Eye patches in Manga/anime

[JoanDrake]

I've noticed a recent trend for girls in manga, especially Hentai, to be wearing eyepatches. Sometimes it's a bandage. If not, often its elaborate, that is using two bands or chains(or going the other way and being self stick), sometimes decorative and/or fringed, jeweled or otherwise.

If this is a new fashion (and I'm not sure it is) is there a reason or is it just a thing? I've been told that recent studies of real pirates and old type sailors suggest that wearing an eyepatch had an actual use, preserving the wearer's night vision in one eye.

There is, of course, the well known occupational hazard of blindness for navigators, since they had to look directly at the sun while "shooting" it with a sextant. I've been told this was a widespread belief but possibly a misconception as the better sextants used either filtered or used less efficient mirrors. However, knowing the hazards of viewing an eclipse, even through a modern filter, and the state of optometry even to the present day, I cannot give these precautions much effectiveness.

What's the story? if there is one.

 

[Warren_Paul]

Another and Chuuniybuu both have female protagonists with eye-patches. It makes them both cute and mysterious looking. And both of those anime are brilliant; well worth watching.

For Another, she wears the eye-patch because it hides away her fake eye and prevents her from seeing the aura of death on people who are about to die.

For Chuuniybuu it's because she is a bit loopy and wears a contact that changes her eye colour to gold, but to control the imaginary magical power the contact gives her, she has to cover it with the eye-patch.*


For some it might well be a fashion trend, and I can't speak for every anime - or any hentai...

EDIT: Did a little research, and apparently it is a growing fashion trend in Japan pushed by their version of playboy... ...only in japan could that become a fashion statement. Although there are cases in western cultures but typically they are hiding a real reason for the patch.


* notice my avatar.

 

[JoanDrake]

As an aside, I've only found out recently that there was a similar fashion among seafarers in the years before electric lights and modern navigation. Sailors would need to go into dark spaces on ship even in daylight, so many wore an eyepatch to keep one eye dark adapted. Also, some navigators were known to lose an eye through repeated direct observation of the sun on old time sextants.

Might be an interesting little fact to insert into tales of lusty, lady anime pirates