The Noseless

Grin size directly corresponds to nose size.
"Careful Harry, he doesn't have a nose!"
—Literal Harry Potter Trailer Parody by Tobuscus

You know that character who isn't The Blank, but has an odd feature, known as a nose, missing? This is that. It is more common in Anime, but it can happen in any style. It might be just how the art style is, or the character might literally be lacking a nose.

This noselessness is a favorite target of a Stylistic Self Parody.

This is a subtrope of The Blank.

Examples of The Noseless include:

Single characters drawn without a nose

Anime & Manga

Meowth: Oh, yeah, I forgot! The cartoonists never gave me a nose!

  • Black Jack has met in his teenage years a noseless classmate who was Fun Personified and taught him to laugh. At first, it seems he looks this way because he is stylized and cartoonish, but when older and less humorous, he is still depicted as noseless.
  • Yotsuba, most of the time. It was there for the first couple of chapters but promptly disappeared, and occasionally still gets drawn in when she's at an angle. Most of the time she's pulling a pretty solid Voldemort look.
  • Cowboy Bebop: Ed doesn't seem to have one either. Presumably some bounty got lucky with a knife.
    • Maria from Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei shares this, possibly as a direct reference given the extreme similarity between the characters.

Comic Books

  • Loki goes noseless in Universe X. Curiously, in the scene that lampshades this, the same description (black-and-white costume, no nose) could also apply to the nearby Tao, though Tao's just wearing a featureless mask.
  • The eponymous character from Yoko Tsuno is mostly drawn with two dots instead of a nose for most of the later albums, which also happens a lot to other, mostly female, characters.
  • In the Image comic Stormwatch, Nautika has no nose for no apparent reason.
  • The title character of Ted Naifeh's Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things also lacks this appendage.

Films -- Animation

  • Even Disney will occasionally suffer from this: Both Pocahontas and Esmeralda are occasionally drawn without noses.

Films -- Live-Action

Newspaper Comics

  • The title character of Cathy. At one point she looked into getting a nose job. For the record, there are very rare side views showing that Cathy does have some kind of nose, albeit an extremely flat one.
  • Jon Arbuckle in Garfield doesn't seem to have a nose so much as he has a very, very long philtrum that goes up to the bottom of his eyes.

Video Games

  • Many Pokémon lack a nose.
  • Some Robot Master characters in the Mega Man games are noseless, such as Cut Man, Flash Man, and Gemini Man.
  • Several of the campers in Psychonauts are without a nose, including Clem & Crystal, Elka, Chops, Phoebe, and most notably Lili. One might later wonder how this works, given that the kids' brains are apparently removed via a potent sneezing powder.


Web Comics

  • The Guardians in Homestuck can be identified because each possesses only one facial feature. Bro has eyes (or at least Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann shades); Rose's mom has a mouth; John's dad has a nose (and constantly smokes a pipe despite his lack of a mouth); Becquerel has ears. Most other characters also lack noses, but have the usual complement of other facial features.
  • Diana from CRFH used to have a nose, but it disappeared sometime around 2006.

Western Animation

Art styles which don't draw the noses of most characters

Anime & Manga

  • In the Claymore manga, noses aren't visible straight on, which makes people seem to have eyes about twice as far apart as they should. It's actually fairly creepy.
  • The Tales of Symphonia OVA frequently fails to draw noses on characters seen from the front. The more prominent instances have drawn mockery from some fans.

Newspaper Comics

  • In the Canadian newspaper comic Ben, the children have no nose (only when viewed from the front).

Toys

  • Any and all LEGO minifigures. There are a few exceptions, like Timmy from Time Cruisers and the Indians.
  • Some Bratz dolls lack noses, their animated forms don't have them either.

