Plot-Sensitive Snooping Skills

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• Sailor Moon: A number of one-shot characters fail to hide their innermost secrets from Usagi, but she never notices her little brother's crush on Ami in the fourth season Beach Episode.
• SPY×FAMILY:
  • The spy Twilight is a master of gathering intelligence and Awesomeness by Analysis in general. The main conceit of the series is that he is the father in a sham family with Yor, an assassin "mother", and Anya, a telepath "child". He has never figured, and likely never will figure, either secret out. (For the sake of comparison, Twilight researched Yor's brother, Yuri, for about a day, talked to him for about ten minutes, and correctly concluded that Yuri was a member of Ostania's Secret Police.) He tends to either come up with strange rationalizations for their behavior, dismiss them showing him up as being due to him slipping/getting soft rather than them being extraordinary, or get distracted during instances where he might have looked into or thought about things more deeply. There are some implications he purposefully avoids looking into things too much since the answers could complicate his mission, and part of him subconsciously enjoys their current status and doesn't want to upset it, aided by the fact that when he did try to investigate Yor one time, she wound up subjecting him to Oblivious Guilt Slinging.
  • He is aware that Bond is an Uplifted Animal due to Handler giving him intel about Project Apple, but he doesn't know about Bond's precognition powers. Due to Bond's difficulty in communicating with Twilight, the latter is often confused by Bond's behavior. Twilight often thinks Bond's responses to his precognition are due to Bond suddenly acting animalistic (when in fact Bond is acting rationally to avoid a bad outcome) or hyper-perceptive (when Bond is simply reacting to a vision). When Bond saves Twilight from a collapsing floor, Twilight is amazed that Bond was able to "smell" that the floor was weakened. In fairness to Twilight, though, he has no idea such a supernatural ability can even exist in his setting, which is otherwise "normal".
• Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro: Subverted, as the cunning Neuro is just as happy using his abilities to investigate the lives of his co-workers.
• Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches: Yamada can be observant as all hell when faced with a witch in trouble even though he doesn't know her well, but he tends to mind-numbingly oblivious when it comes to noticing girls who are crushing on him, and even after they start dating he has some trouble reading Shiraishi.

• Superman: Lex Luthor interacts with Superman face-to-face all the time, and in a good number of continuities is also childhood friends with Clark Kent (and at the very least sees him often through Lois), and he's among the most intelligent men in the entire world. Somehow in spite of these three facts he never, ever figures out that Clark Kent and Superman are the same person. Various explanations for this have cropped up over the decades, but the fact remains that Luthor only figured out Clark's true identity when it was spelt out for him via looking through Superman's memories. Even then it took him a minute.

Mass Effect

• Parallel Realities: Pretty much everyone (with the sole exception of Legion) is unable to figure out the truth behind Shepard until Shepard himself tells them, especially the characters who are tasked with looking into his activities with Cerberus in the Mass Effect 2 arc. As this list includes the Shadow Broker and Liara, it borders on the implausible at several points.

My Little Pony

• Past Sins MST: Celestia and her security forces can't figure out what the cultists were doing...despite Spell Nexus having told Twilight exactly what they're planning.
  Nelighan: If only we had a witness who was there when the villains attacked her with plot exposition!
• A Storm's Lullaby: Tempest, a villain known for her distrustfulness toward her allies and the idea of friendship in general, is oblivious to the fact that Thistle is spying on her.

Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Scary News out of Tokyo-3: Pip's character notes the friction and resentment between members of his family, but is completely oblivious to the clues that they are all members of SEELE.

