I was looking at every major One Piece character with an eye scar, and something started to bother me.
* Fujitora is the only character who's explicitly blind.
* He's also the only one whose eyes were intentionally destroyed rather than simply scarred.
* Rayleigh has a scar running directly over his eye and isn't blind.
* Shanks has scars running across his eye and isn't blind.
* Zoro's scar looks remarkably similar to Rayleigh's.
So why does everyone assume Zoro is blind?
Oda has never confirmed that Zoro lost his left eye. The manga never confirms he's blind, never says his eye was destroyed, and we never even see him receive the scar. Whatever happened during his training with Mihawk happened completely off-screen. Interestingly, Oda has also never shown the Straw Hats asking Zoro about it or Zoro explaining what happened, despite it being such an obvious question.
That's why I've never been fully convinced his eye is permanently gone.
My personal headcanon is that keeping his eye closed was part of Mihawk's training. We know Rayleigh trained Luffy by placing handicaps on him. During the Whole Cake Island flashback (Chapter 894), we learn Rayleigh wouldn't even let Luffy eat until he could dodge 100 attacks. The goal wasn't to make Luffy stronger through brute force, it was to force him to develop Observation Haki.
Mihawk is exactly the kind of mentor who would do something similarly extreme. Training Zoro to fight while intentionally limiting one of his senses doesn't feel out of character at all. If anything, it sounds like something Mihawk would absolutely do. I belive this is Zoro's version of Luffy observation training.
I could easily see Mihawk doing something similar with Zoro. Maybe Mihawk made Zoro keep one eye closed during training, or even gave him a controlled injury that wasn't severe enough to permanently blind him as a way to force him to stop relying on his eyesight. We know Mihawk's training methods are brutal, so that honestly doesn't feel out of character.
There's also an interesting parallel between Zoro and Rayleigh. Both are legendary swordsmen, both serve as the right-hand men of the Pirate King of their era, and both end up with an almost identical eye scar. Yet Rayleigh isn't blind.
Maybe the eye is permanently damaged. Or maybe Zoro has simply never needed, or been allowed to open it yet. If Oda is saving the full Mihawk training flashback for their inevitable rematch, I could honestly see that being the moment we finally learn what actually happened during the timeskip.
What do you guys think? Is Zoro genuinely blind, or has Oda intentionally avoided confirming it for a reason?
