Sense-Impaired Monster

I could've sworn there was someone running here...^note Art by Cardboard Bot, used with permission.

Some monsters are characterized by Super-Senses explicitly superior to their victims', in order to increase the threat that they pose. However, a different branch of monster design goes into the other direction, and instead explicitly dims or entirely removes one or more of the monster's senses while keeping it competent or advanced in its others.

This often serves to make interactions with the monster complex while keeping it a believable threat. In essence, certain things will infallibly or almost infallibly grab the creature's attention, while others never will — for instance, the creature may notice even the slightest noise while being incapable of perceiving people line-dancing in front of it, or see through the thickest darkness while not noticing a full stampede behind its back. This will force characters to very carefully regulate their actions, as to avoid the monster they must determine what forms of sensory input it's hyper- or insensitive to and carefully school their behavior around this. Often, inducing Sensory Overload may be a viable tactic for harming or at least disorienting these beings.

The most common variant of this takes the form of blind monsters with keen hearing or smell. These often have an Eyeless Face and Super-Hearing, and may have exaggerated noses or ears. In these cases, avoiding the beast will involve a lot of very careful, very quiet sneaking about, as even the slightest noise will alert the monster, with the only grace being that you can stand as much in the open as you please without being seen. This often leads to suspense-building sequences where a character must remain absolutely quiet and unmoving while the creature stalks blindly around them, straining to hear any telltale sound.

Sub-Trope of Disability Superpower. This may overlap with Bizarre Alien Senses if the creature in question has access to unusual senses such as echolocation or thermoreception. This is a common feature of batlike monsters, which often have keen hearing and echolocation while being nearly or entirely blind. This may also overlap with Living Motion Detector, but not completely — these monsters may be unable to notice stealthily moving targets while homing in on stationary ones who are making targets of themselves otherwise. Compare Evil Cripple.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has a few Stands that lack certain senses but make up for it with others.
  • Diamond is Unbreakable:
    • Sheer Heart Attack is a sub-ability of Killer Queen, Yoshikage Kira's Stand, which summons a small, indestructible tank-like machine that operates completely automatically. It is only capable of sensing heat, and automatically targets the hottest thing in the area by ramming into it and creating a powerful explosion. As such, it can be distracted by other heat sources.
    • Highway Star, Yuya Fungami's Stand, can chase targets automatically over long distances through its sense of smell, and absorb their vital energy once it catches up to them. However, it seems to lack any other senses, as when Josuke uses his own Stand to create a concrete barrier, Highway Star has trouble navigating around it, buying him precious time.
  • Golden Wind: Notorious B.I.G. is the Stand of Carne and is summoned upon his death. It can sense movement and goes after the fastest-moving thing around it. Trying to run away from it will only cause it to match your speed and catch up to you, but moving slower than other nearby objects can let one escape. When Notorious B.I.G. attacks the heroes on a plane, Trish escapes it by slowly making her way toward a closet while activating the plane's reclining seats as she passes by; so long as she moves slower than the seats, she's safe. In the end, it is neutralized by being dropped into the ocean, where it is overwhelmed by the motion of the waves around it, though the narration implies that it occasionally attacks and sinks passing ships.
• Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead: While Zombies may or may not be blind, they hunt mostly through hearing and smell. Kencho was once able to conceal himself from an incoming group of zombies by covering himself in manure and staying quiet despite being in plain sight.

Fan Works

• The Flight of the Alicorn: The piranhasprites of the Impenetrable Lands have no sense of smell and poor eyesight, and find it difficult to track prey by themselves. Instead, they rely on a tree that they live in symbiosis with, which rouses them into action by shaking its branches when animals disturb the pool of nectar it creates around itself.
• Getting Back on Your Hooves: The Ropen is a giant, blind batlike monster that lives in the Everfree. It hunts by sound and, being blind, is entirely unaffected by Fluttershy's Stare, which requires eye contact to work; however, loud explosions such as fireworks can temporarily cripple its echolocation.

