Love At First Sight

"You proposed to a complete stranger again, didn't you?"

—Baccano! 1932 Drug & The Dominos

Love at first sight. It's a staple of Fairy Tales, love songs, and Disney animated movies. Two characters meet, and fall deeply, madly, passionately in love with each other almost immediately. This is one of the most common story archetypes, probably going back to Greek Mythology.

In Real Life, this often leads to problems. Its actually more true in Real Life to say its love at first smell. Its more of a chemical thing then a visual thing. They've just met, so they don't actually know each other that well. Depending on where a story falls in the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism, Love At First Sight is either a recipe for Happily Ever After or eventual disillusionment and heartbreak. Of course, even if the characters really are perfect for each other, they can still end up being Star-Crossed Lovers who are destined to be apart.

Note that this trope is compatible with Oblivious to Love. In a Love Epiphany, it can suddenly dawn on the character that he is in love and has been for some time, from their first meeting.

Sometimes, only one character falls in love at first sight. That character usually spends the rest of the story trying to win the heart of the other one. If the character is a hero or heroine, you usually get a pleasant courtship. If the character is a villain, he or she becomes a dangerous Stalker with a Crush, because Love Makes You Evil.

Compare Fourth Date Marriage, The Dulcinea Effect, and the vocal equivalent Love At First Note. The Serial Romeo is a character who falls into this over and over again.

Not to be confused with the Manhwa with the same name or the Chinese Drama, Love At First Fight.

Examples of Love At First Sight include:

Anime & Manga

• Renton loves Eureka. That's the whole premise of Eureka Seven, a giant mecha anime. Renton, the hero of the story, falls madly in love with Eureka the moment she crashlands near his grandfather's house. Complicated by the fact that Eureka is not human and doesn't understand his feelings.
  • This is true until around the end of second season, when Eureka begins to show more and more human emotions and eventually falls in love with Renton. The fact that she is a Coralian, however, leads her to think that she and Renton are unable to be together, leading to problems in their relationship.
• The trigger to the action of Maison Ikkoku: Yusaku meets Kyoko and falls for her hard. Really, really Hard
• Andrei Smirnov from the second season of Mobile Suit Gundam 00 apparently fell in love with Louise Halevy upon seeing her.
• There's an implication that Spike, at least, fell in love with Julia at first sight in Cowboy Bebop. It's not completely clear since their Backstory is never fully told, and there are only a few Flash Back images to go by, but in what was apparently the first time Spike saw Julia he reacts with wide eyes and his mouth hanging open.
• In Outlaw Star, Jim develops a crush on Hanmyo when he first sees her practicing her martial arts at a water fountain. Apparently, she felt the same towards him. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be, as she turns out to be an assassin sent after Gene, and Jim unknowingly causes her death.;-;..
  • Harry also falls for Melfina in this way to a rather extreme extent.
• In Flame of Recca, Recca has this to an extent with Yanagi (The Dulcinea Effect kicking in full power). Despite meeting her for the first time, he swears to protect her and is shown blushing around her. Of course, as the series goes on, his feelings for her deepen (as do hers for him), but it's still nevertheless Love At First Sight.
• In the Alternate Universe spin-off of Mirai Nikki, Mirai Nikki: Paradox, Akise Aru (who already seemed to have a suspicious Ho Yay crush on Yukiteru in the original) is shown to have fallen in love at first sight with the wounded Yukiteru. It's so bad to the point where he is shown "championing" for Yukiteru, so that when he defeats all of Yukiteru's enemies, Yukiteru can become God.
  • In the main story, Yuno Gasai also fell madly in love with Yukiteru during the first time the two talked, and protects him from the other participants in the game. Unlike with Akise, this is a very mixed blessing for Yukiteru...
• Hardly one of those pure-hearted, Disney-esque fairy tale types, but apparently Gauron from Full Metal Panic!! fell in love with 12-year-old Sôsuke at first sight, becoming something of a Stalker with a Crush towards him. Yes, warped and disturbing as it is, it's probably the closest thing Gauron has experienced to being in love. Even after five years of not seeing or hearing from Sōsuke, he still manages to recognize Sōsuke right away (at least, after he manages to get a clear view of Sōsuke's face), and apparently has never forgotten him ever since they first met. Gauron himself even confesses to Sōsuke that he loves him.
  • It's also shown in the novels, that Lemon was heavily implied to be attracted to Sōsuke. When he first saw him, he thought Sōsuke was very good looking and "charming", despite the boy being completely emotionless (read: "eye candy"). Later, after Sōsuke wins a tournament that helped win back Lemon's money, Lemon hugged him with "more passion than a french kiss would warrant," making Sōsuke slightly uncomfortable. And later still, Lemon gets drunk, and subsequently invades Sōsuke's personal space by hugging and groping him while blushing—which irritates Sōsuke to no end.
• Rohfa from D.Gray-man falls for Allen at first sight. Of course, it's not like that's anything unexpected...
• After listening with agonized stoicism to an awkward not-quite-confession from Elraine that she's been falling in love with him bit by bit for the entire series, though she doesn't expect him to understand or even know what she's talking about... Kiri Luchile reveals to the reader, although not to her, that he actually did this. He's got his reasons for keeping quiet, though.
• In Black Cat, Kyoko fell in love with Train at first sight (some of it might have to do with how, at first sight, he was saving her). She then becomes his rabid Stalker with a Crush.
  • Creed, as well, is shown to have fallen in love with Train at first sight (in the short excerpt in the manga which shows the scene where they first met). It also cements Creed's status as a masochist, considering that his first interaction with Train consists of Train disdainfully glaring at him, and basically telling Creed to shove off, saying that he's useless to Train. Creed, being Creed, gets aroused by this and ends up becoming Train's Stalker with a Crush.
• Baron Kelvin from Black Butler immedietly fell in love with a seven-year-old Ciel at first sight. This is barely justified by the fact that his love was based on how he views Ciel as special and beautiful, and only special people could interact with other special people. He then goes through a painful surgery to look more beautiful so he could have a chance as Ciel's romantic interest. His obsession leads to a point where he literally recreates the most painful of Ciel's memories of being sacrificed just so he could be there and be killed in the same way that Ciel had murdered his tormentors. "Talk to the demon", indeed.
• Subverted in Baccano!. Claire Stanfield completely insists that Chane is The One after a single meeting...just like he insisted that the last girl he crushed on was his One True Love. And the one before that. And all those other ones too...
  • On the other hand, Chane is the first person who didn't reject him on the spot when he declared his love.
  • For a straighter version, Firo claims Love At First Sight for Ennis. Too bad that she happens to be the one woman in the series that happens to be borderline asexual... It takes them fifty years to get married.
• In Emma: A Victorian Romance, William fell in love with Emma at first sight.
• In Cardcaptor Sakura, both Sakura and Syaoran describe their attraction to Yukito as Love At First Sight. Subverted as Yukito was created to be the perfect match for Sakura, and his power was what Syaoran was subconsciously attracted to.. Still, Yukito falls for Sakura's brother, and Syaoran and Sakura fall in love with each other.
  • Been a while but where was it stated that Yukito was created to be a perfect match for Sakura? He was a pretty boy long before Sakura came into the picture. The entire reason why Syaoran was attracted to him is because of his powers and at least part of the reason for Sakura's attraction is also his power.
    • Where Eriol said what was 'unexpected' in his plans was that Sakura fell for Syaoran, not Yukito. Yue was (in love?) with Clow, and so Clow thought that Yue would be less lonely if he loved his new master. Eriol also did not expect Yukito to love Touya.
• In Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, Shion Sonozaki loses three nails, goes Ax Crazy and considers suicide because she is in love with Satoshi Hojou - whom she talked with for maybe twenty minutes tops, during most of which he was under the impression she was her twin sister Mion.
  • In the anime that's more or less the case, but they have a more complex friendship in the manga and sound novels.
• It is very difficult to interpret the Sengoku Basara anime's first meeting between Sanada Yukimura and Date Masamune as anything but this. Especially when Yukimura clutches at his heart and literally goes weak at the knees while waxing rhapsodic about the One-Eyed Dragon of Oshu

Yukimura: Burning.
Sasuke: ... What?
Yukimura: My heart is burning. Such presence. Such fighting spirit. Such... strength.
Sasuke: Er, please don't tell me he lit your soul on fire.

