophia from The Golden Girls suffers from this. Once she loses her glasses inside a shopping mall, and she keeps inserting quarters into a condom vending machine, mistaking it for a pay phone she intended to use to get her daughter to pick her up.
  Sophia: Here Dorothy, I brought you three. A lifetime supply.
• Good Eats: Alton Brown, at least within the mildly-fictionalized confines of the episodes that have plots. In one episode, he loses his glasses in a shipwreck, then washes up on a Desert Island where he spends several days living off foraged island vegetation, completely unaware that just beyond the trees where he's getting his coconuts one of the major cities of the Hawaiian islands lies within walking distance.
• In an episode of Good Luck Charlie, Teddy takes off Emmett's hat and glasses to make him look cool to a girl she's trying to set him up. He ends up knocking over a pile of plates due to poor eyesight.
• Lilly Truscott of Hannah Montana can't tell a person from a post without her contacts.
• A Happy Days episode had Fonzie confronting a vision problem and the fear he has with the prospect of wearing glasses. Richie tells him that glasses or no glasses, he's still the Fonz and he's still cool. When Fonzie later tells a contest audience that "wearing glasses is cool," the self-esteem of millions of children across the nation who wear glasses soared.
• Heroes: In the series, Mister Bennett uses his Nerd Glasses to make himself seem inconspicuous. Right up to the point where he shoots someone. In the webcomic, one villain remarked "He shoots well, for a guy with bifocals."
• In an episode of I Spy, our heroes have to escort a middle-aged mathematician who can't see for a good deal of the episode and this figures into a twist.
• Deborah Jo in Little Lunch. Most of the plot of "The Lost-And-Found Box" involves her losing her glasses and having to be guided by the rest of the kids to the lost-and-found box to look for them.
• Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: Billy, the Blue Power Ranger could barely see without his glasses or, later, contact lenses, then glasses again when Alpha steps on his contacts.
• One episode of Monk has this as a plot point: the victim was blind without her glasses, yet they weren't found at the crime scene.
• Parodied in Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide in an episode that featured a chase sequence that involved Scooby-Dooby Doors... and Lisa Zemo dressed exactly like Velma, having her glasses knocked off and saying the classic quote.
• Olive from On the Buses can't see a thing without her glasses.
• Our Miss Brooks: Mr. Conklin and Mrs. Davis. Mr. Conklin suffers Blind Without 'Em with a vengeance in "Living Statues" and "Cure That Habit".
• Rake: David Potter is extremely nearsighted without his glasses, and eventually decides to get laser correction for his vision.
• Sylvester breaks his glasses in an episode of Scorpion, and has to rely on child prodigy Ralph to direct him so he can drive.
• In an episode of Seinfeld, George loses his glasses. He thinks he can see just fine (especially when squinting), but he ends up mistaking a police officer petting her horse for Jerry's cousin making out with Jerry's girlfriend. It's also revealed that he once mistook mailboxes for raccoons. Oddly enough, he was also able to spot a dime on the floor from the other side of the room.
• Sid from Skins, mostly likely. The lenses of his glasses are noticeably thick (they magnify his eyes a little bit) and he's been shown to sleep with them on. Of course, Sid only has glasses because the actor who plays him does.
• Geordi La Forge of Star Trek: The Next Generation is a literal example, since his visual apparatus compensates for his total blindness.
• Without this trope, the famous The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "Time Enough at Last" would have lost some of its zing. It's almost reverse Fridge Horror, though, because you realize that eventually he'll think to stumble his way into an optometrist's and find a pair that works reasonably well. He could also have just found himself a magnifying glass.
• Played to their usual absurd degree in The Two Ronnies sketch, the Opticians.
• C. J. Cregg from The West Wing is almost comically nearsighted, as the flashback in the two-part Season 2 opening "In the Shadow of Two Gunmen" shows — she could not drive herself home when she broke her glasses (and couldn't put in her contact lenses), was unable to identify her old friend Toby from less than five metres away without them, fell into the pool because of her poor eyesight and mistook the pool maintenance house for her actual house.
  Toby: C.J.?
  C.J.: Yeah?
  Toby: House is over there.
  C.J.: Okay.