Films — Live-Action

• After Earth: The Ursa are alien bioweapon beasts that were engineered specifically to hunt and kill humans, having been granted the ability to locate their prey through the pheromones released as a product of fear. As such, they lack eyes due to relying exclusively on this function to track down humans. This weakness is exploited by the Ranger Corps, who employ a technique known as "ghosting" that involves suppressing one's fear to render them practically invisible to the Ursa, allowing them to fight back.
• Attack the Block: The aliens have no visible eyes (or any visible anatomical feature for that matter, with the exception of their maws filled with glowing turquoise fangs) and hunt by smell. This factors into The Reveal that the small white alien Moses and his gang killed at the beginning of the film was the female, and the large black ones are males. When Moses was scratched by the female, he was covered in her pheromones, leading the males to relentlessly track him and his friends all over the city, while ignoring those who don't have her scent.
• The Deadly Spawn: The titular alien spawn have no eyes on their face, only rows upon rows of fangs, and hunt prey by sound. Charles is able to avoid being eaten by the aliens in the basement by standing completely still and later tricks one into attacking a radio, causing an electrical fire that burns it.
• The Descent: The Crawlers have adapted so well to living underground that they're pretty much blind. As such, their sense of hearing is amplified to compensate; for good measure, they're prone to letting out earsplitting shrieks whenever their prey can't be found — possibly to frighten them into making sound. As such, the cavers have to remain still and quiet in their initial encounters with the Crawlers.
• Jurassic Park:
  • Jurassic Park (1993): The Tyrannosaurus rex has motion-based vision, and will not perceive you if you remain completely motionless and don't make a sound. This is a major case of Artistic License – Paleontology, since T. rex, in fact, had excellent vision^note Which might be understating the case; they might have had the best vision of any creature ever. Remember, all birds of prey including the famously sharp-eyed eagle are descendants of theropod dinosaurs., plus also had a great sense of smell, so it would be able to sniff out the humans. The Lost World: Jurassic Park retcons this into the T. rex simply having not found Alan and Lex interesting enough to attack at that time, as the two T. rexes in that film show that they can definitely see immobile humans and are willing to attack them when motivated.
  • Jurassic World Dominion: The Therizinosaurus Claire encounters in the Biosyn forest is half blind and relies on its hearing and a little echolocation to navigate itself through its environment. Claire only narrowly escapes it by retreating into the water.
• A Quiet Place: The unnamed monsters are blind, armor-plated beasts that track their prey by sound, but cannot perceive silent entities outside of stumbling directly into them. As they're far too dangerous to fight directly, a family that survived their initial onslaught has modified their lifestyle to avoid making noise (they use sign language, go barefoot, etc.) Played for drama where Evelyn forces herself to stay silent after stepping on an exposed nail, and again when she goes into labor while a monster pokes its head into the room, listening for prey.
• Seventh Son (2015): At one point in the film, Tom and Master Gregory are attacked by a Boggart — not, in this case, a diminutive troublesome house spirit, but a gigantic blind subterranean monster. Sadly, whilst the Boggart is blind, it can still hear and smell the heroes, and violently lashes out at them. It even jumps off a cliff and follows them into a river, despite Master Gregory claiming that Boggarts are afraid of water.
• The Silence (2019): The vesps are flying predators native to an isolated cave system that's accidentally breached at the beginning of the movie. They're completely eyeless, and hunt by sound; any noise made in their presence will send swarms of the creatures homing in to devour whatever alerted them, forcing people to maintain near-total silence in areas where vesps have moved in. However, their complete reliance on hearing means that they cannot perceive anything that keeps quiet, makes them vulnerable to both omnipresent noises such as fire alarms or thunder and to noisy traps.
• The Tomorrow War: Daniel and his father James are fighting the last female Whitespike, and manage to stab out her eyes. This hampers her killing ability considerably, especially because now she has no way to aim her Spike Shooters. She nonetheless tries to find them by pawing at the ground and using her tentacles like antennae to feel around, and James is able to Draw Aggro by cutting his hand and letting her smell his blood.
• Tremors:
  • The Graboids are predatory Sand Worms which, predictably as tunnelling animals, have no eyesight, instead hunting prey with highly attuned vibrational sensing. Characters are at points able to avoid detection by standing totally still, preventing the worms from pinpointing their exact location (although the worms will eject their long feeding tentacles to sweep the area in an attempt to find them), or trick the worms into attacking inanimate objects, simply because they give off vibrations. This also comes with a Logical Weakness: because they have such sensitive hearing, they experience physical pain from noises that are too loud, like explosions.
  • The Graboids' later metamorphic stages, the Shriekers and Ass-Blasters, are both totally blind and deaf but compensate with infrared-sensing organs (similar to the pit organ possessed by snakes) on their heads that allow them to detect the body heat of their prey. They scream to communicate with one another, even though they can't hear anything, because the screaming gives off heat signals. This does lead them to accidentally attack inedible objects like a hot car engine or a power box just because they give off heat. The shriekers also have long tongues which they use to taste objects they think might be food, but don't give off heat.

