Failed A Spot Check / Anime & Manga

Moments when you are distracted from the extremely noticeable in anime and manga.

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• Baccano!: Isaac and Miria finally notice that they are ageless and immortal... seventy years later.
  Isaac: Say, Miria...
  Miria: What's up, pimp-daddy?
  Isaac: Do you ever get the feeling... that we haven't aged a day?
• Bleach:
  • During the Soul Society arc, Kenpachi takes Yachiru, Ikkaku, Yumichika, Aramaki and Orihime and breaks Chad, Uryuu and Ganju out of the Fourth Division prison and go in search of Ichigo. While travelling through the labyrinthine streets, the group ends up arguing about the amount of times they run into dead-ends and get lost. The only person who realises they're being followed by two captains and two vice-captains who are hiding their reiatsu is Yumichika. When Yumichika warns Kenpachi, Kenpachi acknowledges that he can sense them too. Everyone else in the group, however, is completely oblivious until the four reveal themselves.
  • During the Bount Arc, Vice-captains Hisagi, Kira, Rangiku and Fifth-Seat Yumichika are sent after the Bount. Outside the hide-away caves, the vice-captains catch Yumichika admiring himself in his mirror and chastise him for dropping his guard. However, the anime shows the audience that Yumichika had both noticed the vice-captains approaching him via his mirror and that he's the only one who realised the Bount had already detected the group's arrival. Once inside the caves, the group examine many strangely designed pillars but Yumichika keeps looking off in a completely different direction to the others. When they're suddenly attacked from behind, Yumichika saves them all by blocking the strike. He then chastises them for having been so unobservant they'd never noticed the danger he'd been aware of all along.
  • In the manga, when Hitsugaya's Advance Guard split up to find different locations to sleep in, the only one who notices the unusual hollow reiatsu that heralds the arrival of Grimmjow's group is Yumichika. He tries to warn Ikkaku who tells him to ignore it, but he still thinks the situation is far too strange. When Grimmjow's assault begins, a panel is shown of all the shinigami reactions, and the only one not surprised is Yumichika.
• In episode 2 of Blend-S, Maika somehow fails to realize that she's sitting on top of Dino while practicing her character in the break room.
• Yukito in Cardcaptor Sakura manages to roll a 20 and a 1 at the same time, missing the unconscious girl, Sakura's staff, Li's sword, and combat clothes, but spotting the tiny bite mark on Li's finger.
• Most cases of Case Closed have Conan knock out Kogoro and use a voice-modifier bowtie to solve the case as Kogoro. After a while the show gets immensely lazy when it comes to Conan hiding this, and at least one episode has him standing directly between Kogoro and another person, turning around, then talking without anyone noticing.
  • It also makes no effort to explain how no one ever notices that Kogoro's mouth doesn't move during 'his' speeches.
• In Chainsaw Man, it's revealed that the Horsemen of the Apocalypse are unable to recognize faces, which makes this come into play more than once. Denji's able to defeat Conquest (Makima) because she's so hyperfixated on Pochita that she (and the audience) doesn't even notice him blending in with her crowd of minions. For half of Part 2, War (Yoru) is completely unaware that Denji and Pochita aren't the same Chainsaw Man because of this until Famine explains it to her, and she's not too bright to begin with so the fact that they're different colors initially escapes her notice as well.
• Code Geass has this done by a Knight of the Round, Luciano Bradley. As he has Lelouch tied up and is about to kill him, Kallen (in the new suped-up Guren SEITEN Eight Elements) wipes out his command and starts to fight him. Luciano laughs cockily throughout, not noticing that Kallen is smashing his weapons one by one. It's only after Kallen grabs his Knightmare by the head and turns on the radiant wave surger that he finally realizes how screwed he is, and by then it's too late. Arguably, however, Luciano knew full well his weapons were getting trashed; his strategy seemed to hinge on getting close enough to use his spiked Slash Harken at a range she couldn't dodge... except she blocked it.