• • Later on when Shingen asks Yukimura if Masamune was really that strong, Yukimura responds, with shining eyes: "He was! So much that he shook my very soul."
  • This trope also took place between Kasuga and Uesugi Kenshin in the Backstory; she was sent to assassinate him and instead fell in love with him.
• In the Manhwa Pig Bride Ji Oh and Mu Hwa get one of the most detailed Love At First Sight sequences ever. 4 pages are dedicated to the few seconds where Ji Oh first sees Mu Hwa perched on his dormitory veranda railing and there's even a close up of her reflected in his eye when she springs at him wielding a sword. The strangest part? They're only the Beta Couple!
• Also happens in Crying Freeman, where Emu Hino becomes attracted to the handsome and sad assassin she saw first after he accidentally killed his targets in front of her.
• Shizuka Doumeki from xxxHolic pretty much fell for Kimihiro Watanuki like this, when he saw the other sadly cradling a dead kitten and stating "I'll die like this. Alone." Doumeki then swore to himself this wouldn't happen.
• Kodachi Kunō from Ranma ½ fell for the title character once she glanced at him for the first time after he saved her from taking a bad fall.
  • Her brother Tatewaki, likewise, fell for "the Pigtailed Girl" more or less after first confirming her existence. This did not prevent him chasing after Akane Tendō, his first crush, as well, and seems strong enough to keep him from realizing that the "Pigtailed Girl" is Ranma Saotome.
    • OF course, both of the Kunō siblings have rather... forceful and dramatic personalities.
  • The anime has Sentaro and Satsuki. They sit and stare at each other for so long when they first meet, that by the time Sentaro finally says something to her, it's the next day and everybody else has fallen asleep. To top it off, the first words out of Sentaro's mouth are a proposal.
  • It's implied that Ranma himself believes in love at first sight. He once said:

Ranma: Time means nothing to love.

• Muraki from Yami no Matsuei constantly reminds Tsuzuki of how much he loves his beautiful eyes, telling him that he fell in love with him at first sight when he saw his eyes in a photo.
• In Tenjho Tenge, this happens to Masataka when he saw Aya the first time. And to Aya, after she meet Nagi.
• Julia from Strawberry Shake Sweet virtually explodes hormonally as soon as she meets the girl she is about to tutor, Ran.
• This happens to Fumi in Aoi Hana when she meets Yasuko, the most popular student at her all-girl high school. It appears to be mutual, although Yasuko still dumps Fumi rather abruptly.
• In the third Pandora Hearts omake, Gilbert Nightray falls for schoolboy Oz upon crashing into him... Note that in this omake, Gilbert is a teacher.
  • Jack for Lacie, who he spends eight years searching for after they first met.
• Juvia Loxar falls in love with Grey Fullbuster at first site in Fairy Tail
  • Juvia's feelings are compounded as he's the first person to defeat her and his accidental groping her.
• Hinagiku of Hayate the Combat Butler admitted to Ayumu that her love for Hayate was "at first sight". If you reread the relevant chapters, you see that, indeed it was. All the chapters since have proven that the love is not just as "looks-oriented" as most cases would be though. Especially since it took her a long time to realize the feelings, even though they were clear as day to everyone else.
  • It's also been implied that it might work both ways. He has said that he is attracted to Hinagiku. Of course, with Hayate being a Chaste Hero and thicker than a box of bricks, it might be a while before we find out if that's the case.
• Subverted in Princess Tutu. Ahiru/Duck falls in love with Mytho the first time she sees him (when she's a duck). She's turned into a girl to help him, and later admits she just liked him because she "thought he was handsome" but came to care about him even more as she got to know him. Then he picks Rue aka Kraehe, the girl he's known for years, as his Princess instead. And she fell in love with him at first sight, too, after he saves her life as a child.
• Zetsuai1989: Kouji Nanjo falls for Takuto Izumi like this, when they are 10 years old (and he thinks Izumi is a girl). Izumi, however, takes much longer to return his feelings.
• Naruto: A flashback reveals that Karin fell for Sasuke once she glanced at him for the first time after he saved her from a bear.
  • Shiho seems to do the same with Shikamaru when he is at the code squad's office.
  • Rock Lee falls in love with Sakura at first sight as well early on in the series.
• Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water: There is really no other explanation as to why Jean start following Nadia in Paris during the first episode. (Nadia initially doesn't feel the same way, but he earns her trust when he rescues her. This starts a close friendship between them that gradually does turn into a romantic one; in fact, Nadia is completely transformed by her relationship with Jean.
  • When Grandis meets Captain Nemo on the Nautilus, she becomes madly infatuated with the man, igniting a jealous rivalry between her and the overprotective first officer, Electra (who harbors similar feelings for the captain.)
• Shinra Kishitani from Durarara!! fell in love with Celty Strulusen the day he met her... when he was four years old at the time, and his father Shingen was also performing a vivisection on her. Twenty years later, though, Celty has mutual feelings for him, but even then, it's no perfect romance. Not that Shinra is complaining.
• Yandere Kanojo has main characters Reina Ryuuzaki and Manabu Tanaka falling in love with each other at first sight in the first Yonkoma so it can dispense with the typical Will They Or Won't They and instead focus on their wacky hijinx as a couple.
• Misa Amane from Death Note claims that her love for Light was at first sight. Before seeing him, she was mostly thankful to him for killing the murderers of her parents.
• Noelle from Tenshi ni Narumon falls in love with Yuusuke right off the bat upon just meeting him when he stumbles across her in the forest and accidently kisses her.
• Completely Played for Laughs with Riruka in Bleach for Ichigo.
• In Wild Rock, Yuuen thinks he's doing too good of a job Disguised in Drag charming Emba . He later finds out he's not and the biggest thing that gave Yuuen away is simply that Emba's been entranced since the first time they saw each other and knows exactly who (and what gender) he is.
• In Battle Athletes Victory, Akari bumps into Kris, who immediately loudly proclaims to have fallen in love with Akari and has no qualms about showing her affection.
• This is Brief's reaction when he first sees Panty in Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt.
• It turns out that Keith Goodman from Tiger and Bunny is prone to this. First crush? A high school girl he fell in love with at first sight (who didn't even so much as talk to him). Second love? A woman in the park that he fell in love with at first sight (who turned out to be a malfunctioning android). His "soulmate"? A puppy that he took one look at through the pet store window and, once again, fell in love with (no, not in that way) at first sight.
• Its been suggested that Daisuke's love for Risa developed at first sight in D.N.Angel. Also, in episode 14 there's Mio Hio towards Daisuke.
• Shu from Flower Flower falls head over heels with her wife, Nina, at first sight. Nina on the other hand..
• It's implied in Wandering Son that Saori fell in love with Shuuichi at first sight.
• In Big Order Hoshimiya Eiji falls for Kurenai Rin as soon as he sees her first enter class. This changes once he learns that she was sent to kill him.
• In Mamotte Shugogetten Kaori Aihara is like this for Tasuke and Tasuke is like this for Shaorin.