Music

• Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo has been wearing Nerd Glasses for most of his life due to his childhood myopia.
• Thomas Dolby wore glasses since he was a kid, but switched to contacts in the late 80s.
• A supposedly true story about Elton John is that he had perfect vision when he was young. He started wearing eyeglasses to emulate Buddy Holly... and now 40 some years of glasses wearing have ruined his eyes to the point where he legitimately needs those glasses.
• The Guild song "(I'm the One That's) Cool" contains the line "Your black-rimmed glasses are prescription free. Whereas me, I literally can't see my hand in front of my face."
• Chester Bennington of Linkin Park. Despite this trope, Chester was told not to wear them onstage due to the band's "edgy" image early on, which meant he'd play shows practically blind. He still often wore them backstage. From the "Minutes To Midnight" period, when the band's music became more alt-rock and experimental, Chester often wore them publicly.
• A little known fact about John Lennon, he was extremely short-sighted. Refusing to wear glasses because they were unfashionable until his mid-twenties, he could see very little during most live performances of the Beatlemania era.
• Lisa Loeb, who has her own line of eyeglasses. She's also apparently allergic to contact lenses.
• Pe Lanza, vocalist and bassist of Brazilian rock band Restart (although he assumed that he has contacts on during the concerts as a homage to Superman).
• John Lydon of Sex Pistols had meningitis as a child, which affected his eyesight. That classic stare? That's him trying to focus.
• Andy Fletcher of Depeche Mode is also very nearsighted without his glasses and there are even stories that Martin Gore used to hide or snatch Fletcher's glasses away from him, evidently as a practical joke, and causing him to trip in the studio and even on stage.
• Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks can't see a thing without hers and said she was used to seeing the stage lights as having giant haloes around them. She started wearing semipermanent contact lenses in the early 80s and, like Buckminster Fuller, feels her entire consciousness changes depending on whether she wears those, glasses, or neither.
• D.M.C. of Run–D.M.C. wore glasses during the group's 1980s heyday. He would lampshade the glasses on "Here We Go":
  C's for cool, cool as can be
  (And why you wear those glasses?) So I can see
• The late Roy Orbison's reliance on glasses led to his perennial Cool Shades. He broke his regular glasses once before a concert, forcing him to wear his prescription sunglasses on stage just so he could see, and they quickly became his trademark.
• Likewise, the Cool Shades that Bono of U2 has worn since the early '90s are more than just for vanity. The glasses are prescription, and their bright tint is to correct both his glaucoma and sensitivity to light. It's difficult for him to see without them anymore. Bono once said that whenever his picture was taken without them on, his eyes would swell up and he'd see the flash for the rest of the day, ruining his eyesight for concerts.

Myths & Religion

• In The Bible, Mark 8:24 Jesus heals a blind man — and unusually, does it in two stages. After the first dose,^note that is, after Jesus spits on the man's eyes and lays his hands on him. the man is what we could call Blind Without 'Em (he says "I see people; they look like trees walking around"). Which, even in a world without glasses, is still a whole lot better than being blind. Jesus lays his hands on the man again, and the man is 20/20. A possible interpretation is that Jesus first healed his vision and then implanted in his mind the ability to correctly interpret what he saw.
  • In Galatians Paul mentions that when he writes with his own hand he uses large letters. This could imply that when he was cured of his blindness after the Damascus Road incident, although he could see well enough not to bump into things, he still was far from 20/20. It could of course just mean that he's not very good at writing, perhaps having only become literate in adulthood. Since education was not very widespread in those days, this would not be very surprising. Writing in large font is a crude but effective way of making your writing more legible if your ability to form letters precisely isn't very reliable.

Pro Wrestling

• Arn Anderson: The cornerstone of wrestling's Four Horsemen was never seen without glasses except for his wrestling matches. Like Hansen and Duggan, this is attributed to his real-life eyesight problems.
• "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan: The affable everyman wrestler often wore glasses outside the ring due to his real-life poor eyesight. Several heel color commentators — in particular, Jesse "The Body" Ventura and Bobby "the Brain" Heenan — frequently pointed this out in disdaining Duggan.
• Stan Hansen can't see beyond his nose without his glasses on. Stan's legendary stiffness in the ring is attributed to this.
• Rey Mysterio 's use of colored contacts came about because of having poor eyesight, but glasses being unsuitable for wrestling with (especially when you're an agile masked luchador). In backstage photos, he can usually be seen wearing glasses.
• Scott Steiner 's late 90s image change to near constant use of (prescription) sunglasses has to do with his poor eyesight. It was in evidence as early as WCW. When not wrestling, he often wears regular glasses, as seen in low key interviews.
• Jim Cornette has always worn them, although as a promotion owner and manager, he doesn't wrestle, so has never felt the need to hide it.

Roleplay

• In Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues, Ivy is heavily dependent on her glasses, with her vision being a blurry mess without them. They briefly get knocked off during the empowering incident, and again when Zia chokes her the next day. Both times she has to paw around on the floor until she finds them.
• Many Survival of the Fittest characters who have glasses struggle greatly to see without, for example Simon Wood and Bill Ritch.
• We Are Our Avatars: Prior to getting the cybernetic eyes, Daniel Lincoln was a literal example — his glasses had a charm on them that allowed him to see. When his glasses were off, he would often stumble around and give people mistaken identities. The first day with the group ended with him crashing into people and not facing the right way several times.

Puppet Shows

• Batly from Eureeka's Castle is a bat who wears glasses and crashes into things a lot while flying, a play on the saying, "Blind as a bat". He's even clumsier than usual when he loses his glasses.
• In the first episode of Polish puppet series Mordziaki, the protagonist takes glasses from a rat that holds him in captivity in order to escape. It was repeating Odysseus' trick against Polyphemus the Cyclops in a family-friendly, bloodless manner.
• On Sesame Street, Mr. Hooper sometimes misplaced his glasses and was unable to see anything. On a few occasions (such as the opening scene in episode 796), this prevents him from seeing Mr. Snuffleupagus.
• Fiona Phish from the The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss epsiode, "The Birthday Moose" is an elderly fish who can't see very well without her glasses. When the Birthday Bird is unable to take her and everyone else sharing the same birthday to Katroo for a party due to being frozen alive in a block of ice while visiting the arctic, Thidwick decides to take his friends to Katroo himself, disguised as the Birthday Bird. Thidwick is able to easily convince Fiona that he is the Birthday Bird due to her poor eyesight.