Literature

• Children of Time (2015): The ants are blind, perceiving the world almost entirely through scent and touch (and hearing, mostly as an extension of touch). This gives the spiders, who mostly prefer traveling through treetops, an advantage... except when billions of ants start devouring everything in their path, trees included. Not to mention when they start bringing their actual weapons out. Ants might not be able to aim their artillery very well, but enough catapults launching in the general direction of the enemy will still do a lot of damage. However, their blindness means that various parasitic insects manage to infiltrate their ranks through scent masking, and the spiders find ways to domesticate entire colonies through spoofing their scent signals.
• Harry Potter:
  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: The basilisk is blinded early in the fight, but it can still use its sense of hearing to find its prey.
  • Dementors are completely blind and lack eyes. They're however capable of sensing the souls and thoughts of those around them, and siphoning said souls via the Dementor's Kiss.
• Tales of Kaimere: The Xenosimians are a branch of derived tetrapods native to the Polar continent of Kaishel, who lost the use and presence of their eyes in favor of extremely efficient echolocation to hunt their prey. The largest of the Xenosimians are the Moørkutlot, The Dreaded apex predators of the Silent Forest who hunt down their prey by sound and inject them with a non-newtonian fluid. They are the reason why the animals and people of in-land Kaishel have evolve to be as silent as possible.

Live-Action TV

• Once Upon a Time: In the first season, Regina, the Evil Queen, sends the siblings Hansel and Gretel to the Gingerbread House to get her a magic apple. Once inside, its owner, the cannibalistic Blind Witch, magically locks the exits and smells the children's scent. Later, in the fifth season, the cast goes to the Underworld. Regina enters the Underworld version of Storybrooke's Granny's Diner, and the Blind Witch says she smelled Regina entering.
• Primeval: The reoccurring Future Predators, which are descended from bats (or were created from bat DNA) that evolved into large, flightless, ape-like carnivores. They have no eyes, but more than make up for it with highly sophisticated echolocation. This has at times been turned against them; Nick is able to disorient one by shooting out the glass panes of a greenhouse, and the resulting rain of shards confuses the Predator's sonar, while Lester is able to momentarily confuse one by playing loud music from a boombox.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition:
    • Creatures with the "blindsight" special ability use non-visual senses such as smell or hearing to compensate for loss of vision to perceive their surroundings within the specified range. This negates penalties for being blind, as well as other creatures' invisibility or concealment (including miss chance from spells like displacement or blur); however, a creature with blindsight can't make out visual or color contrast, meaning for example that they can't read. The "blindsense" ability is a weaker form of blindsight with more penalties.
    • Creatures with the "tremorsense" special ability are able to detect other creatures out to a specified range by the vibrations they give off when they move, including such things as the somatic components of spells. Normally this functions through transmission of the vibrations through the ground; however, aquatic creatures with tremorsense are able to detect vibrations through the surrounding water.
  • Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition: Creatures with "blindsight" are able to perceive their surroundings out to a specified range without relying on the sense of sight, including by echolocation.
• GURPS: Monster Hunters 3: The Enemy: The albino sewer-dwelling alligators are blind, but can track prey by sound or by the vibrations in the sewage that they make while moving around.
• Pathfinder:
  • Creatures with the "blindsight" special ability use non-visual senses such as smell or hearing to compensate for loss of vision to perceive their surroundings within the specified range. This negates penalties for being blind, as well as other creatures' invisibility or concealment (including miss chance from spells like displacement or blur); however, a creature with blindsight can't make out visual or color contrast, meaning for example that they can't read. The "blindsense" ability is a weaker form of blindsight with more penalties.
  • Creatures with the "tremorsense" special ability are able to detect other creatures out to a specified range by the vibrations they give off when they move, including such things as the somatic components of spells. Normally this functions through transmission of the vibrations through the ground; however, aquatic creatures with tremorsense are able to detect vibrations through the surrounding water.
  • Lilitus, a type of demon, are a weird subversion of this. By description, they have no eyes at all, just a bare patch of skin over where their eye sockets would be, but their statblock treats them as creatures who see normally. This can lead to amusing results such as a Player Character casting a spell and inflicting the "blindness" status effect on a demon with no eyes.

