Eyes are some of the most sensitive organs in any organism. At the back of the eye is a structure called the retina, which is covered in sensitive cells called photoreceptors which convert light energy into nerve signals that can be understood by the brain. However, even exposure to light, the very thing they evolved to detect, can damage the retina.
In fiction, however, Eyes Are Unbreakable. Physically speaking, similar to Convection, Schmonvection, as it's actually painful to look at boiling hot lava due to the infrared light it gives off.
In a similar vein to Harmless Freezing and Harmless Electrocution, characters can stare into the sun, explosions, and other sources of bright light and their vision remains 20/20. They typically move to cover the light with their hand as if it's just a mild annoyance. On the occasion where the glare does cause temporary flash blindness, it will almost never leave any lasting damage when it logically should.
Pick any Video Game where you can look into the sun. It'll be nothing more than a mildly annoying Lens Flare, a.k.a an aversion of Blinded by the Sun. This trope is the Opposite Trope to Blinded by the Light, on the dimension of harm / pain.
Examples
- Bungo Stray Dogs: From magical effects:
- The anime portrays Dazai's Ability as emitting a bright, white light upon initially nullifying another Ability. No one ever seems to have any issues seeing whenever this occurs.
- Poe's books emit a brilliant, yellow light whenever a victim is being drawn into the story by his Ability. At one point, Chuuya ends up staring directly into the light with his eyes wide open, long enough to have a short conversation with Ranpo, without any apparent discomfort.
- In Web Warriors, Spider-Gwen is freaked out to discover that this is the case in Spider-Ham's world — everything is somehow as bright as if the sun was shining normally, even though it's just a yellow circle in the sky that she can look directly at with no issues.
- Elementals of Harmony: Sideboard of Harmony'': Chapter 1: Ave Discordia, played with, because it's not the light that's painful to Discord, spirit of Disharmony:
Fluttershy almost hurt to look at. It wasn't her luminosity, carefully set to a level soft and pleasant for any eye. It wasn't the Torc of Kindness, with its insipid diamond butterfly. It was the tooth-rotting aura of love and acceptance that wafted off of her like a cloying perfume.
- In 2012, when the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts, it emits a powerfully bright glow that many of the characters stare into.
- The Crazies (2010): Judy stares directly into the nuke that wipes out the town, which would be normally blinding, for about five seconds before she puts her hand up to block it.
- Star Wars: None of the lightsaber wielding characters have any vision damage received from the weapons, which burn hot enough to boil through titanium. In fact, lightsabers tend to emit very little light to their surroundings despite their otherwise strong glow (because, until the Sequel Trilogy, the actual props the actors use did not light up.)
- Surprisingly averted in Heroes. A tie-in graphic novel explains why Noah Bennet wears his trademark horn-rimmed glasses. He originally had perfect vision, but an encounter with Howard Grigsby, an evolved human who had the power to generate light from his body, severely damaged his eyesight.
- Averted in one episode of Shadow and Bone where Alina blinds a would-be rapist by cooking his retinas.
- Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has the famous nuke scene, where Paul Jackson can stare directly into the resulting flash and still see just fine. Of course, blindness would be the least of his problems at that point.
- The Fallout series features numerous nuclear explosions, all of which you can stare directly into without suffering any eye damage. For example:
- The destruction of Megaton by nuke in Fallout 3.
- The nuclear attack at the beginning of Fallout 4.
- Any of the player-launched nukes in Fallout 76.
- Halo
- At the climax of Halo Wars, the captain of the Spirit of Fire stares harmlessly at a just-about-to-supernova sun while his ship flies a slingshot course around it.
- Averted in Halo 4 - Spartan Ops. As the UNSC Infinity is pulled closer to the system's local sun, Captain Lasky starts covering his eyes from the glare out the windows. Eventually, the ship activates opaque shades that allow the crew to look at the sun safely.
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: In the Dawnguard DLC, the Dragonborn can take a sunhallowed arrow and fire it directly into the sun, causing it to become extraordinarily bright. This will not harm the Dragonborn or their allies, even if they look at it directly; however, it will cause damage to any nearby enemies.
- In Super Mario Sunshine, to enter Noki Bay, Mario has to look directly into the sun. He, however, doesn't seem to have taken any damage from this.
- Zig-zagged in XCOM: Enemy Unknown's expansion Enemy Within and its sequel, XCOM 2. Flashbangs will disorient units hostile to the thrower (severely reducing aim and movement range, and disabling most unique abilities), but will do nothing to units on their own sidenote .
- Invoked by Richard Feynman during the Trinity test. Reasoning that only UV light could do any real damage, he decided to watch the blast with nothing but a car window for protection. He made it through with his sight unharmed.
"I am about the only guy who actually looked at the damn thing."