Video Games

• Jorge Garcia of Backyard Sports cannot see well without his glasses. Dmitri seems to be like this (he faints if he sees sun without glasses), but the difference is that his glasses may actually be goggles (as they do not break when he falls).
  • But in Sandlot Sluggers, he has no glasses. Darn, he was really cute with them.
• In EarthBound (1994), Jeff describes himself as "really nearsighted". So, he's probably blind without 'em, but never loses his Opaque Nerd Glasses.
• The Courier can be slightly this in Fallout: New Vegas if the player chooses the four eyed trait. It grants a bonus on the Perception stat if you wear glasses, and a malus if you don't.
  • There is a mod ("Realistic Four Eyes") which alters the camera by blurring the screen if a Courier with this trait doesn't wear glasses. Depending on the version installed (there are three versions, depending on the level of blurring), the game becomes unplayable without glasses.
• Ignis Scientia in Final Fantasy XV claims that his vision is "passable without corrective lenses", but given that he's a party member in a Final Fantasy game, the context of "I won't need to waste time digging out my spares when we're fighting a Physical God" should be taken into account. During a sidequest, they get snatched by a wild chocobo; Noctis observes that he'd never seen Ignis without his glasses, and Ignis observes that without them, he could barely make out Noctis' face. Later in the game, he goes completely blind.
• KanColle: Shown to affect numerous characters, Okinami, Makigumo, and I-8 most notably.
• Happens to Skye in the in the survival game Lost in Blue. She's not completely blind without them, but severely nearsighted enough she can't navigate the island's hazards without help. Consequently, she stays in the cave, mostly cooking and doing other passive jobs nearby.
• In Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, the protagonist Guybrush Threepwood needs to steal the monocle from Wally the cartographer as a Plot Coupon.
• Missing groom Matt is blind without 'em in the Nancy Drew game The Haunting of Castle Malloy. Used as a plot point, as finding Matt's glasses is the first sign he hasn't run off as a prank or ditched his bride. It also explains why he couldn't read all the clues Nancy finds in the rocket laboratory, and rescue himself.
• Persona 4 makes the characters wear special glasses while in the TV world so they can see through the fog. These glasses also work when Inaba is covered in fog. The Main Character is a Double Subversion of this. (Once because he actually can see through the fog a little even without them and twice because it's not enough for him to not need them.)
• Ms. Accord's defeat sprite in Puyo Puyo Fever 2 (in which she looks for her glasses, which have fallen off of her face) implies this, even though she never opens her eyes to begin with.
• Radiata Stories: Leona, the Shrinking Violet little sister of Genius, introduces herself with a Crash-Into Hello with Jack that has her frantically apologize to a lamp post afterwards. This carries over to the manga, Epic of Jack, where the very first page she's on Leona accidentally throws off her own glasses bowing to Jack and immediately starts feeling around the ground for them mumbling "glasses, glasses" (prompting a major Big Brother Instinct from Genius).
• Phil's teacher Mr. Soggy in Riddle School 3. You have to knock his glasses off with the rubber band hidden in the vent.
• In Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage!, Ripto's attack immediately after his arrival leaves the Professor's glasses shattered and him unable to do anything to the superportal to stop him as a result.
• Sarah from Star Ocean: The Last Hope. It plays up her key character trait even more.
• Hubert Oswell from Tales of Graces seems to have this problem, if him fumbling around for his glasses in one of the battle victory scenes is any indication.
• The Medic from Team Fortress 2 seems to have this problem. In the part of the video "Meet the Spy", right before the fake Medic puts on his glasses, he's both squinting and slightly cross-eyed, just like someone with a strong prescription would be after taking off his glasses.
• The second Showdown at High Noon boss battle in Tin Star is against Snake Oil, who forgot to bring his glasses. If he can draw before you, he has a chance to miss and shoot a bird instead. His brother Crude Oil, fought later in the game, doesn't have this problem.
• In Disco Elysium the Detective's partner, Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, suffer from acute hyperopia, and as such he always wears a pair of thick glasses, which he is quick to point out is not just for show. His eyesight is getting worse even though he's only 43, to the point that he can't consistently hit a stationary target from a few meters away. His partner at Precinct 57 was even nicknamed "Eyes", because he had to point things out to Kim. The Detective also slides into this role as they work together, pointing out smaller visual details to Kim as the investigation tugs along. That said, Kim still scores a consistent 70% on his target pratice test; normally a somewhat medicore score, but pretty good when his handicap is considered. And indeed, Kim manages to contribute towards saving the day in a big way by pulling off a million-to-one shot against the bloodthirtsy and full-armored mercenary, Ruud Hoenkloewen, by nailing him in one of the only weak parts of his armor; namely one of the eye-slit in his helmet.
• Perilous Old Fool Wagstaff in Don't Starve can only see a small amount of the screen clearly without his goggles, and even within that radius frequently makes absurd mistakes.
• The Wild ARMs: Million Memories version of Judecca. In the final fight against him, he loses his glasses, then falls off a cliff.

Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney:
  • In Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Justice For All, Richard Wellington's eyesight without his glasses is so bad that he mistook a baseball glove for a bunch of bananas (admittedly, the glove was extremely bright yellow).
  • In Trials and Tribulations, Godot is totally blind without his visor, and even with it, he still can't see red against a white background.
• Corpse Party has Sakutaro Morishige, as revealed in Extra Chapter 9. When Yoshiki accidentally breaks his glasses, he has to escort Sakutaro home, where he has a spare pair. When Mayu sees them walking together, she leaves, not wanting to "interrupt".
• Sasuke from Ikemen Sengoku can mistake trees for people without his glasses. In one route, Kenshin even pilfers them specifically to prevent him from escaping, but luckily Sasuke has a spare pair and a friend who can get them for him.
• Kenji Setou in Katawa Shoujo wears Scary Shiny Glasses. And given how close he apparently has to get to recognize Hisao, he seems to be damn near blind with 'em, too.
  "Aren't you blind?"
  "ONLY LEGALLY!"
  • Certain scenes confirm he attends classes that cater to students with absolute blindness as well, confirming the lenses don't achieve much.
• Averted with Becca in Melody. Since she’s nearsighted, she doesn’t usually wear glasses at home.
• Prince Nazagi of The Confines of the Crown without his spectacles is seriously impaired and completely unable to see people's faces, which makes social interaction difficult, since he refuses to wear the glasses in public.

Web Animation

• RWBY: Maria admits that she's blind without "her eyes", referring to artificial eyes she now has. When her perspective is shown, her vision is washed out and blue-tinted, which gives her very little awareness of color. She lost her eyesight in battle when she was much younger and is travelling to Argus because her eyes are malfunctioning and in need of repair.

Webcomics

• The Cyantian Chronicles: Twinky, a Wereskunk, has very bad eyesight in his human form.
• Subverted in El Goonish Shive: Tedd Verres's eyesight is normal, but he wears a pair of thick glasses (filled with high-tech gadgetry) while in public to make himself seem less effeminate, though at the cost of making him look more nerdish. When he is first seen without them by Grace, he initially tries to claim he is this.
  • Later double-subverted when he reveals he is a bit near-sighted and requires glasses after all.
• Even though a lot of characters wear glasses in Frivolesque, Saki is the one constantly running with this trope everytime she has her glasses taken away from her. She's usually looking away from the people talking to her, wandering in random directions, and being unable to identify the people she's standing right next to.
• Grrl Power: has Sydney invoke but then subvert this trope when trapped inside her force field with a villain in order to get him off his guard.
  Sydney: Ha! Trope subverted! Nobody's that blind, you big pile of idiot! Well, no, I take that back. There are people that blind, but they don't get to be cops.
• Karin-dou 4koma: After Elly shatters Meguru's glasses, Meguru mistakes a scale for Shizuki and begs it for help.
• The Law of Purple: Dex's eyesight is highly dependent on his glasses, as he is incredibly nearsighted without them. Possible aversion with another character, who also wears glasses but doesn't appear to be quite as dependent on them.
• Little Nuns: The aptly-named Glasses Nun has terrible eyesight. Without her glasses she can't distinguish any two similar-colored objects apart. One comic shows her, having just woken up and not put her glasses on, trying to feed the convent's ducklings... by giving a bowl of food to a stack of lemons.
• Subverted in MegaTokyo: Piro manages to function quite well after Largo sits on his glasses, and later explains to Kimiko that he can still see reasonably well. (Interestingly, Kimiko responds that she can barely see at all without her contacts.) He still has difficulties, however, as shown later when he searches for hidden cameras.
• Minor subversion: Brent Sienna of PvP is quickly blinded when he removes his sunglasses.
• Faye in Questionable Content not only is blind without her glasses, she also loses her directional hearing. Thankfully, Marten uses his health insurance to get her some new ones by claiming they're for him.
  Optician: Sir, if this is really your prescription, how on earth did you find your way here without your glasses on?
  Marten: Magical vision fairies guided me. Now just hand over the damn glasses!
• In Scandinavia and the World Sweden is utterly blind without 'em. Which becomes a problem when Denmark puts them on — they make him blind, but he's too stupid to take them off, and neither can see or find the other.
• Subverted in Schlock Mercenary, in which Kevyn insists he can't see a thing without his trademark shades. In fact he can see just fine without them — if only in a single spectrum of light.
• Gwynn of Sluggy Freelance fame goes for the classic glasses trifecta, not only being blind without 'em and having a true set of Geek Glasses, but being Beautiful All Along to boot. Unfortunately, when she takes her glasses off to invoke Beautiful All Along, blind without 'em shenanigans often lead to her making a far worse impression than if she'd kept the glasses on. She's tempted to make a Deal with the Devil to correct her vision, even though dating laser-cannon-blasting Riff turned her off to the idea of laser eye surgery.
• StrikerS Nano depicted Quattro as Blind Without 'Em◊ when it came time to parody Quattro of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS only wears her glasses to look cute, and when she decides to get serious, she pulls them off in a dramatic manner.
• Subverted in the (now defunct) webcomic Those Destined :
  Mook: I can see your strength... and your weakness.
  [swipes Rae's glasses]
  Mook: Aha! Try fighting without these!
  [POW]
  Rae: I'm near-sighted, idiot.
• White Dark Life has Tori and her Opaque Nerd Glasses, though Matt averts this trope.