Video Games

  • Akihiko Yoshida's character portraits in Final Fantasy Tactics are lacking in the nasal area.
    • The animated scenes in the PSP remake reveal that the characters actually do have noses, only that they're very small and can only be seen when looking at the face at a profile.
    • This is actually a recurring feature of Yoshida's artwork. Characters in Final Fantasy III DS also do not have noses, except for the detailed FMV at the beginning of the game. His "cartoony" style typically has very limited noses which are all but invisible straight-on. You can see this in the Four Warriors of Light and some artwork for Final Fantasy XII (this picture is a good example).
  • Likewise, Tetsuya Nomura's characters in Brave Fencer Musashi. (An odd thing for sure, since the entire style of the game is a sharp departure from his usual one of generous Pleather.) BFM came before his Belt and Zipper days, when he was trying to find his style regarding human characters.
  • SD style drawing in Lufia: The Legend Returns makes the main characters do not have noses.

Web Animation

  • In Homestar Runner, the only main character with a nose is Strong Mad. This doesn't stop Strong Bad from putting sunscreen on his face as if he had one, though. One answering machine has the King of Town threatening to reveal Marzipan's "questionable voluntary surgery" in retaliation for Marzipan having let slip that the KoT's middle name is "Wad". If you click on the tape you can get "before" and "after" photos; the "before" shows Marzipan with a prominent nose.
  • Edd Gould from Eddsworld almost never drew noses on his characters.

Web Comics

Web Original

Western Animation

  • The main child characters of South Park, although most of the adult characters do have noses.
  • Everybody in The Oblongs.
  • Basically everyone human or humanoid in Oban Star-Racers; the creator, Savin Yeatman-Eiffel, has gone on record as saying that he "doesn't like noses", and wanted an Animesque series with its own unique look, so none of the characters, human or otherwise, are drawn with noses.
  • Most of the Autobots in Transformers Animated have a ridge where we'd have a nose (although they still have "olfactory sensors" according to Prowl). Transformers Prime follows the look.
  • Adventure Time.

Characters who literally don't have noses

Anime & Manga

  • Doctor S, creator of the Gundam Heavyarms, wears a prosthetic nose very similar to the one worn by Gaston Julia (see below), presumably because he lacks a real one.
  • The manga Alive: The Final Evolution features later on a character in the military who has no nose. Later still he is forced to undergo plastic surgery and as a result gains a nose by the end of the series.

Films -- Live-Action

  • Voldemort from the film adaptations of Harry Potter. The lack of nose is done to complete his snakelike appearance. This is actually a rather complicated visual effect and many people have been surprised to see that Ralph Fiennes' nose looked perfectly normal when he filmed his scenes. Early on, there were experiments with make-up and prosthetics, but it was ultimately decided that it would look more "striking" if his nose was completely taken off with digital effects. Their aim was to deliberately hit the Uncanny Valley.
  • The Nemoidians in the Star Wars prequel trilogy.
  • Justinien Trouvé or God's Bastard.
  • Played for Drama in Se7en. For his "Pride" murder, John Doe cuts off a beautiful model's nose and leaves her locked in a hotel room. To prove that she's guilty of the "deadly sin" of pride, he glues a cell phone to one of her hands and glues a bottle of pills to the other—thus giving her a choice between committing suicide or calling for help and having to live with her deformity. She chooses suicide.

Literature

  • Erik from The Phantom of the Opera.
  • A Song of Ice and Fire: Tyrion Lannister starts off with one, but...
  • Harry Potter: Lord Voldemort, although he wasn't always this way. He became hideously disfigured as a side effect of making Horcruxes. Before this, he was pretty good-looking.
  • There is a short story by Nikolai Gogol called "The Nose", about a man who ends up noseless and finds out that his nose has taken a life of its own and ran away, wearing a nice uniform.
  • In Tad Williams' Shadowmarch and Shadowplay, Gyir the Storm Lantern is one of a group known as the Encauled. This type of faerie have no nose or mouth, but they can detect and influence others around them telepathically.
  • The Wheel of Time: Fan nickname for Myrddraal, who should have a nose, but are frequently descibed as having a smooth space where their eyes should be. Since most people's noses would make a big lump there...
  • Sister Bessie in Tobacco Road was born without a nose.
  • The demoness Surpanakha from the Ramayana gets denosed by Laxman when she tries to woo his brother Rama. War ensues.

