The difference between you and him? He makes this look good!
These are the absolute coolest variety of Cool Shades. Rather than those frightfully dull elliptical, circular, or square lenses, the lenses in these shades are in the shape of scalene triangles, joined at one point and with the shortest sides resting on the bridge of the nose. They are often, but not always, worn by lowlife hoodlum characters. There's even an emoticon for them: ◥▶◀◤
Aren't they cool?
A variation is for robots to have their actual eyes in this shape. This serves no purpose other than looking cool.
Examples — sunglasses
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Anime & Manga
- Bleach: Old Man Zangetsu wears a wraparound variety of these.
- The title character of Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo wears a pair that he hardly takes off.
- Digimon:
- A Gazimon is briefly seeing wearing a pair in Digimon Adventure. And by "briefly" we mean that Taichi accidentally broke them with a soccer ball to the face shortly thereafter.
- SuperStarmon of Digimon Frontier and Digimon Xros Wars: The Young Hunters Who Leapt Through Time, as well as Starmon of Digimon Fusion, perpetually wear them.
- Knight Shoemach/Osamu Sugo from Future GPX Cyber Formula wears those when he's racing. It is also to keep his real identity a secret so he can catch up on Smith.
- My Hero Academia:
- Present Mic has yellow-orange triangular sunglasses but they aren’t scalene, they’re equilateral triangles. He appears to wear them out of costume too as he’s clearly sporting a pair in the flashback to his U.A. student days. He may also have an off duty pair that are a little more round on the bottom but we only see those once and it’s hard to tell if they’re different or just a variation in how he’s drawn.
- Aoyoma sports a pair with extremely long upper edges in his hero costume that are probably meant as eye protection from his laser.
- Pokémon: The Series: Ash's Squirtle has a pair that he whips out every now and then, which signifies his role as The Leader of the Squirtle Squad (the other Squirtle instead wear round sunglasses). So do various members of Team Rocket, especially Meowth.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
- Kamina starts off with a pair, and everybody gets in on the act towards the end of the series. They've become so associated with him and considered such a defining trait that "Kamina shades" is a very common term used to refer to this style of sunglasses. This trope also applies to the Gurren, Kamina's personal mecha. Gurren's shades are also sharp enough to double as a sword and a boomerang.
- Simon tops it off towards the end of the series, with his shades becoming star-shaped! ( which is like the original, with three pointed tips added)
- And topped off once more with Super Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann in Lagann-hen which manifests galaxy-sized Kamina's shades.
- Akane from Vividred Operation puts on these types of shades when she tries to disguise herself in Episode 3. The kicker is they are the exact same shade of red as Kamina's
◊. Her grandpa pulls them out again in episode 6.
Comic Books
- Batman: The villainess Magpie's original costume sported a pair of these.
- Video Boy, the eponymous protagonist of an Italian superhero comic from the late 1980s, sports green triangle shades as part of his costume.
- Doom Patrol: Negative Man begins to wear these after becoming Rebis
Comic Strips
- Calvin and Hobbes: Calvin once tried to convince his mom to buy him a BRIGHT GREEN pair of these. Became Hilarious in Hindsight when TTGL came out, prompting a lot of crossover fanart (or just the strip while recoloring the shades to the appropriate color).
Fan Works
- Hottie from Hottie 3: The Best Fan Fic in the World wears pink Triangle Shades.
Films — Live-Action
- In the future presented in Back to the Future Part II, triangular sunglasses are apparently fashionable as one of Griff’s henchmen has a pair.
Live-Action TV
- Super Sentai: Pointed shades are built into the helmets of GokaiSilver and Red Buster, and his Evil Counterpart Dark Buster. All of the members of Avataro Sentai Donbrothers have triangular glasses that allow them to see into the Nouto dimension. In their transformed states they all have visors shaped in this style that stick out the sides of their helmets. Triangle shades are also included in the team's emblem and a lot of their equipment is designed to resemble triangle shades.
Pinballs
- Dr. Dude's bright orange shades.
Video Games
- Some of the Animal Crossing games feature triangle shades for your character to wear.
- Kamikaze Bomber from Bomberman '94 and Metal Bomber from Super Bomberman 3 wear them. For a lesser-known example, Carat Diamond wears them instead of his round shades in the story manga in the Super Bomberman guidebook.
- These have popped up thrice in the Epic Battle Fantasy series:
- Epic Battle Fantasy 3 features two questgivers wearing these - Johnny, found in The Town at the start of the game, and Kamina (naturally) in the Kitten Kingdom Ruins.
- Epic Battle Fantasy 5 has Aniki, an expy of Kamina found at Rainbow River, wearing a pair.
- F-Zero: Captain Falcon's mask counts, as do those of Blood Falcon, Black Shadow, and Phoenix.
- Ghost Trick's Sissel has a pair of these. Yomiel, the person whose body Sissel mistakenly thought was his, has these too. These carry on even after Sissel loses Yomiel's image and reverts to the blueish blob shape all ghosts start out as and Yomiel seems to have drawn a pair of triangle shades onto his "face" after pulling a body together out of random items he found in the submarine.
- Spinni from Kirby: Squeak Squad wears a pair of triangular shades, as the other members Storo and Doc wear an eyepatch and swirly glasses, respectively.