Web Original

• Ask That Guy with the Glasses walks right into his bookcase when he takes his glasses off.
• The Porcelain Doctor from Dead West plays with this. He wears glasses, and rarely takes them off or loses them, but when he has to fight without the glasses, he does it just fine (that happened in close quarters, though). Then again, he might be actually blind, or just simply unable to perceive his environment, due to his frequent hallucinations.
• Apple White from Ever After High is nearsighted, however, she refuses to wear her glasses.
• In The Mercury Men, Edward Borman can't see anything without his glasses.
• Neverland: In the first part of their pilot episode, the character Brian loses his glasses in the midst of an epic battle — which he must bring an abrupt end to in order to find them... since they're only LARPing, the combat is fake, and the danger presented by losing his glasses circumvents the thrill of combat.
• When The Makeover Fairy yanks away her glasses, The Nostalgia Chick sulks that now she can't see. Subverted overall in that she functions perfectly well without the glasses, and rarely wears them after that episode.
• In Space Beasts, Ichabod Crane doesn't need glasses at all for most of the main story. At the very end however, he gazes into the radiance of the magic crystal for too long (despite his friends warning him to turn his head and not look). Because of this he is now legally blind and now needs glasses. (Ichabod isn't too upset about this though, as he always felt this day would come, and it completes his nerd look. His girlfriend Marzipan Cheshire likes the glasses as she thinks they make him look Wise.) However even when he loses the glasses Ichabod is NOT helpless! Having spent so many years living among Animal People he can use senses other than sight to find his way and even fight.
• Cody from SuperMarioLogan can't see anything without his glasses. In the episode, "The Burger!", one of the wishes he makes on the magic cheeseburger he, Junior, and Joseph find behind the refrigerator is to see without glasses, the result of which gives him two big, bulgy eyes.
• While we know that she's nearsighted, in one story, White Cane, we find out Doki's myopia is pretty severe and that she can't navigate herself without her glasses, as the blurry images blend together and she has no peripheral vision, so, without her glasses, she carries a white cane.
• This man on Not Always Legal somehow manages to think the corrective lenses requirement on his license is only a suggestion, and that the reason he cannot see a police car 100 meters away on a partly-cloudy (but otherwise clear) day is because they don't have their lights on.