Comics

• Colossus and Zsaji from Secret Wars, despite the facts that a) they couldn't speak each other's languages and b) she died literally days after they met. A popular Fanon theory states that Zsaji was an empath who either intentionally or inadvertantly manipulated Peter's emotions, especially since he went from pining over Kitty to doting over the alien healer so fast that the boy probably got whiplash. And apart from his subsequently breaking things off with Kitty(which was the sole purpose for Zsaji's existence), she was almost entirely forgotten within a year and is almost never mentioned.
• The Elf Quest concept of Recognition is this trope in spades. "Soul meets soul when eyes meet eyes, stands your lover recognized." When a male elf and a female elf see each other and learn each others' soul names, and are compelled by a biological imperitave to have sex. A life-long romance is not guaranteed (Dewshine and Tyldak), but does tend to follow more often than not (Cutter and Leetah).
• When Susan "Sue" Storm was 12 years old, her aunt rented a room to a Teen Genius university student named Reed Richards. She fell for the Hollywood Nerd at first sight, but would only date and marry him when they were older.
• In Brazilian comic Monica's Gang, the Unrequited Love between Franklin and Marina (though it starts with some Post Modernism: Marina, author Mauricio de Sousa's daughter, entered the comic book world, where Franklin promptly fell in love with her; when she returned, Mauricio reveals he created a character based on Marina).
• This seems to happen quite often to mortals who spend time around the Endless. In Endless Nights, the mortal protagonists of Death and Destruction's stories both end up falling in love with them after spending a short time in their company. Death gets it the most in general, too.
• Thugboy fell for Empowered hard when he first laid eyes on her—it even broke him out of his terminal "Whatever." mood.
• Victor and Lillie from Runaways. It doesn't work out, though.
• Tarot and Jon from Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose.

Fairy Tales

• In "Faithful John", Faithful John is unable to keep the new king from looking in the forbidden room, and so the king instantly falls in love with a portrait of a princess.
• In "The Maiden Without Hands", the king falls in love with the maiden as soon as he meets her stealing pears from his orchard.
• In "The Six Swans", the king finds the heroine alone in the woods, not speaking to anyone, and falls in love with her beauty.
  • Similarly in "Our Lady's Child".
• In "Brother and Sister", the king also finds Sister in the woods and wishes to marry her at once.
• In "The White Bride and the Black One", the king falls in love with a portrait of the heroine.
• In "Tsarevitch Ivan, the Fire Bird and the Gray Wolf", Helena the Beautiful falls in love with Prince Ivan almost as soon as he kidnaps her.
• In "The Greek Princess and the Young Gardener", after the young gardener attempted to kidnap her, and her father demanded that he get rid of a hill to prove that he was capable of keeping her from danger, the Greek princess hopes that he will succeed in getting rid of the hill.
• In "Rapunzel", "The Fair Angiola", "Petrosinella", and "Snow-White-Fire-Red", the heroine falls in love with the prince as soon as he gets into the tower. (Note in that all but "Rapunzel", the heroine is instrumental in their escape; she could have escaped on her own.)
• In "Katie Crackernuts", the prince and Katie fall in love as soon as he recovers his health, and meanwhile, his brother and her sister have fallen in love at sight.
• In "Vasilissa the Beautiful", the Tsar falls in love with Vasilissa the Beautiful on sight—having first been intrigued by her weaving and sewing abilities.
• The Arabian Nights tale of "Prince Camaralzaman and Princess Badoura"... hoo boy. The Prince and Princess, living at opposite ends of the world, respectively decline arranged marriage and get locked in towers to think it out. A good fairy and evil djinn come to blows over which of the two is the most beautiful mortal alive. They end up sticking both in the Prince's bed and comparing them, but can't decide, so they decide to let the mortals decide. Binding the Princess in magical slumber, they wake the Prince, who exclaims over her beauty ("Are you the woman my father meant for me? I had no idea!"), fails to wake her, and finally goes back to sleep. They do the same thing for the Princess, who is even more enamored of the Prince, so the immortals judge the Prince the most beautiful mortal, return the sleeping Princess to her bed, and leave the story entirely. The Prince and Princess awake the next morning, realize they're not sleeping next to the beauty from the night before, and go storming around asking "Where's that gorgeous dreamboat I fell in love with last night?!" Not only that, but the Princess makes a threat of killing herself if her father doesn't show her the man she loves. Note: These two have never spoken to each other, never seen each other awake, know absolutely nothing of the other except that they're gorgeous. And the Princess is willing to kill herself rather than not have her Prince.
  • A side note: The Prince and Princess are said to look very much alike, to the point where the Princess can masquerade as the Prince for months (including getting married to another princess! long story). My classmates wondered if it's the girl who looked very butch or the boy who looked very effeminate—as they said, "Would you marry a girl who looked like you?"
  • They look very much alike? This could be perfectly rationalized as both of them being siblings without knowing: not having grown up together they would lack the Westermarck Effect that prevents people from hopelessly falling in love with their close relatives. In fact, in real life it's common for siblings who never saw each other during childhood to fall in love at first sight.
• In "The Story of the Black Cow", the princess sees a lock of the hero's golden hair and insists she must see its owner to be happy. When he's kidnapped and taken to her, he instantly forgets all else.

Fan Works

• DC Nation had Beast Boy and Fauna meeting each other in the middle of a battlefield, stark naked, and in full-on shape-shift mode. While not the most romantic of meetings, it certainly turned out well for them.
• Luminosity has this as one of the things that simply happen to vampires and werewolves. This can be interesting if the other party is human, as they aren't affected, but generally they end up being turned—automatically mutual—or getting attached to the sheer devotion, respectively. Half-vampires whom vampires fall for get neither perk.
• Many, many Captain America/Iron Man slash fics have Tony falling in love with Steve the moment the Avengers free Cap from deep freeze.
• In My Inner Life Jenna sees Link for the first time and "And then I fell in love."
• On A Cross And Arrow Fluttershy and Rarity both fall in love with their male alternate-universe counterparts (Butterscotch and Elusive, respectively) instantly.
  • In Rarity's case, she actually invokes this trope. Claiming she knows herself well enough to sedu... er... deduce that Elusive would be "the perfect gentlecolt" to her "fair lady." Turns out she was right as she knew what subtle queues and innuendos to follow. Elusive actually picks up on this and takes their tennis match flirtation Up to Eleven when he finally asks Prince Solaris to what could amount to a marriage proposal!