Live-Action TV

  • In a host segment in the MST3K showing of Manos: The Hands of Fate, Joel and the bots discuss what physical abnormalities would make for a scarier "monster" than Torgo and his big knees. Joel suggests no nose—not even nostrils, just flat skin from eyes to mouth. Brrrr.
  • Doctor Who's The Silence, although it appears they might have nostrils, it looks like they have no definable nose.
  • The Markab in Babylon 5.

Video Games

  • Pegnose Pete from Escape from Monkey Island is rumored to have had his nose bitten off by a duck when he was younger. He wears a wooden prosthesis in its stead.

Web Comics

  • Selkie Smith has slitlike nostrils and no nose to speak of.

Western Animation

  • Futurama
    • In episode "Spanish Fry", Fry gets his nose stolen by an alien black market, which are propelled by the myth that "Human Horn" is a natural aphrodisiac for them.
    • Bender, on the other hand, is typically noseless, since robots don't need noses. Well, he does have one, he just doesn't wear the thing.
  • Roger from American Dad does not have a nose, but can smell. This however rarely ever came up (especially since he tends to go outside with disguises, yet no-one notices. Granted, there ARE other things that could tip off any sane person), and was promptly lampshaded in one episode where a kid called him a "noseless freak" (which, of course, prompted another fashion montage, except this time with nose prosthetic). Apparently with a proper nose, Roger looks exactly like Kevin Bacon.
  • In addition to Mandy being the first type, Billy from The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy once had his nose taken away by a "nasalmancer" who himself misplaced his nose after removing it.
  • Similiarly, Fanboy and Chum Chum were able to freely remove and apply not only their, but also each other's noses in "Pick a Nose". Chum Chum separated his nose from his face again in "Fanboy Stinks", when he couldn't stand Fanboy's stench.
  • Skipper Shelton, from episode 4 of Scooby Doo Mystery Incorporated, has a nosepatch covering the end result of an angry clam attack.

Real Life

  • A very sad Truth in Television: one of the main punishments in Imperial China was cutting off the nose. (The others, for the record, were tattooing of the face, cutting off the feet, castration, and death).
  • Some people had their nose shot off in combat. One of the more famous examples is mathematician Gaston Julia, the one with the fractals. He had to wear a piece of leather covering the place where his nose had been for the rest of his life. There are photos. Happy googling.
    • The astronomer Tycho Brahe lost his nose in a duel and replaced it with a series of prosthetic noses, most famously a golden one.
  • A recent Time magazine cover was a photo of an Afghani girl who had her nose cut off during the Taliban regime. She had reported that she was being abused but the Taliban ordered the punishment because telling others about it was seen as disobedient to those people and defied Taliban law.
  • Almost happened to Roald Dahl when he was young, where he almost lost his nose in a car accident.
  • Patton Oswalt tells about a medical show (possibly on Discovery Health) he saw about a guy whose nose froze off while climbing a mountain. He grew a new nose on his forehead through some sort of ancient Indian (subcontinent, not US) medical technique.
  • Snub-nosed monkeys have nostrils, but no nose. In the rain, they have to keep sneezing to keep the rain water out of their sinuses.
  • Michael Jackson approached this after several plastic surgeries.
  • When Saint Elizabeth of Hungary was widowed, her cousin (a German bishop) tried to trap her in an Arranged Marriage. She threatened to invoke this trope and cut off her own nose so no one would want to marry her, and said cousin left her alone.
  • The Great Sphinx of Giza.

When I was a kid, I had a dog with no nose. How did he smell? Terrible!

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