Western Animation

• Zummi from Adventures of the Gummi Bears. In one episode, he loses them, and spends half the episode crawling around blinded until he lucks out and finds them.
• Steve Smith from American Dad!, who's supposed to be far-sighted (according to earlier episodes), is rarely seen without them, but when he breaks them (for instance in fights or when he's been attacked by animals) he usually gets home OK.
• When Arthur doesn't have his glasses on, his eyesight is quite blurry and poor. This also applies to the books, most notably Arthur's Eyes, which was the title where Arthur gets his glasses (adapted into the first episode of the TV series as well.) One day, he gets sick of being called Four-Eyes, he hides the glasses in his lunchbox, and goes into the girls' bathroom by mistake!
  • This is also discussed in the Step-Into-Reading book "Glasses For D.W.," where D.W. wants glasses like Arthur despite her eyesight being fine, though Arthur explains that he needs his glasses to see. D.W. soon begins to fake vision problems as an attempt to try and get glasses, to the point of intentionally walking into walls.
• As Told by Ginger:
  • Macie can hardly see without her glasses.
  • Noelle as well. In one episode she loses them in a bet to another girl. While we are given a glimpse of her vision (in the perspective of the other girl when she puts on the glasses) it doesn't appear to be too bad. Until she gets her glasses back however, Noelle clearly has a difficult time seeing.
• An episode of Celebrity Deathmatch where Mills Lane and Stacy Cornbread take over in the announcers' booth (due to Nick and Johnny being arrested) shows that Mills is badly nearsighted without his glasses. (Good thing he's usually very close to where he's supposed to be.)
• Implied for Jérémie Belpois of Code Lyoko, given that his first instinct when woken up isn't to investigate but to snatch up and put on his glasses.
• Averted with Prince Wednesday in "No Red Sweater for Daniel" on Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood. He accidentally broke his glasses and has to go out for a while without wearing them while they're getting repaired. He, however, has no problem going out in the town and immediately recognizes Daniel and the fact that he's not wearing his red sweater. It becomes more clear exactly how his vision is being affected only when Daniel plays dress-up with a brown hat, which Wednesday describes as a "fuzzy brown blob."
• Daria seems to be pretty blind without her glasses, though occasionally we see her without them and she doesn't seem to have too much of a problem.
• In the Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines episode "Fly-By-Knights", Dastardly thinks the Vulture Squadron needs glasses, so he kits them out with them. The resulting effects: Zilly sees everything upside down, Klunk sees everything in fours, and Muttley sees everything as far away. The General's hand reaches out from Dastardly's phone and plops a pair of glasses on him, with the result of seeing everything way close up.
• The title character of Dexter's Laboratory needs his glasses to see as well; they aren't just simply to make him look smart.
• Doc McStuffins:
  • The character Hallie the hippo makes this statement, as the titular Doc takes away her glasses supposedly to give her an eye exam, but actually to hide the fact that she's in a room that's decorated for a surprise birthday party (but isn't quite ready yet). We are, however, given a point-of-view shot of what Hallie sees and it's clear that things are just blurry, like someone with nearsightedness. She probably could have figured it out if Doc and the others hadn't continued to keep her distracted.
  • Also, in the episode "Starry, Starry Night", Aurora the telescope is blind without her eyepiece, mistaking the aquarium for a big-screen TV, Lambie for a dog and Chilly for Stuffy, who she thinks is a porcupine. As in the case of Hallie, this is reinforced with point-of-view shots, which indeed shows what she sees as a blurry mess.
• Dorg Van Dango: The first episode (aptly titled "Dorg Needs New Glasses") shows how reliant Dorg is on his glasses - and only his glasses.
• On Dragon Tales, while the point-of-view shots show fuzzy nearsightedness, Eunice the unicorn (a flying unicorn, or alicorn, actually) is apparently so blind without her glasses that when Max and Emmy arrive, she addresses dragonberry bushes before turning to them. Then, when she actually sees Max, she thinks at first that he's a dragon and not a human.
• Duckman: His eyes don't shrink to points when he removes his glasses — he doesn't have eyes without them. Or eyelids and eyebrows, for that matter. Not only that, but they sit far down his face even normally, so you can see the blank stretch of forehead where they should be even when he's got the glasses on. Furthermore, as Cornfed suddenly notices and remarks on, Duckman doesn't even have ears to keep his glasses in place. A particularly bizarre sight gag shows Duckman face down on the floor, his glasses knocked off, and his eyes within his glasses blink and shed tears. In one episode he actually removes the glasses/eyes, and turns them around to take a look at himself.
• In Dungeons & Dragons (1983), when the heroes are forced to experience their greatest fears, Presto's is simply having his glasses taken away, since his eyesight is really bad and he's terrified of not being able to see.
• A Time Travel episode of Fairly Oddparents has Timmy meet a scrawny, nerdy King Arthur. When Timmy gives him a pair of glasses, he declares "I can see!" *voice drops deeper* "I can fight!" and instantly muscles up and defeats a dragon.
• Meg Griffin from Family Guy, Stewie breaks Meg's glasses because he hates to be watched while he sleeps. We even see how bad her vision is when Stewie does a vision test and holds an undetermined object (which appears very blurred out).
• The Flumps: In "Where's Grandfather?", Grandfather loses his glasses, can't tell which Flump is which, wanders into Father's workshop, and falls asleep while leaning against a bench.
• Mr. Herriman on Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends is blind without his monocle. Though when he hears Bloo and looks very closely, we see through his perspective as he spends an extended time focusing his poor sight on the troublemaker to see him clearly enough.
• Futurama:
