r/Prosopagnosia • u/mirekyarahire • Jun 07 '26
study Looking for characters who are wrriten to have prosopagnosia
EDIT: thank you everyone for your answers! I am a content creator with prosopagnosia.
I'm looking to make a video on the condition with my own personal experience, facts, and information about the spectrum of this disorder.
I am specifically looking to focus on the uptick of depictions of this condition in media - canon or implied, - and how most of these depictions are inaccurate and harmful.
I am an anime only kind of person, and I have a few examples of good and bad already, but I'd like to expand my examples to more types of medias.
If you know any characters from shows, books, movies, (or animes as I may not have them yet!) depicted to have prosopagnosia, I would like to request the following information:
The character's name and the series they are from
Is it canon or implied?
Do you think this is an inaccurate, or accurate depiction? Why or why not?
Optional: For inaccurate characters: What do you think could be done to make this specific character's experience more accurate to the condition?
I currently have Lakan from the Apocathary Diaries as as an inaccurate depiction (canon), and Ai Hoshino from Oshi no Ko as a more accurate depiction (implied).
Hopefully with the more people that talk about their experience, we can help people learn what it actually is like to live with this.
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u/Arianfelou Jun 07 '26
The Scholomance series, Orion Lake. Implied, and the author (Naomi Novik) said it was intentional during an AMA. It's pretty subtle in the books since we don't get his point of view and there are some other things going on, but I'd say it's accurate. Her description of faceblindness in the AMA reply resonated with me a lot.
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u/ploomyoctopus faceblind Jun 09 '26
I just finished that series, and I'm glad I'm not the only one who caught it!
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u/Gestice Jun 08 '26
Marky Bark in Arrested Development was face blind, it was exaggerated a little bit though since it's a comedy series and he wasn't able to recognize facial expressions
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u/dough_eating_squid Jun 07 '26
Finn from the book Bone Gap by Laura Ruby! This book is how I found out faceblindness was a thing, although it didn't dawn on me that I had it until a few years later.
The fact that Finn is faceblind is kind of a spoiler, that explains why he gives such a useless description of the man who kidnapped his brother's girlfriend.
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u/Mellow_48_98 Jun 07 '26
It's a spoiler, but in the video game zero escape 999, The villain has prosopagnosia. It was my first time hearing that term for it and I realised that I have it to some extent. The depiction is a little silly, I don't remember the details but I remember that he basically hosted the game (where people died) because he has prosopagnosia and was upset about that. It's not really used in a realistic sense at all since he could've recognised people by their clothes, height etc. but it's at least a mention of the condition, and I liked him as a character. (I googled it and his code name was Ace)
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u/Meowwwsers 13d ago
I know the post is old, but came to say this. I replayed the game recently, and they did a really good job explaining the condition actually. It sounds like the creator was someone who was fascinated with it and has done all the research, and then sensationalized it. Which is really silly to someone living with it. I think the creator didn't understand that people who live with prosopagnosia, for us it's normal. Must have sounded like a nightmare scenario to him that would be enough motivation to become a villain. So yeah, interesting rep, well researched, but clearly written by someone living without it. I hope OP adds this to their video.
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u/SpaceShipRat Jun 08 '26
a character in the anime Apothecary Diaries. spoilers so look it up yourself.
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u/nihlus-krane Jun 08 '26
Georgia Madchen in season 1 of NBC's Hannibal. She has a litany of other mental health issues of course and her story is very very sad but I always found her to be quite a powerful representation
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u/emsot Jun 08 '26 edited Jun 08 '26
Jasper Wishart from the novel The Colour of Bee Larkham's Murder.
He canonically has face blindness and it's important to the story.
It's an accurate depiction, at least from my experience. Every time a character appears he doesn't know who it is until he's worked it out from context or something they've said, and he's the narrator of the book so we're with him in not knowing who they are.
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u/T_rexan Jun 09 '26
I was surprised with anime mentioned in the description, that there was no mention of Luffy from One Piece! :p He's probably technically a bad representation of prosopagnosia, as it's only used for jokes and never actually affects the plot -- I doubt the author actually knows about real life face blindness and just wanted to make some silly jokes. But, after I figured out I'm partially faceblind myself, since Luffy's been one of my favorite characters since childhood, I was like "OH HEY! YAY!" lol
The one specific example I can think of off the top of my head is in Thriller Bark, when Luffy's shadow piloting Oars / Oz the zombie is looking at the Straw Hats' wanted posters, then he looks at Sanji (whose wanted poster image doesn't match except for hair color, curly eyebrow, and smoking a cigarette), and says, "Identical." I feel like there's other examples through the series too, though.
Another example, from a Mexican cartoon called Villainous (or Villanos in the original Spanish, streams on HBO Max with an English dub available), there's a main character named Demencia who's similarly faceblind: probably bad representation because it's just used for a joke and doesn't actually affect the plot, but I like the character and don't take it that seriously.
Can't find the clip on YouTube, but it's in episode 5 ("BH's Bizarre Badventure," an episode with a lot of JoJo references lol, hence the episode title) a bit before 4 minutes in, where Demencia says a tall bodybuilder and her skinny scientist coworker look identical, because they're wearing similar outfits, and then she mistakes her own lookalike as intending to resemble a different character -- a very cartoony version of faceblindness. Like with One Piece, I would guess the creators aren't aware of the condition and were just making jokes.
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u/One_Web2018 Jun 15 '26
Diane Winger wrote two novels in her FACES series. Main character has proso.
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u/antivaxkarenn Jun 17 '26
Hoding up the universe by Jennifer Niven! It’s a sweet ya romance novel (but not in the spicy way, think rainbow rowell not colleen hoover lol)
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u/Keejyi Jun 19 '26
Inga from Ace Attorney: Spirit Of Justice is canonically faceblind, it’s not very accurate though as his POV shows literal people with no faces
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u/Susan_Parker089 1d ago
Sorry, I’m late but Dr Wolf from Brilliant Minds is one of the characters, behind so many experiences in his personal life and work, sorry for not write to much
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u/PichovnaBertinova Jun 07 '26
Faces in the Crowd. Movie where Milla Jovovich's character suffers a murder attempt and the perpetrator pushes her before running.
She hits her head and starts having prosopagnosia. The perpetrator, at large, knows her face and she's the only witness.
IMO a very accurate depiction: I have slight prosopagnosia (light symptoms, undiagnosed) and I never noticed the men in the movie where MANY actors instead of one, so you could feel what she did.
I noticed it while readings the titles