Blindness in Media

Media that depicts people who are blind or are legally blind. This page is for works that have prominent characters who are blind or legally blind.

See also Blind Creators.

A subindex of Physical Disability in Media.

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Anime & Manga

• Darker than Black: Yin, one of the main cast, is blind.
• Helen ESP: Helen is blind, deaf, and mute, but possesses some amount of psychic powers, such as communicating telepathically with dogs, most notably her Canine companion and best friend, Victor.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders: N'doul is blind; however, this doesn't stop him from being a very dangerous enemy to Jotaro and his group.
• Tokugawa no Saru: Tsuki is deafblind and mute.
• Shigurui: Irako Seigen, one of the two protagonists, is a blind samurai.

Comic Books

• Daredevil:
  • Matt Murdock, a.k.a. Daredevil, is blind as a result of being doused with chemicals when he was a child.
  • Stick is a blind sensei who teaches a young Matt Murdock how to manage his new blindness and use his other senses as well as teaching his martial arts, which eventually served as a base for a grownup Matt to become Daredevil. Also is known as Elektra Natchios as one of his (many) students. Even in his MCU appearance, he served as The Mentor to create TheDefenders.
• Emilka Sza: One of the main characters is a blind musician named Natalia, who befriends the titular Emilka - a mime. Natalia is the only person who is able to "see" Emilka's world without realising it's invisible and is able communicate with her. Natalia has a sense of humor about her disability, often comes of as a Disabled Snarker, and is, in general, a very happy-go-lucky (but also very caring) person.
• Fantastic Four: Alicia Masters, a blind woman who is The Thing's wife.
• Doctor Mid-Nite from the Justice Society of America. He's blind without his goggles.

Films — Animation

• Blindscape: A blind man wakes up in a forest. Objects only appear if he hears them or touches them.
• Quest for Camelot: Garrett is blind, but is able to navigate the forest and fight in combat better than most of his seeing peers. This is partly due to training from Kayley's father, but it is also implied that his blindness enhanced his senses of hearing and touch, making him more attuned to his natural surroundings.

Films — Live-Action

• L'Accordeur: A sighted piano player pretends to be blind and learned how to convincingly pass as blind.
• Ashes of Time: Starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai as an unnamed Blind Swordsman.
• At First Sight: Virgil (played by sighted actor Val Kilmer) is blind and falls for Amy Benic (Mira Sorvino) when they meet at a spa.
• The Beyond features a mysterious blind girl. The two main characters are blinded as well.
• Blade: Trinity: Sommerfield is a blind scientist.
• Blind Fury: Rutger Hauer plays a blind Vietnam vet.
• Blindness: In an unnamed large city, an unexplainable and sudden outbreak of instant blindness is affecting people rapidly.
  • Based off the book Blindness.
• The Book of Eli: Eli (played by sighted actor Denzel Washington) is a blind wanderer in a post-apocalyptic world on a mission to save the Bible.
• Crippled Avengers - One of the three main characters is Ah Kuei, the blind kung fu master.
• Dancer in the Dark: Selma is extremely partially sighted and on the brink of being blinded.
• Daredevil: The first live-action adaptation of the eponymous blind Marvel Comics vigilante superhero.
• Don't Breathe: The main antagonist is a blind veteran who unexpectedly proves to be more than a match for the three teens that broke into his house.
  • Don't Breathe 2: The blind man returns as this film's Anti-Hero.
• Don't Look Now: The main couple encounters a pair of sisters in Italy, one of whom is a Blind Seer.
• Journey of the Heart is about a Blind Musician who's an autistic piano savant.
• The Killer - The titular hero is a Hitman with a Heart who risks his life to restore the sight of a singer he accidentally blinded, only for everything to go to hell once he's betrayed.
• Margarita with a Straw: Supporting character Khanum is blind.
• Master of the Flying Guillotine - The titular Big Bad is a blind Professional Killer which the one-armed hero must figure out a way to defeat.
• Once Upon a Time in Mexico: One of the protagonists gets his eyes gouged and is forced to rely on hearing for the rest of the film.
• Once Upon a Warrior: A blind swordsman must save a child from an Evil Sorceress.
• Paris, je t'aime: The segment "Faubourg Saint-Denis" is about a young blind man and his relationship with his girlfriend.
• A Patch of Blue: A blind, illiterate teenage girl is befriended by an African-American man.
• Ray: A Biopic of famous blind jazz musician Ray Charles (played by sighted actor Jamie Foxx).
• Rogue One: One of the heroes, Chirrut Îmwe, is blind.
• Scent of a Woman: The movie is about a former US Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade (played by Al Pacino), who lost his sight due to a grenade accident.
• See For Me: The protagonist is a young woman (played by Skyler Davenport, who is blind) who is housesitting when thieves break into the home.
• See No Evil, Hear No Evil: Walley Karew is blind.
• Wait Until Dark: Suzy Hendrix (played by sighted actor Audrey Hepburn) is a young woman who has been recently blinded.
• The Way He Looks: The main character Leonardo is blind.
• Zatoichi: This franchise follows Ichi, a blind masseur who happens to be one of the most fearsome and dangerous swordsmen around.
  • Zatoichi (2003)