Video Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: The Monster Compendium details that the mutated crabs found beneath Freeway 42 had lived in darkness for so many years below ground their eyesight had become permanently impaired, which they compensate by improvising their scents and sound to detect and attack anyone who comes near their territory.
• BioShock Infinite: Zig-zagged with the Boys of Silence, altered humans fitted with oversized helmets that reduce sensory input to a pair of large ear trumpets and a narrow slot for vision. This sensory deprivation combined with heavy psychological conditioning makes them incredibly sensitive to sound and motion, useful as Living Motion Detectors and enforcers of the World of Silence.
• Dead Space 3: The Feeders are blind, but have increased hearing to compensate, due to having evolved in a pitch-black basement. They can be distracted by throwing things across the room to make a noise to attract them. They aren't completely blind, though. They can tell light from dark, and light drives them into a murderous rage.
• Devil May Cry 4: Blitz demons are blind, and their Enemy File description explicitly states that they have to rely on their other senses to track their prey's movements. However, this also means they're prone to attacking their fellow demons, indicating their difficulty in distinguishing friend from foe.
• Doors: The second boss, the Figure, is completely blind, and will frequently walk past you if you are quiet enough. Heck, crawling can allow you to even move past it. But if you dare walk by standing up, which will generate more noise, the Figure will immediately run at you and attempt to kill you. It also has long arms, allowing it to have a high chance of touching you and instantly killing you. Its hearing is even good enough to detect breathing, which will make hiding in a closet harder by forcing you to play a mini-game to regulate your breathing when the Figure is in front of the closet you are hiding in. Losing will result in you being forcefully yanked out of the closet and killed.
• Earthworm Jim: Big Bruty in the level of the same name is a bizarre invincible blind creature who can smell Jim and makes a mad dash in his direction. To beat the level you have to both avoid Bruty but also use him to open doors and trigger mechanisms and seesaws.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: The Falmer are entirely blind and hunt by sound. This makes sneaking past them very difficult at low levels since they'll detect sounds that other creatures won't, but high stealth and the Muffle spell make it easy to sneak around them. Additionally, light sources can be freely used around Falmer without alerting them. They partly counteract this by keeping around their domesticated Chaurus, which aren't blind, and aggroing Chaurus will alert Falmer as well.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy XIV: In the many Deep Dungeons, some undead monsters (usually ghouls and the like) are vision impaired, but are sensitive to sound. If you walk by them instead of running, the undead monsters won't be able to detect you and will leave you alone.
  • Final Fantasy XV has a behemoth named Deadeye for its blind right eye. You have to follow it back to its lair, making sure to not come into its functioning eye's line of sight. The amount to which Deadeye's partial blindness affects the mission is a subject of debate. Furthermore, keep in mind that the behemoth's other senses function perfectly well, so don't get too close during the tailing section, even with its bad eye.
• Five Nights at Freddy's:
  • Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location: Barring her jumpscares, Ballora's eyes are always shut, so she relies on her hearing to find you.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach: After Gregory crashes a go-kart into her and rips out her eyes, Roxanne becomes completely blind, and will blindly charge in any direction she hears noise in. The room immediately after her Not Quite Dead moment has a puzzle using this, where the player needs to trick her into destroying a boarded-up door.
• Gears of War: The Beserkers, female Locust Drones perpetually on their period, ten feet tall, with rock-like hide, and strong enough to bash down concrete columns; however, they are visually impaired/completely blind, something the humans often take advantage of to avoid her to lure her into obstructions, whilst not firing off guns that would get her attention without damaging her hide.