- Proto Man from Mega Man (Classic) similarly wears these as part of his helmet. The official art heavily implies that he wears another◊ set of Triangle Shades under the ones on his helmet.
- Milky Nezumi from Nezumi Man, since he's a Shout-Out to Kamina.
- Whereas Dr. Eggman from the Sonic the Hedgehog series sports a pair of pince-nez sunglasses, his Evil Twin Eggman Nega wears triangular shades.
- Mouser from Super Mario Bros. 2 and Boshi from Super Mario RPG wear them, almost identical to Squirtle's, as mentioned above.
- Tatsu of Xenoblade Chronicles X got a pair of these as a memento from his father, who was selected as a yearly heropon.
- Yo-kai Watch: When Jibanyan is fused with Roughraff, they merge into Baddinyan, a delinquent version of Jibanyan that wears a pair of these along with a pompadour and a school jacket.
Web Animation
- hololive's Takane Lui has these as an optional accessory.
- Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers invokes this trope a few times:
- Bowser puts on a pair and breakdances after successfully cooking Italian ravioli with just Doritos in Cooking with Bowser and Mario 2!.
- Peach after poisoning Toadsworth in Toadsworth's how to-Princess.
- Yoshi wears a pair in Yoshrooms while attracting another Yoshi, only to be beaten up by said blue Yoshi.
- We also have triangle shade-wearing Teletubbies. For example:
- Dipsy while in the crowd cheering and dancing with SMG4 in APRIL FOOLS.
- Dipsy again in Tubbie TV while "getting it on with the ladies". This happens a second time at the very end of the blooper when the Teletubbies celebrate.
- Tinky Winky (briefly) in The 12 idiots of Christmas.
Webcomics
- Homestuck: Dave's Bro sports "dumb pointy anime shades", as John calls them; the comic's author has denied this being a Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann reference on several occasions. Dave himself wore a pair of his own for most of his life, but swapped them for the aviators Ben Stiller wore in Starsky & Hutch which John gave him as a thirteenth birthday present. The post-Scratch counterpart of Bro, Dirk Strider, also wears his own computerized specs, which themselves hold Dirk's "Auto-Responder" an Artificial Intelligence based off Dirk's own consciousness.
- Manly Guys Doing Manly Things: Bishified Commander Badass has a pair. They come in handy for slitting Final Form Gackt's throat.
- As does Duke Nukem. He looks remarkably similar to Dirk above.
- The Man Who Was Thursday: Triangle shades are used in a webcomic version of the story to make a character look sinister.
- Buwaro of Slightly Damned wears a pair in this non-canon piece of art drawn by the author
Web Original
- Cartoonist Kaz Cooke's Author Avatar.
Western Animation
- In Ben 10: Omniverse, Bullfrag, one of Ben's transformations, wears a pair.
- In Courage the Cowardly Dog, Di Lung wears these to show off how rich and cool he is.
- While not in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic itself, they're worn by Princess Cadance in one of the non-matching pictures from the printable Princess Cadance Perfect Match activity.
- Ace, the leader of the Gangreen Gang, from The Powerpuff Girls always wear his triangular shades, meaning that his eyes are seldom seen.
- Steven Universe:
- For Garnet's first two outfits, she wears a visor that is flat on the top and sides, but has a triangle beneath each eye. Her third form changes it to have three triangular prongs on top, the middle one covering her Third Eye.
- Sugilite has a fully triangular pair that covers four of her five eyes.
- Peridot gains these as part of her Crystal Gem outfit. They're even designed as a direct Shout-Out to Kamina himself.
Examples — eyes
Anime & Manga
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: As if the humans having them wasn't enough, the Gunmen also sport triangle shade-shaped optical receptors. And, as if that is not enough, Gurren Lagann sports humongous triangular shades over his triangular eyes. And the final kicker is that Gurren/Gurren Lagann's shades can be used as an Improvised Weapon, being used as a sort of boomerang by Kamina and Simon, as well as the first strike of their Finishing Move, the Giga Drill Breaker!!
Comic Books
- ABC Warriors: These robotics warriors enjoy this trope. Depending on their current bodies, at least a few of the titular robots have them at any one time. Hammerstein and Mek-Quake are the most fond of theme.
- Batman villain Mr. Zsasz has these in his original appearances, although this was dropped in the late 1990s.
Live-Action TV
- In the TV adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981), Marvin the Paranoid Android has these, although instead of flaring up at the edges, they droop down to give him a suitably depressive expression.
- Same goes for the movie version, except the triangles are placed against a meridian line around his perfectly-spherical head. The effect is the same, given the arc the line makes.
Video Games
- Many of the robots in Descent have eyes like these, plus Glowing Mechanical Eyes.
- Krookodile of Pokémon has markings around his eyes that resemble triangle shades.
- Ultra-V from War of the Monsters has these in glowing yellow.
Western Animation
- The character designs in Transformers: Animated were influenced by those of ABC Warriors, and that famously included the eyes.
- Soundwave's visor is literally the shape of Kamina's shades! Prowl's is close. The Powers That Be say it was indeed ABC Warriors and not Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann that was the inspiration.