  • In "The Problem With Popplers", the Omnicronians are almost fooled when Zapp Brannigan tries to substitute an ape for Leela. Leela at first thinks this is because they have a hard time telling any creatures other than their own species apart, but seeing as Lrrr did indeed only figure it out when he used his glasses to get a better look, it seems bad eyesight may be at least partially to blame.
  • The Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough at Last" is parodied with The Scary Door, where the last man on Earth has just lost his glasses.
    Last Man on Earth: Wait, my eyes aren't that bad; I can still read the large-print books. [eyes fall out] Well, lucky I know how to read braille. [hands fall off, Big "NO!", tongue falls out] Oh, look at that weird mirror.
    Bender: Cursed by his own hubris.
• The Garbage Pail Kids Cartoon episode "Mona Loser" had the Garbage Pail Kids discover that the Mona Loser painting was frowning and going back in time to try and fix this phenomenon. Back in 16th century Italy, they discover that the portrait's painter Leonardo da Squinty was fired by Mona Loser's husband because he was near-sighted and was therefore unable to paint properly. Elliot Mess solves the problem by inventing Leonardo a pair of glasses.
• Jackie Chan Adventures: Chow can't see without his Cool Shades, as we learned when he tried using the Pig Talisman.
  Viper: [dodging every blast] I'm going out on a limb here, but it looks like you need contacts.
  Chow: Maybe.
• King of the Hill:
  • Subverted when Hank Hill's glasses are broken on a motorcycle trip and Peggy has to drive him home on the bike. While we get to see the world through his blurred vision, it's not bad enough to qualify as "blind" except in the not-legal-to-operate-motor-vehicles sense.
    • Played straight in the episode "A Firefighting We Will Go." After Bill breaks Hank's glasses, Hank runs face-first into a wall while chasing him up a flight of stairs.
• Littlest Pet Shop (2012) episode "Blythe's Pet Project" has a B-plot where shop owner Mrs. Twombly loses her glasses and has a driver's test coming up. Her eyesight is so bad that she mistakes an average height woman for Russell, a less-than-a-foot-tall hedgehog. It turns out they were in her purse all along. Oh, and she passed the test.
• Looney Tunes: In "Tweety's SOS" (a Tweety and Sylvester cartoon set aboard a cruise ship), Granny drops her glasses while trying to keep the puddy tat away from her bird. Sylvester notices this and, seeing that Granny is virtually blind without her glasses, kicks them under her chaise. Sylvester then resumes his chase... but is unable to grab his meal before the bird finds the glasses and puts them back on his master.
• The Loud House:
  • Clyde McBride falls victim to this trope. This is best seen in "Be Stella my Heart", where he ditches his glasses in an attempt to impress the new girl.
  • Lisa also falls victim to this trope. In "Picture Perfect", Lincoln tries to make Lisa look "perfect" for the family photo reshoot by removing her glasses, and she ends up falling down the stairs. In "Making The Grade", Lisa applies laser eye surgery in order to look "normal" among Lincoln's classmates. At the end of the episode, when Lisa decides to go back to kindergarten, she goes back to wearing glasses despite having self-applied laser eye surgery. Said surgery seems to have worn off by The Loud House Movie and Season 6's "Eye Can't", with Lisa back to being blind without her glasses.
• The nearsighted Mr. Magoo is completely blind without 'em, but is stubbornly adamant that he doesn't need 'em, and he never wears 'em. This makes him Captain Oblivious and Hilarity Ensues.
• In the Muppet Babies (2018) episode, "Skeeter and the Super Girls", Skeeter tries to fight crime as her superheroine alter-ego, Top Speed without wearing her glasses, as she believes that real superheroes don't need glasses. However, because she can't see very well without her glasses, it compromises her attempts to help Piggy as Super Fabulous and Summer as Captain Icecube's attempts to stop Gonzo as Dr. Meanzo from stealing cookies from the cookie bank.
• Porcupine in My Friends Tigger & Pooh, who can't tell the difference between Darby and her dog, Buster, without her glasses.
• In My Gym Partner's a Monkey, Adam deliberately takes off the Spiffy's (nerd) glasses to avoid detection of a killer mob, as they were killing off the smart people (literally) and were under the assumption that anyone with glasses is smart (despite the fact that there at least two people in the killer mob who wore glasses). In their blind state, the Spiffy's were wandering around helplessly, appearing to be so dumb they can't tell where they're going (well, it worked).
• Betty-Anne Bongo in The Off-Beats, a segment on Nickelodeon's KaBlam!. Even though she's a beatnik, her horn-rimmed eyeglasses are not a fashion accessory; she really needs them to see. In one episode when she loses them and the Populars find them and hide them from the rest of the Off-Beats, and while Tina is wearing the glasses, Betty-Anne's vision is so bad without them that she can't even see that Tina is wearing her glasses!
• Played for Drama in The Owl House. In "Watching and Dreaming", while being overrun and bound to the wall by Belos's Meat Moss, Raine's glasses fall off their face. When Eda, King and Luz burst through the ceiling, their vision is so terrible that they don't recognize their best friend and her kids, and start freaking out as a blurry shape starts running towards them. They calm down as soon as Eda puts their glasses back onto their face.
  • Principal Bump wears his Palisman Frewin on the top of his head to help him see. While he can see well enough to fight without the assistance, he is still missing one eye and is scarred over the other.
• Gus in Recess is apparently blind without his glasses. He even says "I'm blind!" when he accidentally steps on and breaks them. What's ridiculous is that when he finds that he's considered cool without them, he ditches them, sacrificing sight for popularity. The viewer is given a scene or two from his point of view: the images are blurred, but not even close to the severity of the blur of people with glasses in real life. It's only a slight blur, and the "lines" between objects are still distinguishable.
• Rugrats:
  • Didi. Her eyes are shown as dots without the glasses, e.g. in the "Mirror Land" episode from the original 1991 series.
  • Chuckie has an entire episode from the 1991 series that revolves around this; Chuckie Loses His Glasses". When the others put on his glasses they see the same stuff he does without them.