Films -- Animation

• Ashitaka from Princess Mononoke; he was pretty much ready to die for her the moment they shared eyes. And his words to her when she's about to slit his throat for carrying her out of Iron Town? "You're beautiful. Yup, he was hopeless from the get-go.
• Many fairy tales, particularly those turned into Disney animated films, such as Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, etc. The ones that don't do this tend to stand out a little (e.g. Beauty and the Beast).
  • Aladdin and Jasmine pretty much fall in love at first sight, but by some animating/writing miracle, it comes across as completely natural, and no one is in any doubt that they're perfect for each other.
  • Sleeping Beauty features a slight variation on the trope in that Prince Phillip appears to fall in love at first note when he goes head over heels for Aurora's singing.
  • Notable aversions include the thusly stated Beauty and The Beast, Pocahontas (it takes them a song that possibly took days before their first kiss), Mulan, The Princess and the Frog (not until they escape the frog hunters) and Tangled (not until their escape from the Kingdom's soldiers).
• But the trope is darkly demonstrated in Disney's version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, where the villain Frollo develops an instant case of lust for the gypsy Esmeralda. His musical number concerning her doesn't say anything about loving her; it just goes on and on about his desire.
  • Compare Frollo's song, "Hellfire", to Quasi's, in which he sings with innocent joy about how this wondrous feeling he's discovered must be like "Heaven's Light". Then again, we're talking about Disney here—they gave Hunchback a (mostly) happy ending.
  • Phoebus is attracted to Esmeralda and takes an interest in her wit. She doesn't fall for him right away, but it's pretty quick.
• An American Tail: Tony and Bridget instantly falling in love while she's giving a speech at an anti-cat rally.
• WALL-E falls in love with EVE the first time he sees her. Possibly justified in that EVE is the first living thing he's seen other than cockroaches.
  • Well, "living" in the same sense that WALL-E is "alive", anyway. Close enough for this entry.
    • Actually, it's probably more accurate to call her the first sentient being he's seen in centuries, given how the prequel comic series shows WALL-E interacting with his fellow WALL-E robots while cleaning up Earth. Hell, he even meets a human astronaut who came home from a mission too late to join his family in space, and helps him track them down.
  • Don't forget John and Mary.
    • Also justified somewhat with John and Mary, given that it's the first physical contact with another human that either of them has ever had.
• Carl/Ellie from Up: "Y'know, you don't talk very much. I like you!"
  • At the very least it seems to be one-sided from Carl, given he didn't seem able to talk whenever she was around.
• In the DTV movie Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers, this happens with Mickey and Princess Minnie. Not only are they smitten, the entire world vanishes, they float in purple and pink clouds, random flowers come out of nowhere for him to give to her, romantic music swells, they hold hands and float until Daisy interrupts. It's so over the top it's adorable.
• Barbie and Ken in Toy Story 3. It seems crazy, but it's like they were made for each other!
• Gaston for Belle in Beauty and the Beast. He sings in one song about Belle: "Right from the moment when I met her, saw her, I said: She's gorgeous! And I fell!"
• In Rio, Blu falls for Jewel the second he sees her.

Films -- Live-Action

• In Cemetery Man people-hating gravekeeper Francesco Dellamorte spies a stunning woman at a funeral, ("The most beautiful living woman I have ever seen! Will I see her again?") a catalyst for an increasingly grisly series of events.
• West Side Story. In the film, complete with the hazy effect around everything that is not the two principal characters, Tony and Maria, looking at each other. But then again, the musical is based on Romeo and Juliet.
• In Star Wars, Anakin at nine years old asks a fourteen year-old Padme Amidala if she's an angel, and calls here one of the most beautiful creatures in the universe, even though he should still be afraid of cooties. Ten years later he comes back into her life, courts her, and they marry. They get bonus points for also being star-crossed lovers when he's on the front lines of war. However, their marriage ends up... badly.
• Doc Brown of Back to The Future finds the whole trope ridiculous in the third movie and declares that it could never happen to him. Naturally, he's shortly hit over the head with it (though it may have helped that he had just saved Clara's life).
• Played with in Enchanted. It was the way things were done in the Fairy Tale world, but in the real world, the main character had a failed marriage due to believing in it. As the worlds collide, the end result is the lesson: Love at first sight is possible, but you should get to know the person to see if it's real before committing.
• Ben and Elaine in The Graduate: one date which gets off to a very rocky start, then they share burgers and life stories in a drive-in restaurant, then some uncomfortable truths are aired, and months later he's still willing to drive up to Berkeley to chase after her. Hardly a day after they have an argument, they're talking about marriage, and their passion seems to go strong for the rest of the movie—not counting the last seven seconds.
  • Granted Ben and Elaine fall for each other very quickly but its still not at first sight. Especially since its implied in an earlier scene that they knew each other before their date
• In The Terminator, Reese has been in love with Sarah Connor for years just from looking at her photograph. She comes around in a day or two and a Rescue Romance.
• In Tron: Legacy, Quorra was more or less ready to die for Sam Flynn the moment she unveiled herself in the Light Runner scene. Justified, since Sam's arrival was the first time she ever experienced romantic sensations for anyone, hence why she doesn't know how to express those feelings for him. Luckily for Quorra, Sam admits similar feelings for her in the Solar Sailer scene.
• Big Fish: "They say that when you first see your true love, that time stops, and that's true. What they don't tell you is that when it starts up again, it goes twice as fast to catch up."
• Imagine Me and You : Rachel "knew after three seconds" that she was in love with Luce. However, the fact that she was walking down the aisle to marry her high school sweetheart at the time made things a little bit difficult.
• The short musical film Boycrazy has a number parodying this. The two men involved do not hook up in the end.

I don't know a thing about you...
I don't know a thing about you...
I don't know a thing about you... so this must be love!

• The gay-themed Were the World Mine both obeys and betrays this tope, as love at first sight happens thanks to a Love Potion.
• The first time Miss Piggy lays eyes on Kermit the Frog in The Muppet Movie immediately sends her into a musical dream sequence, complete with slow-motion romp through a meadow of flowers and long
• En kärlekshistoria (A Swedish Love Story). Per (fifteen) and Annika (thirteen) are drawn to one another the first time they set eyes on each other, and become a couple after one walk together and a few sentences of conversation.
• Les amitiés particulières (This Special Friendship). One look at Alexandre Motier and Georges de Sarre is smitten.
• if...., Lindsay Anderson's 1968 schoolboy-rebellion film. Philips and Wallace have apparently never met, but Wallace has presumably seen Philips around and been attracted to him. Philips then falls for Wallace when he sees him perform a gymnastics routine. They start meeting secretly.
• Deconstructed in Oldboy. Mido and Oh Dae-su fall in love very shortly after meeting each other, but it's ultimately revealed that they've been hypnotized to do so as part of the villain's plan.
• In the short film Un beau jour un coiffeur (One Fine Day a Haidresser), a young man falls in love at first sight with a hairdresser who turns out to be straight. Then the young man falls in love at first sight with a physical training instructor, who seems...not to be straight.
• Last of the Mohicans doesn't spend too long developing Cora and Hawkeye's romance, but they do talk a bit before falling in love. In comparison, Uncas and Alice share barely any dialogue, a few glances and a passionate embrace. Yet we know that they love each other. And it works. He dies trying to rescue her, and she commits suicide immediately after. Again, with basically zero dialogue. It turns out to be one of the movie's most touching plotlines, and many viewers prefer them to Hawkeye and Cora.
• Fur an Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus has Lione and Diane noticing each other at first sight and they were intrigued by what they seen.
• Pseudolous and Gymnasia in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. One look to the Cute Mute Hot Amazon, and Pseudolous is already hopelessly in love to the point of risking to screw the plan intended to earn his freedom. Gymnasia herself is shown as clearly impressed and flattered by meeting someone actually able to understand that her frantic pantomimes are an highly complex and organized sign language.
• The one-sided version occurs in Dead Poets Society, with Knox being instantly smitten with Chris. Even though the latter has a boyfriend who is more than willing to beat up any competition.
• In Far and Away, Shannon tells Joseph this after he dies.

Shannon: I loved you. I loved you from the first time I saw you.
Joseph: I often wondered about that.

• Annie and Bryan in Father of the Bride.
• This happens to Gentaro towards Nadeshiko in Kamen Rider x Kamen Rider Fourze & OOO: Movie Wars Megamax.