• Half-Life: Alyx: During Chapter 7, Alyx has to repeatedly avoid an unkillable zombie-like humanoid named Jeff that wanders through the narrow corridors. Jeff's skull is split open like a Venus flytrap, rendering him blind, so he navigates by sound, necessitating that Alyx quietly sneak around. This is more difficult than it sounds, both because empty glass bottles litter the halls, alerting Jeff if she bumps into them, and because Jeff emits clouds of spores that will cause Alyx to cough if she walks through them without a gas mask or covering her mouth, again alerting Jeff. However, Alyx can also distract Jeff by Throwing the Distraction, to lead him away from her momentarily.
• In Silence, an Asymmetric Multiplayer game, allows you to play as the Rake, a horrifying monster with hypersensitive hearing but poor eyesight due to damage to its eyes, who must hunt down other players on the survivors' team by sound. These traits are implemented by the game as actual gameplay mechanics; as the Rake, the player's vision is unreliably blurry, so they must track down victims through sounds that appear as blips on an in-game radar, which vary in size depending on the Rake's proximity to the source of the sound. The human players need to be quiet so that it doesn't find them.
• It Steals: The Phantom is an Invisible Monster that is similarly unable to see you as well. It relies on hearing in order to find you, but you are also able to note its presence from an invisible force moving furniture around haphazardly.
• King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow: The Isle of Wonder is guarded by five creatures called the Sense Gnomes, who each possess exactly one of the five senses, and are under orders from the Big Bad to kill any human that sets foot on the island. When they confront Alexander as a group, he must use a different item to confuse each of them — a smelly flower on the gnome with the giant nose, a mechanical songbird on the one with the giant ears, a mint on the one with the giant tongue, a rabbit's foot on the one with giant hands and invisibility ink on himself to hide from the one with giant eyes.
• The Last of Us: The more advanced forms of the Parasite Zombies in the game have fungal plates erupting from their skulls, growing over their eyes and rendering them totally blind. To compensate, they use a crude form of echolocation; the Clicker infected are so named for the sounds they emit to navigate and find prey. However, in practice, what they possess seems to be merely sensitive hearing, because they can't find prey if they're quiet, unlike real echolocation where the target making sound or not is irrelevant.
• Last Train Outta Wormtown: The Sand Worm players detect earth vibrations and can easily find the position of any Pardners that stand directly on the sand — but not any other terrain, even natural terrain like rocks. Should the worm player leap out to try and catch a Pardner, those who aren't on the sand will appear invisible to the player.
• Legacy of Kain: Defiance: The "god" Hash'a'gik actually a time-displaced and heavily mutated Turel is a gigantic batlike monstrosity with useless vestigial eyes but a highly-developed sense of smell and even sharper hearing to compensate. Worse still, he also possesses telekinetic powers. Fortunately, the cult that's simultaneously worshipping him and keeping him captive has set up large gongs around his prison, allowing them to overwhelm Hash'a'gik with sound; Raziel can use these to his advantage over the course of the boss battle.
• Little Nightmares: The Janitor is completely blind, forcing him to rely on his hearing and feeling with his long arms. The levels with him force Six to move slowly to avoid making loud noises.
• Metro Exodus: The Blind Ones are Exactly What It Says on the Tin, being mutated gorillas that lack eyesight. They make up for this deficiency by having Super-Strength, being Nigh Invulnerable and taking a ton of ammo to take down, having limited Psychic Powers capable of causing Mind Rape to anyone nearby, and being rather smart for mutants.