• An Education: As smart as Jenny is, she's so infatuated with David that it never occurs to her that he might already be married.
• Meet the Parents (2000): Ex-CIA agent Jack discovers all sorts of unsavory things about his future son-in-law, but has no clue (even when said clues are waved in his face) that his own son smokes pot. He also comes to some incorrect conclusions because he didn't bother to deconflict the different people with the same name, a mistake that is only possible if everyone involved ignores the fact that there might be more than one person with his same (or similar) name.
• Red Eye: Rippner has watched Lisa for eight weeks, but during his first few conversations with her, he realizes she has a secret he doesn't know and wants to know just what it is. Before The Reveal, Rippner even stumbles upon the secret quite a number of times without realizing it by asking if Lisa's father had any reason to be worried about her and later asking her if someone broke her heart. It is only during the lavatory scene that Rippner catches a glimpse of Lisa's scar and figures out her secret.

By Author:

• Sonya Sones: In her young adult novel One Of Those Hideous Books Where The Mother Dies, Ruby claims that, like her mother, she has a "gaydar" that's never wrong in detecting gay people. Her gaydar leads her to believe that Max, one of the workers for her father, is gay, which turns out to be right on the mark, but completely fails in regards to her own father who turns out to be the guy Max's dating. In fact, she kept on thinking that her father had something going on with Cameron Diaz who occasionally drops by (he's a famous movie star) even when it became clear that he and Max know each other really well.

By Work:

• Bloodlines: Angeline has yet to notice Adrian and Sydney's Secret Relationship. But when Sydney, Eddie, and Neil Raymond conspire to go after a Strigoi, she is the one who picks on subtle clues that something is up. She snoops around and manages to recruit reinforcements.
• Galaxy of Fear: Tash Arranda is an untrained Force-Sensitive. She knows her uncle is hiding something right from the start of the first book, but in The Swarm, when Zak has a secret he desperately wants to unload but can't seem to just spit out, she's totally oblivious and keeps interrupting.
• Harry Potter: Lord Voldemort is a wizard prodigy who has dug deeper into the Dark Arts than anyone else and is a mind reader to boot. Yet, he's unable to pinpoint the moment in which one of his most loyal followers, Severus Snape, switches loyalties and starts spying on him on Dumbledore's behalf. While this is more of a credit to Snape's capacity for deceit, one has to wonder just how narcissistic you have to be to not even entertain the idea that killing a man's most precious (if stranged) person won't turn him against you.
• Johannes Cabal the Detective: Cabal's razor-sharp intellect fails him with regards to the wiles of the opposite sex so when Lady Ninuka tries to put the moves on him he is completely lost. Leonie has to spell it out for him before he realizes it. Conversely, when Leonie first approaches him, before he recognizes her he worries that he might be in the middle of getting "picked up", despite it being the furthest thing from her intentions.
• Over the Wine-Dark Sea: Sostratos has an interesting justification. While he is too socially awkward to know how the sailors around him think, he can keep pace with the murderous politics of the Hellenic world because his historical studies made him accustomed to how warlords think at least, even if he can't understand ordinary people. This skill proves useful from time to time while trading in dangerous places.
• The Wandering Inn: The Horns, a veteran adventuring team, find a massive treasure haul in Albez, yet they get distracted, fail to check for traps, and therefore lose nearly all of it.