Literature

• Happens to Kim Ward and Jelka Tolonen in David Wingrove's Chung Kuo series.
• The two protagonists of Anthem, Equality and Liberty, fall in love the second they meet.
• In Five Hundred Years After, Aliera and Mario fall in love almost immediately, despite him being an assassin fleeing after attempting to kill the Emperor. However, this may be Paarfi's embellishment.
• In Sandy Mitchell's Warhammer 40,000 novel For the Emperor, Ciaphas Cain describes his first meeting with Amberley Vail. He declares he's never believed in Love At First Sight, but he can still remember (decades later) every detail about her from that first meeting.
• A humorous version in the latest book of the Wheel of Time, in which Berelain (The Vamp, who seduces people for political advantage) and Galad (an exaggeration of the Knight in Shining Armor) both fall head-over-heels on their first meeting. This leads to many entertaining scenes, especially as both of them are presented earlier as cool-headed and in control.
• Harry Potter crushes on Cho the instant he sees her during a Quiddich match in his third year. Of course, it doesn't last...
  • Not to mention Ginny Weasley's reaction to Harry from the moment she meets him. That one sticks.
  • Nine-year-old Severus Snape seems completely entranced by little Lily Evans from the moment he lays eyes on her.
    • Though in this instance it seems unclear whether the scene is actually the first time they've seen each other. Petunia points him out to her sister as 'that Snape boy from Spinner's End', and with a judgmental air... this means there has been some interaction before, even if he was only pointed out to them, but it is memorable enough that they recognize him. Some of his dialogue also implies he has seen her before he actually had the opportunity to speak to her.
• Marius and Cosette in Les Misérables, to a truly ridiculous (and obnoxious) extent.
  • In the musical, their courtship amounts to about 10 minutes of total time onstage together before their marriage.
• In Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novel The Guns of Tanith, Milo, reflecting on his not present love, considers Caffran and Cridd and their sweet romance, even though neither of them would describe it as love as first sight. (From their actual meetings in Necropolis, they might be wrong not to do so.)
• In James Thurber's The 13 Clocks, Prince Zorn and Princess Saralinda. It quite annoys her uncle, the wicked duke.
• In G. K. Chesterton's Tales of the Long Bow, Owen Hood habitually fishes a certain location in hopes of meeting again a woman he had met only once:

Years before, when he was a very young man, he had sat fishing on that island one evening as the twilight bands turned to dark, and two or three broad bands of silver were all that was left of the sunset behind the darkening trees. The birds were dropping out of the sky and there was no noise except the soft noises of the river. Suddenly, and without a sound, as comes a veritable vision, a girl had come out of the woods opposite. She spoke to him across the stream, asking him he hardly knew what, which he answered he hardly knew how. She was dressed in white and carried a bunch of bluebells loose in her hand; her hair in a straight fringe of gold was low on her forehead; she was pale like ivory, and her pale eyelids had a sort of flutter as of nervous emotion.

• Parodied in the Discworld novel Sourcery, where Nijel and Conina first meet: "The world had suddenly separated into two parts -- the bit which contained Nijel and Conina, and the bit which contained everything else. The air between them crackled. Probably, in their half, a distant orchestra was playing, bluebirds were tweeting, little pink clouds were barrelling through the sky, and all the other things that happen at times like this."
• Tom Sawyer to Becky in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. This had obvious parallels with the way Mark Twain himself fell for his wife, which is subtly noted in The Adventures of Mark Twain stop-motion film.
• Very common in Henryk Sienkiewicz's works, including Quo Vadis and his Trilogy though notably averted in the Darker and Edgier last book of the Trilogy, Pan Wolodyjowski.
• In Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars, John Carter (finally) realizes this.

I loved Dejah Thoris. The touch of my arm upon her naked shoulder had spoken to me in words I would not mistake, and I knew that I had loved her since the first moment that my eyes had met hers that first time in the plaza of the dead city of Korad.

• From Skulduggery Pleasant, China Sorrows has the ability to make everyone she meets fall in love with her. Skulduggery says that the effects lessen over time but will never go away completely.
• Hell's Gate by David Weber features one group of people with a variety of psychic talents. Voices are the most common power, and are telepathic. Recognition between telepaths is very rare, but happens enough that it is the standard for most great works of Romance and tragety in the world. Two persons who've never met lock eyes and just suddendly are in love. But they don't know each other, and may already be married to other people.
• The werewolves in the Twilight series undergoes a process called imprinting, which alludes to animals' instinctive and overpowering attachment to their young. However the effect is complicated by the fact that the werewolf can imprint on any human (in one case, a baby), and it can also happen when he or she is already in love with someone else.
  • "Baby" being minutes after she's born.
    • Implied that it had already happened before she was born and that that was the reason he stayed for the entire pregnancy, and that he just mistook it for his feelings for Bella. Which is even squickier.

"Hey, Nessie, remember when I was trying to bang your mom?"

• • Twilight in general takes this to... rather extreme measures at times. There's a trend in predestination amongst the couples. An example of this would be Alice, who fell in love with Jasper before first sight (she foresaw meeting him and thus went to where they'd meet).
    • Hunh. This troper always thought that it was Played for Laughs.
  • Another variant: Edward falls in Love At First Smell with Bella.
• In Mirror Dance, mother and son discuss father and mother's meeting:

"He thought it was love at first sight. I've never bothered explaining to him that it was his compulsions leaping up."
"Why not? Or were your compulsions leaping up too?"
"No, it took me, oh, four or five more days to come completely unglued. Well, three days, anyway."