• Minecraft: The Warden, an extremely powerful and dangerous monster found in the Deep Dark, is completely blind, to the point of having no eyes of any sort. Instead, it hunts primarily by sound — its native biome is filled with organic growths that make noise when they detect movement, and the Warden will respond to both these and noises made directly by other beings by heading over to them and trying to kill whatever it finds. Moving through the Deep Dark involves a lot of careful sneaking to avoid alerting it; if its attention is drawn, it's possible to distract by throwing eggs or snowballs to send it off to investigate the noise. However, if it's having trouble tracking down its quarry by hearing, it will resort to sniffing the air to triangulate a silent player's location by smell.
• Monster Hunter: The Khezu is a worm-like wyvern with no eyes, but a keen sense of smell. As a result, it's immune to flash bombs.
• The Persistence: The Listeners can only find you by listening, so you can sit right in front of them and have no fear of being seen. Just don't move, shoot, use an item, open a door, or wet yourself too loudly or they'll gun you down.
• Rainbow Friends: Green is blind, so, even if you're in the box, he can kill you.
• Rain World: Brother long legs are entirely deaf and blind, and rely on touch to find their way around by groping their way through the Garbage Wastes with their long tentacles. A stronger variant found later on, the daddy long legs, are still blind, but can also detect sounds.
• RATUZ: Near the end of the game, player character Five has to traverse a labyrinth that's home to a humanoid mole rat-like monster. The monster can track Five's scent throughout the labyrinth, but is blind and has to rely on motion detection to find Five's position once it reaches him. If Five makes a movement when the monster is near, it will eat him whole, but if Five stays still, it'll sniff the area a few times before moving away.
• Resident Evil:
  • Lickers, introduced in Resident Evil 2, are the result of a zombie transforming into a new and stronger creature as a result of secondary infection with the T-virus. As part of their mutation, they no longer have any eyes leaving them completely blind and having developed increased hearing to help compensate. Provided you move slowly and don't fire guns, you can slip past them unnoticed if there is enough room in the narrow hallways of the Police Station where they appear, and Claire's otherwise worthless Bow Gun is quiet enough to not alert them.
  • Resident Evil: Dead Aim: Pluto is a heavily-mutated human who lacks eyes but developed exceptional hearing as a result. He serves as one of the game's bosses and is rather tricky to take down if Bruce didn't find the silenced handgun...
  • Resident Evil 4: The Garrador has had both eyes sewn shut rendering them blind. They have increased hearing and will hear Leon if he runs, gets too close, fires his weapon, or smashes a crate, but you can also use this to your advantage: you can fire and leap out of the way to take aim at their exposed back, and a lot of rooms have conveniently-placed bells that can be fired on to lure it as well.
• SCP: Secret Laboratory: SCP-939 players have impaired vision, but make up for it by being able to detect and track human players by the sounds they make (whether that be walking, sprinting or shooting).
• Singularity: Reverts (a type of mutant created by Time-Reversing a human, creating a creature that's basically a man-sized Fetus Terrible) are blind, due to their mutations sealing or destroying their eyes.
• The Suffering: Being a representation of military firing squads, the Marksmen have a blindfold of flesh covering their eyes making them unable to see. However, they compensate for this by being very adept at detecting opponents without having to see them, resulting in them often firing their cluster of rifles at the slightest sound of movement.
• Wolfenstein: The Old Blood: King Otto's Monster is blind and can only locate the Player Character by the sound of gunfire... but this also applies to the Nazis trying to kill both the player and the monster.
• World of Warcraft: Atramedes, one of the bosses in Blackwing Descent, is a dragon that was rendered blind by one of Nefarian's experiments. He hunts based on sound, represented by inflicting a stacking "sound" debuff on players that are hit by his sonar and attacking whoever has the most sound on them. However, his room is lined with shields that can be smacked like gongs to disorient him and reset all accumulated sound.

