- Aubrey-Maturin: Both Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin have elements of this, in contrasting ways. Jack Aubrey is a highly successful naval officer (which requires technical and mathematical knowledge as well as strategic and leadership skills) as well as an amateur astronomer and musician but has a tendency to make poor choices when on land, especially in financial matters. Stephen is a physician/scientist/spy Badass Bookworm par excellence, but is utterly hapless at sea and something of an eccentric Cloudcuckoolander.
- Yuri from Dirty Pair is very intelligent when it comes to science, forensics, and hacking, but she can be rather ditzy at times, particularly when she's around a guy she likes, or sometimes when thinking up crazy ideas to solve a problem.
- Leonard of Quirm is the most intelligent man on the Discworld...and has absolutely no comprehension of human nature whatsoever. The Patrician finds conversations with him a combination of relaxing (since he doesn't have to watch what he says) and frustrating (since Leonard comes up with things like "Yes, I've invented an incredibly powerful war machine, but that's okay because no-one would ever use such a thing."). Jingo has him repeatedly shocked at Nobbs and Colon's constant ideas of how to use his inventions to attack others.
- Don't Care High:
- Mike Otis is a recluse who is unperturbed and uncurious about bizarre things like people doing his projects for him, nominating him to be class president, or crediting him with various stuff he has no idea about. But he is a brilliant mechanic who invented a new car model on his own.
Paul: Mike, do you have any idea how great an achievement it is to make a working car out of nothing?
Mike: Probably not.
Mike: Probably not.
- A minor student named Dick Oliver scores a 95% on a quiz about William Shakespeare by keeping up with the assigned study materials but someone ends up spending weeks if not months thinking that the English class is a cooking course, and still thinks that even after turning in the assignment.
- Full Metal Panic! features captain Teresa "Tessa" Testarossa. She is a tactical and strategic genius who became a captain in the international anti-terrorist organisation MITHRIL by the age of 16 and personally designed the submersible carrier Tuatha De Danaan which she commands. She is also a lovesick teenage girl and (apart from her talent for swimming) generally clumsy and slightly awkward.
- Nako in Genie Team G Jiken Note, whose inattentiveness is serious enough to actually mask her intelligence for years and cause her to be passed off as a troublemaking ditz.
- Harry Potter:
- Luna Lovegood. She is a Cloud Cuckoolander almost to the point of Obfuscating Stupidity, but she pulls out one genius move after another when it counts.
- Ravenclaw House seems to favor these. The description on Pottermore states that one of its lesser-known values is eccentricity, and has graduated quite a few Ditzy Geniuses over the years.
- The title character of Haruhi Suzumiya is brilliant at most things she does, scoring incredibly high grades in all her classes and mastering every sport she tries with minimal effort, but she utterly fails when it comes to anything that requires her to consider other people's points of view, like the movie she made. She thought it was brilliant; everyone else was... less enthused. At one point she fails to comprehend why characters always die at the climax of a story, and another time she complains that crabs didn't evolve softer shells so she could eat them easier. She also fails to realize that wearing a Playboy Bunny outfit at school would upset the teachers. And then there's her general Insane Troll Logic, such as pointing out that Tanabata wishes will take years to reach their destination due to the speed of light delay, but expecting that Orihime and Hikoboshi will be able to ignore the lightspeed barrier because they're gods.
- Honor Harrington has a Havenite former ops and tac officer, who's shown to be a tech nerd, and put in charge of a R&D station known as Bolthole. Her name's Shannon Foraker.
- Jakub Wędrowycz: Jakub is literally a genius, but comes across as a Ditzy old bum due, in part, to poor general education (three years of elementary school back in the 1910's), though Obfuscating Stupidity also comes in play.
- Michael Sevenson in the Knight and Rogue Series manages to be Too Dumb to Live after having gone through a university. His complete inability to tell even a partial white lie and his tendency to act without thinking (sometimes to the extent that he doesn't even that realize he's acted until after the fact), not to mention his tendency to ignore social norms, make it surprising whenever he shows that he does, in fact, possess intelligence.
- Lessons in Chemistry: Elizabeth wonders if Calvin is one of those people who is incredibly knowledgable in one field but not so much in others after he, a gifted and brilliant chemist, innocently asks why anyone would ever discriminate on the basis of someone's gender.
- The 16th-century Polish poet Jan Kochanowski wrote a brief satirical poem "Na matematyka" ("On the Mathematician"). The poem can be roughly translated to English as follows: "He's measured the Earth and the deep sea, he knows how the dawn and dusk happen; he understands the winds, he has apprentices—But he can't see he's got a whore in his house." In other words, he's got all sorts of academic knowledge, but is totally clueless that his wife is cheating on him with everyone.
- Josh of The Magicians is just as academically brilliant as all the other student magicians at Brakebills, but in his case, it's tempered by him being lazy, careless, ignorant, and Unskilled, but Strong. In the sequel, he offers to teleport his friends from Venice to Corwall - only for a light-hearted interrogation to reveal that he believes Cornwall to be in Canada. And when he actually learns that it's in England, he doubles down and classifies it as part of Europe... only to surprise everyone with an incredibly complex discourse on the science of magnetic force and the magical art of astral folding.
- In On the Spectrum, Clara's best friend Bree acts like a ditz, but gets straight A's in school.
- Simona Ahrnstedt gives us Beatrice Löwenström in her debut novel Överenskommelser. She's a very intelligent young woman when it comes to academical and intellectual pursuits. But man, does she make some lousy decisions! When she's bullied into an engagement with a man, who's like forty years older than her and treats women like dirt, she never asks for help from anybody, who might actually want to and be able to help her. She also gets drunk at her cousin's engagement party (which could have ended much worse than it did), trusts her sociopath cousin (she shouldn't have) and tries to seduce male protagonist Seth when she has just fallen off a horse and gotten injured (not the right time)!
- The whole Peterkin family in the humorous children's novel The Peterkin Papers. They are well-educated, creative, and in their way, resourceful, but fail at handling mundane problems on their own due to a combination of Complexity Addiction and lack of common sense.
- Philogelos: The skholastikòs (the root for the modern word "scholastic") is a stock character in many of the book's jokes. He is portrayed as ostensibly well-educated and literate, but woefully lacks common sense and tends to Comically Miss The Point. Various English translations have rendered it as "intellectual," "pedant," "egghead," or "student dunce."
- Another Swedish example is Indra Ingridsdotter, the protagonist of Röd måne by Elisabet Nemert. She's such a brilliant medicine woman that she eventually gets knighted by the queen. But she also has an extreme lack of common sense. She has casual sex with many different men...even though she lives in the 17th century when casual sex was against the law. It's not until after a scorned ex-lover has her thrown into prison that she finally realizes how stupid she had been.
- The Greek class from The Secret History. They're all extremely intelligent (except for Bunny maybe) but they have absolutely no common sense. Especially Henry who is so secluded from society that he doesn't know how social situations work, how he should act in a police interrogation or whether it's a good idea to have a drug fueled orgy in the woods with your friends.
- Sword Art Online: Sugou Nobuyuki is a VR genius in his own right, though falling a bit short of Akihiko Kayaba. But he's prone to very blatant Bond Villain Stupidity moments and can't anticipate very obvious consequences to his actions. Case in point: he believes that there are numerous organizations that would kill to have his research and shelter him from the law after Kirito defeats him in ALO. Instead, he's arrested and incarcerated, with RECT nearly going bankrupt as a result of his crimes.