• Averted so hard in the Darkest Powers series by Chloe and Derek that it's worth mentioning. First of all, they meet in a group home for "troubled" kids, which is a code word for "mentally disturbed" which is a code word for "has superpowers". Derek assumes that Chloe is a flighty blonde ditz whose only point of interest is the fact that she's a necromancer, and even then only because he can use her to manipulate his brother, Simon, into finally escaping to safety. As for physical attraction, he doesn't even notice her looks (although she is legitimately cute). On Chloe's end of things, Derek is initially withdrawn, ominous, intimidating, and pretty much a Jerkass. He has also been viciously mauled by (werewolf) puberty, so his face looks like a "before" picture for acne cream, his hair is constantly greasy, lank, and dull, and the deodorant does nothing—even though he showers twice a day. Not to mention that the first time they're alone together, the interaction goes downhill, until Derek ends up throwing her across the room. It's an accident -- actually an accident, not "Why'd you make me hit you, baby?"—but Chloe doesn't know that until a few chapters later¹. At the end of the trilogy, they end up together after their relationships develops in a completely believable manner, turning out to be the complete opposite of Strangled by the Red String.
  • ¹ When she does find out how he could manage to throw her across the room without putting deliberate effort into it, she accepts the explanation. It helps that she weighs maybe a 100 pounds and is only five feet tall, and he's over 220 pounds of pure muscle and roughly six-three or so.
• Daren and Selenay in Mercedes Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar novels. Also Sherrill with Keren. Reportedly, this is pretty common with lifebonds.
  • As a matter of fact, Talia and Dirk did this too. Dirk was the first Herald that Talia saw!
• In The Tale of Genji a man doesn't have to see the girl to fall in love - fortunately as women normally hide behind curtains and screens. Just a glimpse of her perfect calligraphy will do the job nicely. Of course if he does manage to get a peek at her the results will be instantly devastating and probably lead to all kinds of complications.
• In Shanna Swendson's Enchanted Inc., love at first sight cures a spell.
• Most of P. G. Wodehouse's heroes do this, and spend the rest of the novel/story working through a tangle of zany schemes and mistaken identities to finally marry the girl.
  • In "Bachelors Anonymous," Ivor Llewellyn has a bad habit of proposing to women during awkward silences, only to get divorced later.
  • In Jill The Reckless, Derek's mother wants to meet Jill because she has learned first impressions are everything. Derek tells her he's heartily glad of that, because he fell in love at first sight.
• In Robert E. Howard's "Queen of the Black Coast", Conan the Barbarian aims at Belit and then, at a whim, shoots the man next to her. As soon as she gets a look at him fighting, she announces herself in love with him.
• JRR Tolkien liked this one, both Beren and Aragorn were devastated by their first look at Lúthien and Arwen on The Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings, respectively. Of course Tolkien himself fell for his wife Edith when he was only sixteen, proposing marriage and being accepted literally the day after he turned twenty one.
• Agatha Christie also favored this trope. Many of her short stories involve young couples deciding to marry hours and several adventures after their first meeting.
• In So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, Arthur falls in love with Fenchurch the moment he sees her, asleep, in the back seat of her brother's car that he is hitchhiking on.
• S.L. Viehl likes to play with this trope in various ways.
• In The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, Basil Hallward falls for Dorian when he sees him at a party, leading him to paint the titular portrait. Then Harry Wotton gets in the way and things go... poorly.
• Miguel de Unamuno's novella Mist (original title: Niebla) has the main character, Augusto, fall in love with Eugenia as they pass by each other on the street. Everybody supports their relationship except for Eugenia, who is in a relationship with somebody else.
• In The Sword and the Circle, Rosemary Sutcliff's retelling of the first part of the Arthurian legend, eighteen-year-old Arthur falls in love with Guinevere at first sight, though he doesn't realise it initially. Then Lancelot and Guinevere fall in love with each other the moment they accidentally touch hands and look up into each other's eyes.
• Stu Redman and Frannie Goldsmith in Stephen King's The Stand...Stu told Frannie it took about three hours, but the text of the scene where they meet indicates it may have been even a bit faster.
• In Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Monster Men, Number 13 falls in love with Virginia at once, though he does not fathom it. When he recovers from amnesia, he explains that he had fallen in love at a train station and chased after her across the world.
• Played straight and deconstructed in L. M. Montgomery's A Tangled Web Jocelyn left her husband on her wedding night because she had fallen in Love at First Sight with the best man who leave unaware of her affection. When they met again several years after he is middle-aged, overweight man about to marry a rich widow. Jocelyn's love imminently fade away. Lucky for her that her husband didn't keep a grudge against her
• In Gene Stratton Porter's Freckles, Freckles's first sight of Angel. This is sealed by her lack of fear of snakes.
• In Gene Stratton Porter's The Song of the Cardinal, the cardinal had actually met the she-cardinal before, and kissed her, but the circumstances meant he had not noticed her much. But when she flies to his tree, he is struck down, his usual Pride humbled, and he sets out to woo her.

instantly this shy little creature, slipping along near earth, taking a surreptitious peep at him, made him feel a very small bird, and he certainly never before had felt small.

Live-Action TV

• Dharma and Greg meet and get married in the pilot episode. They first saw each other on a subway train when they were children. About twenty years go by, and they see each other again on the same train and get married later that day. The show is very heavy on the Idealism side of the scale.
  • Though to be fair, their relationship does have issues. (Heck, they start fighting less than a day into their marriage!)
  • And they did a cameo as the same characters on Two and A Half Men - still together but he wants to kill himself because he can't stand her anymore.
• Battlestar Galactica: Lee Adama and Kara Thrace. Which is trickier than it seems when you consider the fact that she's his younger brother's girlfriend at the time.
• Home Improvement: Tim and Jill Taylor.

Tim: The first time I looked at you I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you.

• Skins has to be the most cynical show to end this trope with a Happily Ever After, what with The Reveal in the S4 finale. (Very obviously a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming, only magnified by the rest of the speech...)

Naomi: I loved you from the first time I saw you. I think I was twelve.

• iCarly: Carly confirmed during "iSaved Your Life" that Freddie had been in love with Carly since he first met her.
• Lancelot for Guinevere in Merlin. She measures him for a suit of armour and it's clear that he's completely smitten. When they meet again in a life-or-death situation in season 2, he's more than willing to die for her.
• The robothead 790 was subjected to the Love-Slave mind treatment in LEXX, and the first person it laid eyes on was none other than Zev whom he immediately fell in love with. Later in Season 3, 790 had an accident, and it immediately fell in love with Kai who subsequently fixed it.
• There are indications of this with Grissom and Sara on CSI from the stories told about their college lecture meeting, although relationship did not ensure for years afterward.
• Glee: Although Blaine doesn't clue into it for months, the looks on his and Kurt's faces during "Teenage Dream" proclaim louder than any words what exactly happened between the two of them as soon as they laid eyes on each other.

Myths & Religion

• Greek mythology has its share of Love At First Sight, usually caused directly by some god or goddess.
  • Eros, after a quarrel with Apollo, got back at him by shooting him with an arrow that made him fall in love with Daphne at first sight, after he shot Daphne with an arrow that made her (in simplest terms) hate at first sight.
  • Aphrodite, Eros' mother, because she was jealous of the beautiful Psyche, asked Eros to shoot her with an arrow so that she would fall in love with someone repulsive at first sight, but Eros ended up falling in love at first sight with Psyche.
  • Narcissus was so beautiful that every woman who looked upon his face fell instantly in love with him, but he would always spurn such people and break their hearts. He was cursed to fall in love with his own reflection after spurning several nymphs this way.
    • And in other versions, falling in love with his own reflection was punishment for spurning probably much older * male* suitors. Values Dissonance? Perhaps. Creepy? Just a tad.
    • Although in Greek culture of the time young men were supposed to have older male suitors, as well as continue to be attracted to women, so both versions technically work. (Male suitors of the same age? Now that was just weird.)
    • And this doesn't count as Values Dissonance... how?
    • No matter who else got rejected by Narcissus, the last person is always Echo in an exceptionally cruel manner. Since she had the misfortune of getting cursed to repeat only what people said to her, it was a big problem when Narcissus needed directions to the nearest city. He had no way of knowing she was cursed, but it doesn't mean he should have called Echo an idiot and gone out of his way to avoid her. Rather understandable that Aphrodite considered this the last straw—especially since Echo was so in love with him that she couldn't bear to cause him harm, even to seek justice for herself.
  • Hades and Persephone. A bit one-sided, but basically he (also) gets shot with Eros' arrow of love. Instant attraction and abduction ensues.
    • Weirdly enough, they end up the most stable (and presumably happy) couple in Greek mythology. It probably helped that he lavished gifts and non-sexual attention on her to genuinely win her over—and unlike Zeus, he never cheats on her. Just because he's the king of the Underworld doesn't mean he can't respect his wife's feelings.
    • Well, he cheated once or twice... in three-thousand years of marriage. That's leagues above a lot of people, let alone Zeus or Poseidon.

Theater

• Romeo and Juliet are perhaps the most famous example.
• In Measure for Measure, this happens to the antagonist, Angelo, after he first meets the protagonist, Isabella.
• More happily, in As You Like It, Orlando and Rosalind, and later Oliver and Celia, fall in love at first sight. The trope gets lampshaded and even deconstructed, but it's ultimately shown in a positive light.
• In The Taming of the Shrew, Lucentio falls in love with Bianca at first sight. His servant, Tranio, lampshades it.

"I pray, sir, tell me, is it possible
That love should of a sudden take such hold?"

