Myth-Busting the One-Eyed Monster

The myths and facts about mono-visioned individuals, namely, Seishirou and Subaru: 22 December 2004

I have wondered about the validity of many of the medical claims in Tokyo Babylon regarding individuals who lose an eye and what exactly that entails. In the manga, it is said that Seishirou will eventually go completely blind from fatiguing one eye, and this tragedy plays a great deal in volumes six and seven. As a part of my general fan obsession and as research for the X fanfic “A Perfect Circle”, I asked questions of Mom and Dad, both of whom are medical doctors, for information on one-ocular vision this morning, and did some extended online research on the topic.

Surprisingly, I stayed away from the worse one-eyed monster jokes, though when Mom was talking about “penetration wounds” I had to be snide. She didn’t get it.

Myth: People with one eye will go completely blind after a while from extended-use fatigue. This is the big one. This is not at all true, which throws CLAMP’s entire tragedy-campaign involving Seishirou going blind and Subaru wanting to be his seeing-eye dog right out the window. According to the “Living With One Eye” pamphlet, “…the [good] eye may feel just as tired as anything else with prolonged use, but being used will never damage the eye.” There are many people who have lived for decades with one eye or with one-ocular vision, and their working eyes are still as functional as the eyes of other people their age. Sorry, CLAMP. Sorry, fans. No tragedy over which to angst. Something tells me the doctors in Tokyo Babylon have pretty high malpractice insurance rates. This must be a common myth; my sixth grade science teacher told our class that if we kept looking through microscopes with one eye closed, we would go blind. She was serious, too.

Mom had this to add: “If the loss of vision in one eye is related to trauma (an isolated event independent of the welfare of the other eye, i.e. a knife or Fuuma), there is no increased risk to the other eye. However, if they loss of vision in an eye is due to disease such as diabetes or some retinopathies (retinal diseases), then the disease can effect both eyes, and the risk of losing sight in the other eye is increased. The only other thing that can happen… in a trauma situation is that somehow, through that trauma (i.e. in a hit to the head), both retinas are loosened, and if they don’t repair, you are blind in the non-repairing eyes.” This means, in short, that Seishirou and Subaru are not going to go blind unless something else happens to their good eyes.

Myth: People with one eye have zero depth perception. People have poor depth perception the first few months after they lose sight in one eye, but they quickly adapt even if they never fully regain it. The pamphlet says that “You [I guess Sei-chan and Subaru, if they were reading this] will soon learn to move your hand further forward than originally judged necessary when reaching out to pick something out or performing other hand movements,” etc etc, you get the idea. Depth perception is worse up close than far away for these individuals, but even close depth perception will improve to a usable level. Mom had a colleague when she was in pediatric residency who was blind in one eye, and he was able to thread needles and insert IVs into miniscule veins without help. Seishirou probably has no problem practicing veterinary medicine. According to the pamphlet, “…[perspective] is only useful if a person has prior visual knowledge,” which means that perspective is relative to past experience and comparison, so people with one eye blind can re-learn how to judge distances and perspectives.

While we are on the subject of bad depth perception, I could make some horrible joke about Subaru not being able to see a car dead in front of him, not accelerating down from freeway speed on a residential street, ramming into the other car, and driving off with shards of his front lights in my trunk, but I am not going to. True story. Scout’s honor. I will hunt down that nondescript early 90’s white Subaru one day. That guy had to be high or something.

Myth: People with one eye cannot focus at all. Whereas depth perception is measuring relativities between objects, focusing is concentrating on one object. Dad shot this one down pretty quickly and moved on to talk about the nuances of depth perception, but Mom claims that this is true to an extent. All right, I was guilty of making this mistake myself in “A Perfect Circle” when I assumed that Seishirou could not focus well at close-range. It made sense since I tried to concentrate on my cell phone with one eye closed and got a headache, but I made the common mistake of forgetting that people with one eye have long spans of constant adaptation time. Even though citing CLAMP’s knowledge of one-ocular vision is no proof of anything, Subaru had little trouble jumping around rubble and throwing cards at Seishirou not long after losing his right eye in X, though one might attribute this to him using his Jedi-like senses more than his vision.

Myth: Losing the left or right eye over the other yields different results. Nope, though people tend to favor one eye over the other when doing one-eye activities like looking through a microscope or sighting. If that eye is lost, the person can quickly adapt. The dominant eye is not linked to hand dominance, either. My dad is right-handed and left-eye dominant.

Myth: A damaged, blind eye will turn flawlessly white. This is a pretty common misconception in fantasy fandom. Maybe when characters have their vision divinely stolen by the gods or something their eyes will turn symbolically blank, but this is not the case with more mundane eye injuries. Though the iris (the colored part of the eye) might discolor or fade when damaged, the pupil (the black part) is actually a hole in the eye’s tissue and would only distort when slashed. Imagine slashing a black olive across its hole, and you get the idea. Both Seishirou’s and Subaru’s eyes were badly mangled, so removing the useless tissue makes sense. If the eyes healed and scarred over, the scar tissue might be white, but those eyes would be far from pretty and pearl-like even if the scar tissue covered all of the iris and pupil.

Unless there is some odd onmyouji magic of tragic appearances at work, Seishirou and Subaru have prosthetic eyes, though most prosthetic eyes are colored with false irises and pupils to resemble real eyes. Anderson Eye Associates states that most prosthetic eyes are made of an acrylic called polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA), used in hard contact lenses, and even though most people still refer to their false eyes as “glass”, seldom are glass eyes made anymore. I can see why people would still call prosthetic eyes “glass eyes”, though. Saying that you have a “glass eye” sounds a lot cooler than saying that you have a prosthetic eye made of an inert plastic resin. Prosthetic eyes have to be washed regularly, which entails removing the prosthesis from the socket with a suction cup-like device and rinsing it with mild soap, and the boys can sleep with their false eyes in. According to the Eye Cancer Network, prosthetic eyes can move with real eyes, just not as well, though in the manga and anime Subaru’s and Seishirou’s eyes move in perfect synchronization with their real eyes.

Fact: People with one eye have a limited range of vision. This probably makes driving fun. I tried driving with my right eye closed the other day and lasted only until I had to change lanes, but people with one eye learn to turn their heads in their blind direction whenever they need a broader range of vision. If not for their heightened senses, this would make sneaking up on Seishirou and Subaru from the right rather easy. It is sad to say that Seishirou the one-eyed monster probably drives better than most two-eyed drivers in Scottsdale, and if the Tokyo Babylon OVA is any indication, he drove like a maniac even when he had two eyes.

Sources:

• Dr. Elaine Cook, M.D. (Mom)
• Dr. Marshall L Cook, M.D. (Dad)
• “Living With One Eye”. Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind. Visited 22 December 2004. http://www.rvib.org.au/publications/pubs/Living%20with%20one%20eye.pdf
• “Ocular Prosthetics”. Anderson Eye Associates. Visited 22 December 2004. http://www.anderseneye.com/Serv_ocpros.htm
• “Enucleation”. Eye Cancer Network. Visited 22 December 2004. http://www.eyecancer.com/Enucleation/enuc.html

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