Web Comics

• Schlock Mercenary: The Pa'anuri, being omnicidal dark matter entities, don't have any of the senses us baryonic beings have, and can only sense gravitational fluctuations when not equipped with the right sensors (hard as it may be to get them since Pa'anuri are the size of planets). This sense is spotty enough with baryonic matter that the only things they can spot with any degree of certainty are planets, stars and active Neutronium Annihilation Plants (also known as Annie Plants), which power most high-end technology in the setting. As a result, even massive warships must turn their entire power generation off if they don't want to get gravitically folded into a pretzel, but they can go entirely unnoticed if they do.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation: SCP-939 has no eyes or ears and is implied to sense changes in heat and air pressure and flow to get around.

Web Videos

• Daisy Brown: The lab-grown monster Alan is introduced as being completely blind, which doesn't prevent him from being a threat to Daisy's safety, but does make him helpless in at least one regard, which forces him to still rely on her for food and movement throughout the house. This balances his brute strength and sadistic cruelty. It's subverted when she and Alan are drawing pictures, and he draws a picture of her, revealing that he's not actually blind, and is thus way more threatening and powerful than Daisy had originally believed.
• TitansGrave: The Ashes of Valkana: In Episode 4, "Sewer Terror", the party encounters Kynegidas, an enormous subterranean monster that is described as having an Eyeless Face and navigates the world through hearing. They take advantage of this by throwing tiles to create noises that distract it while they traverse its lair.

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender: June the Bounty Hunter has a creature known as a "shirshu", which resembles a cross between a wolf, a giant anteater, and a star-nosed mole, as her tracker, attack animal, and mount all in one (which she names Nyla). The shirshu has no eyes, but it does have an incredible sense of smell, allowing them to track a target virtually anywhere on the planet once it's picked up their scent. Team Avatar are able to drive it away at one point by exploiting a Logical Weakness: an animal with such powerful olfactory capabilities can't stand to be around potent scents, and it goes berserk when several pitchers of perfume are spilt around it.
• The Dragon Prince: The ancient dragon Sol Regem is utterly blind as a result of his eyes having been burned out long ago. However, his hearing and smell are as keen as ever. In "Sol Regem", this presents a complex situation for Rayla and Callum when they try to sneak past him and into Xadia, since he despises humans and will not knowingly permit one's entry. Callum can walk right in front of him and even talk to him without being identified, but Regem will "see" through their ruse the moment he gets a good whiff. Once this happens, Rayla takes advantage of this by taking Callum's scarf, using the scent on it to trick the blind dragon into thinking that she's Callum, and leading him on a wild goose chase.
• Jackie Chan Adventures: The Kiang Shi is a blind Chinese vampire who tracks its prey by smelling their breath. Downplayed as it becomes capable of seeing and talking after absorbing enough chi from Tohru, Jade, and Uncle.
• Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: Deathstalkers are giant three-tailed scorpions that are functionally blind, but can "see" their prey by tracking their heartbeats. The faster your heart beats, the more visible you are to a Deathstalker. Wolf urges Kipo to keep her heart rate at a steady pace to avoid the detection of the scorpions.
• Samurai Jack: In "Jack and the Three Blind Archers", Jack faces off against three demonic archers able to fire arrows with pinpoint accuracy and machine gun speed. During his first encounter with the archers, Jack realizes they are totally blind, but have incredibly acute hearing; they don't react to Jack waving his straw hat at them, yet are able to perfectly pinpoint his location just from the rustling of his clothing. He's able to defeat them by blindfolding himself to hone his own hearing to their level, evening the playing field.

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