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Clueless Chick Magnet / Literature

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  • Anne of Green Gables:
    • Walter. He's a dark-haired, dreamy-eyed poet and really has no idea the girls want him.
    • Anne is a rare gender-flipped example. Due to some self-esteem issues (at least half of which revolve around her loathed red hair) and an obsession with romance novels, Anne is completely oblivious to the feelings of her male peers. By her late teens, she is fending off marriage proposals left and right — much to her surprise.
    • Averted in one case: Gil himself is a Chick Magnet, but unlike Anne, he is well aware of it.
  • A Brother's Price: Jerin has no idea how many women are attracted to him. Part of this may be due to his very protective sisters - presumably, women don't get to do more than gaze longingly at him. When he is old enough to get married and his sisters decide they can demand a brother's price (like a bride price, but for a bridegroom) of double the usual sum, he is very insecure about it and thinks they're overestimating his attractiveness.
  • Rowley in Diary of a Wimpy Kid. He doesn't seem to be all that interested in girls, yet in Rodrick Rules he's managed to socialize with some of the most popular girls in his year. At the end of The Third Wheel, he ends up in a relationship with Abigail. It doesn't last, but that he'd be used to make another boy jealous is impressive.
  • Derek of the web-novel Domina is continually blind to everyone's affections for him. Once, when two girls are having a heated argument over who gets his First Kiss, he thinks they're screwing with him.
  • Ishmael from Don't Call Me Ishmael!. He doesn't think he's popular with girls, but by the end of the series, quite a few girls have shown interest in him. He usually doesn't initiate contact with anyone, instead, some girls make moves on him.
  • The Elenium:
    • Berit is capable of attracting a harem wherever he goes, with no clue about what he's doing. When visiting Matherion the Atan girls fall over themselves trying to get him alone for a "sparring session". He responds by setting up a lesson program. In the end, Sparhawk offers that he should talk to the lad before he sparks a diplomatic incident, only to be shouted down by every woman in hearing range. Apparently, the innocent cluelessness is part of his charm.
    • Subverted by Bevier, who is well aware that pretty much every woman he walks past is making moony-eyes at him, but since he is angling at priesthood and fully occupied with his duties, he refuses to act on it.
  • Harry Potter: Harry has a bit of this in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. He's confused by how popular the Gryffindor Quidditch team has gotten, and Hermione has to exasperatedly point out that people are only signing up because he's the captain and has become much more popular and attractive since the events of the last book.
    Hermione: You've never been more popular or, frankly, fanciable.
  • Darryl, the protagonist of Heart In Hand. When an attractive woman at a nightclub mentions that she's cold, talks about "wanting something to warm me up" and spills a drink over her top, his only reaction is to give his sweatshirt to hernote .
  • John Carter of Mars:
    • In A Princess of Mars, John just could not get it through his Heroic Skull that the most beautiful woman of two worlds was head over heels for him. She had to beat him over the head with an "I love you" stick.
    • John Carter frankly admits he doesn't understand women but he does become clued in enough to recognize when other women fall in love with him — as they do with monotonous regularity to his considerable embarrassment. He develops an interesting strategy for dealing with the problem; he takes the girls home to Dejah Thoris. She apparently befriends them and sees to it they meet lots of attractive and available men until they find one that makes them forget John Carter.
  • Beau in Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined has no idea that he has a lot of success with the girls at school from day one, not even when other boys start hanging around him just to get a share of his attention. Edythe later claims he has gathered ten admirers.
  • Mother of Learning: At the start, Zorian is best described as "not good with people" (and probably more accurately as "an anti-social recluse"), so the only girl interested in him is his classmate Akoja, who seems to see a spark of talent in him. Even with the time loop and his empath abilities, it takes a long time for him to notice her attraction. However, he never seems to notice the various other girls who become attracted to him throughout the loops. In general, whenever he ends up helping a girl (either because they have something he needs or because they stumbled into a dangerous situation that he needs to get them out of), they get a surprised look on their face as if they just realized that he's cute and competent once he stops scowling at everyone. Akoja's sole point of view chapter (after the time loop is over) makes it clear that quite a few girls have started taking an interest in him now that he's more sociable and generous with his time, and at one point Zach claims that he can't let Zorian die because "there are so many girls trying to get into his pants!"
  • Percy Jackson and the Olympians:
    • Percy is completely oblivious to any girl showing interest in him. Any time things actually get moving, it's because the girls themselves have instigated it out of pure frustration. Both Annabeth and Rachel kiss him first and Calypso has to borderline propose. Let's just say Annabeth's nickname Seaweed Brain is well-earned sometimes.
    • In the Sequel Series The Heroes of Olympus, he's improved enough to awkwardly refuse Reyna's advances, (as he and Annabeth have finally got together), but upgrades to a clueless guy magnet concerning Nico's feelings.
    • He's never described as particularly attractive in the first series, but that's probably because it's told first-person from his own perspective. When other characters describe him in the sequel series, it's nearly always with a degree of approval.
  • In the first chapter of The Princess Bride, Buttercup doesn't understand why other girls have stopped talking to her until they tell her that it's because she's been drawing the attention of every boy in town away from them. She had noticed them trying to spend time with her, but hadn't thought of it as anything more than them being annoying.
  • Reign of the Seven Spellblades: Downplayed by protagonist Oliver Horn. He is aware that he attracts an inordinate amount of female attention (if nothing else, his male friends Pete and Guy never let him forget it), he's just somewhat baffled about why and has trouble figuring out what, if anything, to do about it for a while. Eventually, his big brother Gwyn counsels him to just take his relationships at their own natural pace and allow himself to feel things without trying to classify them, which Oliver takes to heart.
  • The Sharing Knife:
    Dag: Among Lakewalkers, a woman invites a man back to her tent...
    Fawn: Among farmers, the boy asks the girl...
    Dag: Really... How much time do you think we've wasted here, Spark?
  • Undefeated Bahamut Chronicle has Lux Arcadia, who has yet to realize the attention of the more than a dozen girls interested in him. This is despite several of them explicitly confessing their love and kissing him, in some cases more than once. His little sister Airi suggests that it's because he has too much emotional baggage and subconsciously rejects the idea of others being interested in him. This ends once the main conflict is (seemingly) over, with Lux acknowledging their attention.
  • Miles Vorkosigan from the Vorkosigan Saga is a lot more attractive to women (and one hermaphroditenote ), for all his bodily deformities, then he even begins to realize — though his cousin Ivan surely does. He later begins griping that while he can find women to love, none of them will marry him. And most of the women who fell for him did so without any real effort on his part. Both times he does try, it doesn't go well. Elena married another man, and Ekaterin nearly kicked him out of her life entirely, since he did it dishonestly.
  • Firestar from Warrior Cats didn't know Sandstorm and Cinderpelt were in love with him until the latter tells him about the former. As Erin Hunter jokingly said: "Stupid man cat!"


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