• Played sort-of straight in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street between Johanna and Anthony, the latter of whom expresses his feelings repeatedly in a supposedly romantic song that sounds a lot like something John Hinckley Jr. would sing to Jodie Foster. Of course, this is Stephen Sondheim, so the ridiculousness is also parodied in "Kiss Me", a song about the two running away from Judge Turpin before he forces Johanna into marriage. This little ditty features such lines as "I knew I'd be with you one day, even not knowing who you were" with Johanna's expression becoming momentarily confused as to how precisely this guy is the love of her life when she's literally only just met him, a fact underlined by the later line that clearly states (even though they're eloping) that she doesn't even know his name.
  • Under the circumstances, Johanna is being fairly practical. Anthony offers her a way out of marrying Judge Turpin, and she accepts it. After all, she doesn't have a lot of options. Besides, Anthony is quite possibly the first young man she's ever met. Naturally she's interested in him. Her desperation, loneliness, and curiosity might not equal love, of course; she might be dressing up her feelings to make the best of a less-than-ideal situation.
  • The Judge Turpin falls in lust at first sight for Lucy.
• Although it's a staple of the original fairytale, it's perhaps even more pronounced in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical of Cinderella - in the 1957 version, Jon Cypher looks like he's just been hit with a very large truck, and Paolo Montalban in the '97 edition looks like the floor has just dropped out from underneath him. Somehow, both of them actually manage to make it believable, too. The 1960's version averts this though.
• Receives a Take That in Cyrano De Bergerac:

Roxane: Well, I love him. That is all Oh--and I never saw him anywhere except the Comédie.
Cyrano: You have never spoken?
Roxane: Only our eyes.
Cyrano: Why, then, how do you know?
Roxane: ... I know.
...
Cyrano: So soon! So soon we lose our hearts! But, my dear child ... You, who love only words, wit, the grand manner -- why, for all you know, the man may be a savage, or a fool.
Roxane: His curls are like a hero from D'Urfé.
Cyrano: His mind may be as curly as his hair.
Roxane: Not with such eyes. I read his soul in them.
Cyrano: Yes, all our souls are written in our eyes!

• Me and My Dick has a subversion. Dick and Miss Cooter fall in love at first touch when Joey and Sally hug too close.

Video Games

• In Lunar: Eternal Blue, Hiro falls in love with Lucia at first sight (possibly due to Naked First Impression). The depth of Hiro's instant devotion is such that The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Cliches equivalent of The Dulcinea Effect is named The Hiro Rule.
• In Final Fantasy X, Yuna Towards Tidus
• In Valkyrie Profile, Lezard Valeth fell for Lenneth Valkyrie upon first sight. Which resulted in him becoming a creepy, obsessive Stalker with a Crush. Oddly, you never actually get to see just where and how he saw her.
• You can start flirting with Bastila almost immediately after rescuing her in Knights of the Old Republic, and the flustered (or angry) responses indicate that this trope may be in play.
• In Odin Sphere Oswald the emotionless Shadow Knight fell in Love At First Sight with Odin's daughter Gwendolyn when he saw her wearing her late mother's dress while on a spying mission in Odin's realm. A feather she left behind reminded him of the prophecy of the dragon Hindel: "Seek the bird... that shall be your destiny."
• Neverwinter Nights 2 has Neeshka, who starts acting rather possessive towards the player almost immediately after he rescues her (except that the conclusion to that story was cut). The two romances that stayed in the game are much more realistically played, due to both of the non-player partners being quite shy.
  • Though Neeshka admits later on that the player was the first person to be nice to her. It's understandable that she'd latch on to him.
• Possibly occurs with the player and Silk Fox/Sun Lian in Jade Empire. Their first conversation after she joins the party can end with her commenting that their flirting has gone much further than she originally intended and breaking off abruptly.
• Albion: Not quite literally at first sight, but still instant. When Mellthas and Sira discover their ability to communicate with each other telepathically very shortly after first meeting, they see the depths of each other's souls or something and fall in love immediately.
• In Star Fox Adventures this happens with Fox McCloud and Krystal, along with an implied Rescue Romance.
  • Her outfit probably helped...
• In Left 4 Dead's The Passing, Ellis instantly falls in love with Zoey the second he sees her. Even saying they will skip the dating part and get right to the marriage. Well considering it is the Zombie Apocalypse, there probably wasn't time to date anyway.
• In the Assassin's Creed series, Altaïr does so with Maria, a Christian woman who pretended to be his real target, Robert de Sable. Despite killing dozens of guards just to get to the fake Sable, Altaïr immediately and instantly spares Maria's life, leading, as we learn in the sequel, to Ezio Auditore da Firenze and Desmond Miles, your other two protagonists in the series.
• Seeing as King's Quest is based on fairy tales, this trope gets thrown around liberally. In the Backstory, this happened for King Edward the Benevolent (Graham's predecessor), and it turned out badly (she was a witch scheming to get the magic chest of gold). Graham gets hit with this himself when he sees Valanice imprisoned in Kolyma, and his son gets a dose when he meets Princess Cassima. The exception to the rule, like usual, seems to be Rosella. While Edgar got a case of this upon seeing her in King's Quest IV, it took her a while to share the opinion.
• In Sengoku Rance, Kenshin ends up falling for Rance after beating him in a fight and getting a close-up look at him.
• Naked Snake and Ocelot in Metal Gear Solid 3, according to Word of God, fell in 'a pure love' from the moment they first saw each other. Unusually for this trope, while they maintain undeniably strong feelings for each other ever after, Ocelot even being revealed to have dedicated his entire life to Snake in Metal Gear Solid 4, they are not the Official Couple and are demonstratively pretty bad for each other.
• Knights of the Old Republic II: In the cut content, given high enough Relationship Values, after loses his fight against Darth Sion, Atton tells the female Exile in his dying moments that he loved her from the moment he met her and tried to play it off as a joke.

Visual Novels

• Couple of examples in the Nasuverse:
  • First, Tsukihime, where Arcueid admits that she fell in love with Shiki at first sight at first being horribly butchered, something he pretty much reciprocated and spent 90% of the story denying to himself. Arcueid acts rather annoyed if Shiki goes for the other girls in their routes. Shiki counts much more than Arcuied does. She was more fascinated with him at first, rather than in love, and she was pretty much an Emotionless Girl before Shiki "broke" her. Shiki, on the hand, lusted for her, to the point of insanity, even if it largely due to his bloodline. He even admits that she was easily the most beautiful girl he's ever seen or will probably ever see.
    • There was also Roa for Arcueid hundreds of years ago. Didn't end well.
  • Second, in Fate/stay night, where Shirou falls in love with Saber upon first seeing and doesn't actually realize it for two weeks. The other two routes get around this by not letting Saber get enough contact with Shirou for them to really hit it off. Each route is... rather... different as to how it goes about it.
  • In Rin's route, Saber gets captured early on and then has an important argument with Archer, who uses his future Shirou credentials to make her reconsider her own motivations, a process which took past Shirou an entire route and many arguments to complete. She does not spend enough time with Shirou for the remainder of the route for them to hit it off, but the finale then has either her letting Rin have him or deciding to share. Saber, however, does not realize why Rin's so happy to have her stick around.
  • It's rather more tragic in Sakura's route, where the love at first sight is destroyed in the most soul-crushing way possible. The method? Kill Saber early in the route. Then have her come back. Evil. Then have Shirou kill her, and get so torn up doing it that he deliberately kills every memory he has of her, promising himself that he will forget her and move on to be with Sakura. Much like everything in the last route, a bit... sad, especially since Shirou never understood what he felt towards Saber, but continued anyway.
• Esperia in Eien no Aselia fell in love with Yuuto at first sight, however, she wasn't sure what kind initially. She also has a lot of difficult actually opening up to people. In Kyouko's route, Yuuto becomes an Eternal without her, so she forgets him. When he comes back, she falls in love at first sight and is extremely confused and upset. When she becomes an Eternal as well to follow him, her newly ex boyfriend does the same. Minus following her, because he probably can't.