Literature

• Alfred Bester: In Golem¹⁰⁰, Gretchen is blind but unaware of the fact, because she's telepathic and subconsciously borrows the perceptions of the people she's with.
• Wilkie Collins: In Poor Miss Finch, the title character is a young lady who lost her sight at a very young age.
• All The Light We Cannot See: One of the two main characters is blind.
• Black Dawn: One of the main protagonists is a blind girl named Cady/Aradia. While her blindness makes her current situation even more perilous, she's also a Blind Seer and has other powers that come in handy. Aradia appears in other books in the Night World series and holds an important position in witch society, though she plays more of a supporting role outside of Black Dawn.
• The Blind Musician by Vladimir Korolenko, a Russian novel describing the life of a blind pianist starting from birth.
• The Day of the Triffids, both the book and the movie, are about a "freak meteor shower" that blinds most of the population, leaving a very small percentage still sighted.
• Guardians of the Whills: One of the heroes, Chirrut Îmwe, is blind.
• Kane Series short story "Cold Light" features Rehhaile, who cannot see but can access other people's minds to look through their eyes. When she is alone, however, she is fully blind.
• Baynard Kendrick (1894-1977) was a sighted author of mystery novels. He was an American who had enlisted in the Canadian army during World War I. While visiting a wounded comrade, he met a blind soldier who demonstrated how acutely he could deduce facts about someone using other senses such as touch and hearing. Kendrick returned to the United States after the war, and began a career as a writer for pulp magazines and publishing houses. He created the character Duncan Mclain, who was a blind private detective, Mclain solved cases with assistance of two guide dogs and some human aides.
  • Two movies based on books about Mclain were produced in 1938 and 1942.
  • Many years later, Kendrick was credited on the 70s television show Longstreet as "Based on characters created by Baynard Kendrick".
  • The books include:
    • The Last Express (1937)
    • Filmed as The Last Express (1938) with sighted actor Edward Arnold as Duncan Mclain.
    • The Whistling Hangman (1938)
    • Odor Of Violets (1941)
    • Filmed as Eyes Of The Night (1942) with sighted actor Edward Arnold as Duncan Mclain.
    • Blind Mans Bluff (1943)
    • Death Knell (1945)
    • Out Of Control (1945)
    • Make Mine Mclain (1947)- collection of three shorter works.
    • You Die Today (1952)
    • Blind Ally (1954)
    • Clear And Present Danger 1958 (1958)
    • Reservations For Death (1958)
    • The Aluminum Turtle (1960)- also known as The Spear Gun Murders
    • Frankincense And Murder (1961)
• One Hundred Years of Solitude: Úrsula Iguarán, matriarch of the Buendía family, progressively goes blind as she grows older. However, none of her family members ever discover this, since she completely memorized how their house looks and is able to walk around as if she could see.
• Tangerine: Paul is legally blind. The kids on Tangerine Middle's soccer team nickname him "Mars" due to the thick glasses he wears in order to see. Paul's parents claim that this happened when he stared at an eclipse for too long when he was young, though he has no such recollection of that happening. It's eventually revealed that it was due to Paul's older brother Erik spraying paint in his eyes as revenge for Paul supposedly tattling on him for spray-painting a wall.
• Warrior Cats: Power of Three introduced Jayfeather, a snarky blind cat, to the cast as one of the protagonists. Interestingly his blindness isn't revealed until a few chapters in; the world is described from his POV vividly through scent and sound and touch with the only visual description being when he's dreaming. This gives time for the reader to grow attached to him for who he is, and it shows how he doesn't consider it a hindrance (which is why he is so annoyed when others try to coddle him.)

