Triangle Shades

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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 oval, 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.

A variation is for robots to have their actual eyes in this shape. This serves no purpose other than looking cool.

Examples of Triangle Shades include:

Sunglasses

Anime and Manga

• Kamina of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann 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.
  • It's also rumoured that if anybody puts on Kamina's shades, they will instantly be promoted to Memetic Badass status.
  • It's become a meme to Photoshop Kamina's glasses onto various people, places, flags...which, well, instantly promotes them to Memetic Badass status.
  • They became an Ascended Meme in Super Robot Wars Z 2, where equipping them to a pilot gives them a huge starting will boost.
  • 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 Triangle Shades. No, that's not a typo there.
• Squirtle in Pokémon has a pair that he whips out every now and then; it signifies his role as the leader of the Squirtle Squad (the other Squirtle instead wear Lennon Specs). So do various members of Team Rocket, especially Meowth.
• The title character of Bobobo-Bo Bo-bobo.
• Franky from One Piece.
• Toguro the younger in Yu Yu Hakusho.
• Knight Schumacher/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.
• 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 Leaping Through Time, as well as Starmon of Digimon Xros Wars, perpetually wear them.
• Fourteen years before Gurren Lagann, triangle shades were the the chosen sunglasses of Justy Ueki Tylor, as shown in episode 26 of Irresponsible Captain Tylor. The luckiest(? - or smartest?) captain in the USPF fleet was definitely not a hoodlum.

Literature

• Cartoonist Kaz Cooke's Author Avatar.

Live Action TV

• Pointed shades are built into the helmets of GokaiSilver and Red Buster.

Newspaper Comics

• Calvin and Hobbes: Calvin once tried to convince his mom to buy him a BRIGHT ORANGE pair of these.

Video Games

• Teddy from MOTHER.
• Captain Falcon's mask counts, as do those of Blood Falcon, Black Shadow, and Phoenix.
• You can buy a pair in Transformice.
• 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.

Web Comics

• 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 and 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.
• The Man Who Was Thursday: Used in a webcomic version of to make a character look sinister.

Eyes

Anime and 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. Now that's cool.
  • And if that wasn't enough, the Super Galaxy Dai-Gurren wears a pair of sunglasses for no apparent reason. Same goes for the titular Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.

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.

Video Games

• Krookodile of Pokémon has markings around his eyes that resemble triangle shades, leading him to be called Kaminacroc by fans.
• Many of the robots in Descent have eyes like these, plus Glowing Mechanical Eyes.

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 Gurren Lagann that was the inspiration.