• Breaking Bad: Hank Schrader, a competent DEA agent who regularly deals with and dismantles drug traffic rings, doesn't even suspect his brother-in-law Walter White's activities as Heisenberg for five seasons. It's not until the end of "Gliding Over All" that a chance discovery at Walter's house finally opens his eyes.
• Criminal Minds: You would think the profilers are a justified example, since they have a rule about not profiling each other, but their camaraderie is so strong that they really can't keep secrets from the team for long and they all are basically each other's therapists.
• Doctor Who: The Fifth Doctor is very perceptive about most people, but after he makes friends with someone, he assumes the best of them and tends not to notice anything he'd consider out of character for them.
• Emmerdale: When it comes to being in situations where crucial information is right there, waiting to be discovered, characters tend to be very dumb (often to the point of missing obviously-placed evidence) or very smart, as the plots call for.
• Kamen Rider Zero-One: Jin's suspicions on Ikazuchi's abrupt Heel–Face Turn in #39 go entirely unheeded by Aruto — the President of Hiden Intelligence — despite him having been direct witness to the latter's history as a Manchurian Agent. It gets Aruto beaten to the brink of death and his Driver seized by Ark-Zero.
• The Lost Room:
  • Much is made of the Objects' potential significance, what might happen if they're destroyed or reunited with the Room, and what happened in the Room. Despite the Photo and especially the Glass Eye, it's comparatively late in the story before anyone stops and considers whose Room it was.
  • The Occupant has no desire to be found, and he willfully repelled anybody in possession of an Object, and only the Sood had tracked the Objects' movements long enough for any kind of pattern to be detected. The Wedding Photo and the Polaroid never being shown to anybody else before Joe asked about them definitely helped.
• Merlin (2008): Arthur is competent, intelligent, diligent, and utterly blind to any evidence that Merlin is constantly using magic behind his back.
• NCIS: Kate (and to some extent, nearly everyone) misses out on stuff about her team members that she would notice on criminals. Kate is supposed to be an amazing profiler because of her Secret Service training, but she was the most oblivious person on the team until McGee showed up.
• Profiler: Sure, she can look at a handful of clues and figure out why the killer liked the color purple (or whatever), but she can't look at years of evidence and figure out who has a crush on her, or what her daughter is up to, or anything personal.
• Psych: Shawn Spencer completely misreads Juliet's friendliness and touchiness with another cop as completely familial. This is in spite of having severe UST with her.
• Sherlock: Sherlock Holmes can work out Watson's military career and family life from scratches on his phone but doesn't work out that a woman putting on lipstick and asking him if he'd like a coffee is hitting on him.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: This was one of the frustrating things about the way that Deanna Troi was written, or depending on your point of view, one of the things that made it difficult to write for her. When you're a psychologist and an empath whose entire job is to use your alien powers to tell other people's hidden motivations, there are a lot of stories that you ought to be able to stop dead in their tracks. As a result, telling those stories anyway often left her stuck somewhere between Forgotten Phlebotinum and Idiot Ball.
• Tatort: Inspector Faber is quite brilliant in putting himself in other people's shoes and acting just the way it's necessary to get information from witnesses and suspects. But he mostly fails social skills altogether when it comes to his colleagues - pretty much the only people he has steady social contacts with since his wife and his young daughter died in a car accident. He doesn't really care for them—maybe except from Böhnisch he most frequently works directly together with—and often is inept for team work.

• Dragon Age: Inquisition: Leliana is an excellent spymaster overall but somehow lets Solas and Blackwall into the Inquisition without checking their backstories, missing that Solas is Really 700 Years Old and "Blackwall" is a Dead Person Impersonation. In the former case, she finally investigates his alleged hometown post-game, finding it an ancient ruin. In the latter, Cullen mentions that Leliana has something of a "blind spot" regarding Wardens and implies that she might have "misplaced" some evidence.
• Paradise Killer: The protagonist Lady Love Dies, an immortal Time Abyss investigator, lived beside Crimson Acid for centuries at least and never knew that Crimson loved her romantically.

• El Goonish Shive: Diane is good at observation and making deductions, but is also bad at introspection to the point where she doesn't realize that her best friend is in love with her.
• Fans!: Rikk seems to have some kind of mental block that prevents him from realizing that Rumy is in love with him, despite having been outright told so on multiple occasions. Frequently lampshaded by his friends and later, even by himself.
• Surviving the Game as a Barbarian: The protagonist is clever, observant, and keenly analytical — in matters of survival, at least. When it comes to personal relationships, he has no idea why a female teammate is flustered about being given a ring and told to get naked (for power-up purposes, of course), nor why she starts showing more interest in him after he saves her life.

• Dexter's Laboratory: Dexter is a genius Mad Scientist who tries to give his lab monkey superpowers and tests him extensively afterwards. He still consistently fails to notice that Monkey had powers all along and is an Animal Superhero.