LoL streamer learns to “animation cancel” blindness to keep playing after brain injury

League of Legends streamer NoArmWhatley almost died after falling out of a third-story window and landing on his head, miraculously surviving and keeping almost full brain function after waking up from a weeks-long coma.

After waking up, he proclaimed that he “cannot f**king wait to play League of Legends” when he’s released from the hospital, something that turned out to be difficult. Because he fell on his head, the streamer has struggled with blindness due to blood pooling in his eyeballs.

While he has a surgery planned to fix the issue, he hasn’t let that stop him from playing League. Though he struggled at first, the Tahm Kench one-trick has continued climbing on his namesake champion and has returned to Master rank despite his injuries, putting him in the top 0.5% of players in Europe.

His secret? Animation cancelling blindness. Somehow.

NoArmWhatley finds a way around his blindness to play LoL

On his first stream back after the incident, Whatley used some MS painted diagrams to display what it looks like when seeing out of his eyes. And, though he’s gotten a bit better in the months since, it’s still an accurate visual depiction of what he has to deal with.

The scroller above shows his left and right eyes. He has Submacular Hemorrhaging in his left eye, which is essentially bleeding so deep in his eyeball that it has no natural way of escaping. As such, he’s only able to just slightly see in his peripheral vision.

His right eye has Viscous Hemorrhaging, which, while less threatening to his vision long term, still isn’t great. This is due to bleeding within the actual eyeball, also known as the vitreous, that creates splotchy vision.

Whatley is well on the road to recovery, but the blindness has remained. He has called it the worst part of being injured, saying that it “f**king sucks.” The streamer also revealed, when he sleeps, the blood pools to the back of his eyeballs and that he wakes up completely blind. He has to get up and let the blood settle elsewhere to restore some of his vision.

So, how does he get around this issue? What he calls “animation-cancelling”.

In response to someone wondering how he’s able to be so good at League of Legends despite almost complete blindness, he replied saying that he’s trained himself to “animation cancel” it.

“If I blink and on the same frame I look up really fast, the blood in my eye gets propelled down, which gives me a few seconds of clear vision. Really good for teamfights and 1v1s,” he explained.

Whatley is looking to get surgery on both eyes before 2025 is out, hopefully restoring his vision and keeping him from having to use what sounds like a Mario 64 speedrun strat to get a few seconds of half decent vision.

At the time of writing, he just landed in London to participate in an event by Minecraft Streamer Tubbo to compete against two other teams in a variety of games. Despite still recovering from his injuries, Whatley isn’t slowing down as a content creator.