Web Animation

• Doki of There She Is falls head over heels, crazy in love with Nabi the first time she sees him. Nabi...well he comes around eventually.

Webcomics

• The Law of Purple: Red falls for Rose on first sight. Much of the attraction is that she's thrashing a purse-snatcher at the time, as seen here.
• In Girl Genius, Zola plans to manage her meeting with the heir to the Storm King—and make it look like Love At First Sight.
  • Zeetha's first meeting with Higgs is like this. For her. For him, its one of the few things that terrifies him.
• Minus: what happens when Cupid gets really out of hand.
• Xkcd: This comic
• Homestuck: Trolls, due to Bizarre Alien Reproduction, have a form of romance which is essentially hateful archnemesishood. The first time Karkat sees John, he is instantly struck by total, all-consuming, overwhelming hate, complete with spade-shaped Wingding Eyes.
  • And then there's Vriska and... Nicolas Cage.
• Subverted in Dresden Codak. Kimiko sees a handsome guy with an FM-2030 book and instantly turns into a tongue-tied twit, fantasising about either an idyllic relationship (on an airship!) or a UST-laden scholarly rivalry. See here. Unfortunately for her, he turns out to be kind of a moron.
• In Endstone, Jon disowns believing in this when he first met Kyri.
• Ls Empire has an entire species (Kayoss) that falls in love this way, mainly due to their Magic Genetics. This does have a side effect (referred to as Love Struck) which involves light headedness, drooling from the eyes, and passing out.

Western Animation

• The first time Berry lays eyes on Bloo in Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends she goes wide-eyed and sees Bishie Sparkle's around him. So, starts her Yandereriffic love for him.
• It's implied that Aang fell for Katara at first sight in Avatar: The Last Airbender.
  • And Sokka for Yue, though that may very well have been mutual.
• The Legend of Korra, has Tall, Dark and Snarky Mako fall hard for Uptown Girl Asami within seconds of their Crash Into Hello, as communicated by cartoon heart bubbles.
  • Big Fun Bolin explicitly tells The Hero Korra he fell for her the moment he saw her. His Establishing Character Moment the first time we see him was him spotting Korra across the room and smoothing back his hair, and immediately after he walks up to her he starts implying to Toza that they are a couple (which Korra is quick to correct). The problem is, Korra has feelings for Bolin's brother Mako in the same vein, which, to Mako's chagrin, are mutual.
• In The Raccoons, Bert instantly falls for Lisa the instant he sees her. However, when he makes his big play professing his love, Lisa, caught off guard of a new friend going way too fast, unsuccessfully tries to gently cool his romantic aspiration for someone he just met. However, when she returns home, troubled at upsetting Bert, writes an affectionate letter later which lifts his spirits with the implied promise of a relationship that can develop in its own time.
• Kim Possible on Eric and Eric on Kim Possible in The Movie. Well, she needed anyone except Ron (because of the rules) and Eric was a droid made to let Kim fall in love with him.
• Code Lyoko: Heavily implied with William, who shows a keen interest in Yumi from the first day he knew her, and later claims that he's always been in love with her.

Sissi: Have you been crazy about Yumi for a long time?
William: Forever.
Sissi: You've only been here for a couple of months!
William: Don't you believe in destiny with a capital D? Two people who have never met, but are made for each other?

• Discussed in The Simpsons episode "The Two Mrs. Nahasapeemapetilons" prior to Apu's Arranged Marriage:

Apu: Manjula and I have not seen each other for 20 years. Two people cannot fall in love, sight unseen.
Moe: Hang on there. I'm counting in that.

• On Jimmy Two-Shoes, Beezy and Saffi fall in love the moment they see each other.
• Happens when Ferb sees Vanessa for the first time in Phineas and Ferb. Isabella to Phineas (although we don't know when it happened) is possibly the same case.
• One of the Ork bikers asks this to Velma in Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated after she fixes one of their bikes. Velma, being the Deadpan Snarker, bluntly tells him that she doesn't find him attractive.
• First time Helga truly meets Arnold at the age of three outside the Pre-K as he holds an umbrella over her head on Hey Arnold!. However, justified as she puts all of her emotions and neglective parent's behavior into this one act of kindness. Word of God, however, states that they're meant to be.
  • In "Arnold Visits Arnie" during Arnold's Nightmare Sequence Lulu falls in love with Arnold at first sight and so does Hilda with Arnie.
• My Life as a Teenage Robot: One-shot villain Little Acorn in the episode "Puppet Bride", who falls in love with Jenny at first sight (he sees hearts and sparkles around her upon seeing her) and tries to force her to become his bride.
• Pepe Le Pew often falls in love at first sight with another animal so long as they have a white stripe down their back, most often towards Penelope Pussycat.
  • And Fifi La Fume of Tiny Toon Adventures often did this to animals of the male variety, most notably to Furrball in the episode "Aroma Amore". Furrball himself seems to experience this upon meeting Fifi, but completely loses interest upon seeing her skunk stripe and picking up her scent.
• KaBlam!: Henry for Dawn, a one-shot character from the episode "A Nut In Every Bite". Dawn is the granddaughter of Mr. Stockdale, who comes from Switzerland to visit the show. Henry falls for her almost immediately (much to June's dismay), but she doesn't quite share the love. However, he does manage to charm her... by hurting himself. At the end of the episode, Dawn goes back to Switzerland, but by this point Henry is actually relieved (he's hurt himself so much he's covered in casts and bandages, and bound to a wheelchair).

Real Life

• Mark Twain supposedly said that he saw a picture of his future wife, Olivia, and fell in love at first sight.
• Thomas Hardy claimed to have, on seeing his future partner for the first time, realized instantly that he would marry her (not necessarily the same thing). Much like his novels, the two did not have a happily ever after.
  • The same is said of Carl Jung.
• Steve "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin and his widow, Terri, have both said that they fell in love at first sight. Steve was about to feed a crocodile at the time, and he was so spellbound by Terri that the crocodile nearly grabbed him. Ironically, Terri has also said that she had never believed in love at first sight until then - and that she knew three days after she met him that "destiny had taken hold."
• Shown to have some basis in science—the first few minutes of a relationship have shown to be predictive of the relationship's future success, more so than what two people have in common or whether they like each other. DAMN.
  • Makes sense since it's human nature to always rely on first impressions even when they get contradicted later.
    • Well, within reason, anyways.
• Joan "The Mad" of Castile and Aragon and Philip "The Handsome" of Burgundy turned out to be this, resulting in a Perfectly Arranged Marriage. It turned out badly.
• John Barrowman of Doctor Who and Torchwood fame flat-out states in his memoir Anything Goes that he took one look at Scott Gill and knew he was the one. (Although he doesn't deny that at least some of the initial attraction was lust, he also calls what he felt a "prophetic jolt.")
• Rachel Maddow, on meeting her partner Susan Mikula: "...she opened the door and it was, like, comets and shooting stars."
• Sir Michael Caine saw Shakira Baksh in an advert for coffee, thought she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, and, believing her to be in Brazil, expressed an intention to go there and find her. He was later put in touch with her by a friend; they married in 1973 and have been together ever since.
• Second sight, technically — Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis met briefly, and then were reunited at a party several years later. The way he tells it, he saw her across the room in a beautiful backless dress and then she turned and came over to talk to him, and that was it. "I'm in trouble," as he put it. D'awwww.
• Broadway legend Patti LuPone says of meeting future husband Matt Johnston that she took one look at him and "said no in my head and yes in my heart." She was playing Lady Bird Johnson, he was an assistant cameraman. They're still married, very much happily so.