Live-Action TV

• Blind Justice: The main character is a detective who got blinded while in the line of duty.
• Clarence is about the mayhem an extremely short-sighted person gets into.
• Covert Affairs: August 'Auggie' Anderson (Christopher Gorham) is blind after a mission in Iraq.
• Desperate Housewives: Carlos was blinded during the tornado. Although he was later healed in Season 5, he had theoretically been blind for the whole five years of the time jump.
• Daredevil (2015): Second live-action adaptation of the eponymous blind vigilante superhero from Marvel Comics.
• In the Dark: The protagonist, Murphy Mason, went blind as a teenager, and is assisted by a guide dog for directions.
• Longstreet: Mike Longstreet, played by sighted actor James Franscius, is a blind insurance investigator. Aided by his guide dog Pax, Longstreet investigated cases of stolen artwork and fraud. In "Eye of the Storm" he visited a diner to meet his contact, "Mr. Smith", and retrieve a jade chest set. The diner is filled with travelers taking refuge from a bad storm, and eventually, Mike has a murder to solve.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Queen Miriel is one of the most crucial characters and she goes blind by the end of Season 1, during Orodruin's eruption.
• See: Humanity has gone almost completely blind due to a sickness and regressed to primitive beliefs and technology. Seeing is considered a heresy and the rare individuals who can see are tracked down and killed.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton) was born blind and wears visors to help him out. In Star Trek: First Contact, he upgrades to cybernetic eyes.
• The Wire: Buthcie (S. Robert Morgan) is a blind man who runs his own bar in Baltimore.
• You: In Season 3, Dante, Joe's co-worker at the library, is partially sighted.

Theatre

• Wait Until Dark: Susy Hendrix has been recently blinded and has to deal with people breaking into her home.

Video Games

• The Cat Lady: When Susan is captured by the Third Parasite, the latter destroys her eyes with a bottle of bleach before leaving. This results in an Interface Screw, where the screen goes entirely dark (except for the inventory bar at the bottom), and the player has to steer Susan literally blind, as she stumbles around looking for the revolver that the Second Parasite had left behind for her. What the Parasites don't know is that Susan has Resurrective Immortality as part of her Dying Deal Upgrade, so killing herself immediately restores her vision.^note  The problem is rather that Susan is already suicidal and having to kill herself (again) distresses her more than having her eyes burned out with bleach.
• Daredevil 2003: Video game based on the 2003 film of the same name.
• Daredevil The Man Without Fear: A scrapped video game based on the Marvel character.
• Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance: A swordsman named Kenshi, in his quest to hone his skills, was tricked by Shang Tsung telling that he could unseal an old well and gain an immensely powerful sword sealed within. The well was actually the resting place of Kenshi's ancestors, and when he unsealed it, the energy that emanated from within blinded him. From that day onwards, he seeks revenge against Shang Tsung, using the word he found out inside the well and the abilities that Ermac teached him: psychokinesis
• Perception: Cassie Thornton is a blind woman, drawn to an abandoned house to uncover the source of her nightmares. Gameplay revolves around tapping your cane on the ground, producing sound and allowing Cassie to navigate the halls.
• The Vale: Shadow of the Crown: Alex is a blind princess who must stop the invasion of barbarian forces, learning things about herself and her family along the way. The game has functionally no visuals, and the player has to hone their sense of hearing to survive in this world.

Visual Novels

• Katawa Shoujo: Lilly Satou has been blind since birth, and her route focuses on her and Hisao trying to have a relationship together despite their respective disabilities preventing them from fully enjoying what normal couples do.

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender: While she doesn't appear until season 2, Toph Beifong is a blind earthbender who becomes part of the main cast and whose blindness is integral to her character.
• Mr. Magoo is extremely nearsighted.
• The Rhino And The Redbill has Niles the rhino, who also has poor eyesight like his real-world counterpart, and needs help of both a walking stick and an Oxpecker named Red to travel.

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