  • When Didi loses her glasses, she walks into closets. When Chuckie loses his glasses, his world becomes an LSD trip.
  • Grandpa Lou can't see if his glasses are lost, either. At the end of "Chuckie Loses his Glasses", he ends up talking to Tommy's clown lamp, having mistaken it for Didi.
  • As shown in "Crime and Punishment", another episode from the 1991 series, Chuckie takes after his father, Chas. Chas stops wearing his glasses to impress a policewoman named Naomi, whom he goes on a date with, but is unable to see well without them. Chuckie accidentally breaks Chas' glasses, and he is worried that if Officer Naomi finds out, she will arrest him.
  • In the 2021 series episode "The Big Diff", Angelica tells Tommy and Chuckie that they're too different from each other to be best friends, which inspires them to dress and act like each other. Chuckie dresses in a blue t-shirt and a diaper and stops wearing his glasses to be more like Tommy, which results in him being unable to see well. When he and Tommy decide to go their separate ways (as Tommy also tried to dress like Chuckie, which included wearing Grandpa Lou's glasses), Chuckie accidentally says goodbye to Phil.
• The classic example is Velma from Scooby-Doo, who was always losing her glasses in the original series. (A common gag on the show: Whenever she loses her glasses, the Monster of the Week is the one who hands them back to her, and she doesn't realize how close he is until she puts them on.) Nicole Jaffe, the actress who originally played Velma, admitted in an interview that at the initial taping of the show, she accidentally dropped her glasses. She then exclaimed something the writers adapted into her catchphrase: "My glasses! I can't see without them!"
  • An episode of Be Cool, Scooby-Doo! has Fred replace the rest of gang with a group of kids and gradually turn them into Replacement Goldfish. Velma's analogue doesn't need glasses, but Daphne's does, so Fred takes "Daphne's" glasses and gives them to "Velma," rendering both of them vision impaired.
• Parodied by Johnny Bravo in the Scooby-Doo Crossover episode "Bravo-Dooby-Doo" — he and Velma lose their glasses (Cool Shades in his case) at the same time.
  Velma: My glasses! I can't see without my glasses!
  Johnny Bravo: (covering his eyes with his arm) My glasses! I can't be seen without my glasses!
  • They then grab each others' glasses and...
    Velma: Jinkies! Everything's dark! I'VE GONE BLIND!!
  • Leading to Johnny switching their glasses back and replying...
    Johnny Bravo: I'm only going to say this once... Don't. Touch. The Glasses!
• Shaun the Sheep: The Farmer can't see a thing without his glasses. In one episode, his lenses get scratched up so he's blind even with his glasses, something the sheep take advantage of to perform all sorts of un-sheeplike behavior in front of him without having to worry about getting caught.
• The Simpsons:
  • Milhouse often loses his glasses, and he is practically blind without them (as an art-style gag, in contrast to the goggle-eyes of everyone else, he has tiny little pinpricks when his glasses are off). As well as this, both his parents have similar glasses.
    Milhouse: (to approaching car) Nice doggy!
  • Professor Frink sometimes loses his glasses too.
  • Averted in "A Fish Called Selma" where Troy McClure is pulled over for reckless driving. His license requires him to wear glasses, but they make him look like a nerd, so he's usually seen without them.
  • In "$pringfield", former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger drops his glasses in a toilet while visiting the nuclear power plant. (Smithers assures him as he leaves that they'll keep an eye out for them, but Kissinger knows what happened, he's just too embarrassed to tell him.) In the next scene, the news reports that he injured himself walking into a flagpole.
• Brainy Smurf from The Smurfs (1981) on one occasion when Gargamel swipes his glasses from him and breaks them after capturing him and the others, he waves his hand in front of his face and cries “I can’t see!”.
• The Scooby-Doo example is lampshaded in the South Park episode "Korn's Groovy Pirate Ghost Mystery", where the band take on the role of Mystery, Inc. At one point, Fieldy invokes this trope when his glasses fall off, and he gropes around until he comes across the pirate ghost.
• Mr. Griff on Stanley states that he can't see a thing without his glasses.
• Steven Universe: Connie Maheswaran has eyesight so bad she couldn't even make out Steven's face from a few feet away while he was trying on her glasses in "An Indirect Kiss". This gets fixed by the end of the same episode when Steven accidentally fixes her vision with his healing spit from a shared juice box, but she keeps the frames anyway so her parents don't find out. She does stop using the frames when she reveals to her mom that she can see without her glasses.
• In the Superman: The Animated Series episode "The Late Mr. Kent", Clark's car is bombed, which of course doesn't hurt him but leaves him unable to show his face as Clark until he can explain away his survival without revealing his secret identity. Luckily for him, the one witness to the explosion turned out to be very nearsighted and not wearing his glasses, making it plausible for Clark to claim he was thrown clear.
• Taz-Mania: Edgar Bushlad from "Just Be Cuz" is Francis' younger cousin and is much more successful at capturing wild animals than Francis is. However, Francis discovers that even Edgar has a weakness; Edgar can't see anything without his glasses. Francis takes advantage of this weakness to use Edgar as bait to capture Taz so he can finally pass his manhood ritual. However, his shoulder angel convinces him to do the right thing and save Edgar from Taz.
• Panda from We Bare Bears wears contact lenses. In the episode "Chicken and Waffles", he loses them and is unable to see properly, so he needs Charlie to make his way around the city.
• Eliza from The Wild Thornberrys loses her glasses pretty often and her vision is pretty poor. In one episode she switches places with another girl only to have difficulty because she can't wear her glasses.
• Work It Out Wombats!: Gabriela can't read without her glasses on.

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"I thought I was blind without my glasses. But I was just blind!"

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