• Digimon Adventure: After falling into Devimon's trap (a big mansion with lots of hospitality, and only Sora thought there's something fishy about that), the Chosen Children still fall the same trick twice later on:
  • The Chosen Children are treated with hospitality by a village full of Pagumon, despite the fact that the group was informed that the village is supposed to be a Koromon Village and Tentomon has heard that Pagumon are usually bad Digimon, the children don't realize that they are tricked until they find a Botamon at the village, the pre-evolved of Koromon, since it would not be able to survive in a Pagumon Village. Only Sora and Agumon (who smelled the scent of Koromon) felt that things weren't right from the start.
  • When the Chosen Children rearrive at the beach of File Island, they find a beach house that wasn't originally there (which isn't that weird considering that the Digital World was reconstructed into the Spiral Mountain and many places aren't the same as before, and it's been about 11 years in the Digital World since the children left it). All of them run into it without thinking, but rather than being treated with food, they get showered by sand instead. Thanks to Jou accidently stepping on Mimi's shoe, the two of them and their partners don't make it to the beach house at the time and they are spared from the trap, allowing them to save their friends from being burned to death. And this time, nobody was suspicious about the beach house at all.
• Digimon Adventure 02: The Australian civilians don't notice a Dark Tower standing at the beach of Sydney, nor do they care how it came out of nowhere. And they don't notice the Digimon at the beach either.
• Digimon Tamers:
  • The Tamers and their friends don't really mind the creepy boy who sometimes appears out of nowhere and watches the Tamers fighting the Devas. They just accept him as an odd kid. That is until he goes full creepy, makes some cryptic speech about the deity of the Digital World or spins his head. The obvious spy is the monkey Deva Makuramon.
  • Nobody does notice Juri suddenly having pale skin, Dull Eyes of Unhappiness and her borderline Slasher Smile. Which is even more egregious when Juri's shows up like that for the first time: she's very depressed about the death of her partner Digimon, but then she disappears for a moment and shows up again like descripted above. Nobody seems to mind the sudden shift of her behaviour, going from depressed to slightly happy. When people do notice how creepily and abnormal she acts, they simply shrug it off as if it's nothing. And when Takato finally realizes that's not the Juri he knows, but a copy of her, it's way too late.
• Dragon Ball Z:
  • Freeza somehow missed Goku's Genkidama — a giant, glowing sphere of energy roughly the size of a blimp — for quite a while. The given justification is that he couldn't sense energy, but it's... huge. And glowing. And RIGHT THERE. The only plausible explanation is that he mistook it for one of Namek's several suns.
    Freeza: "Hahahahaha...eh? Oh, somehow I completely forgot about that."
    • In the dub, he explicitly says "What? That's not the sun!" when finally noticing it, suggesting that he did mistake it for one of Namek's suns at first.
  • The same mistake happens to Boo, but unlike Freeza, Boo was busy fighting other fighters and enjoying toying with them. However, Boo was capable of sensing energy. The series justifies this as his pure form seemed to have an Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!.
  • In the Dead Zone movie, Goku and Piccolo are fighting each other after they apparently defeated Garlic Jr. and they don't notice the debris around starting to fly up to the sky and their surroundings are cracking. And they still haven't picked up that Garlic Jr. is immortal.
• In Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA, until they are informed of Kuro's existence, Illya's friends and Shirou prove utterly incapable of telling Illya and Kuro apart. Though they have the same face, Kuro has darker skin, paler hair, wears different clothes, and doesn't even try to copy Illya's mannerisms. Even after learning about her, Shirou still occasionally mistakes Kuro for Illya.
• In an episode of Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, Sagara defuses a Hostage Situation by taking the hostage-taker's little brother hostage and somehow tying him up in the rafters of the warehouse without anyone noticing. The kid was also in on the plot, however, which makes it slightly more plausible.
• In Flunk Punk Rumble (aka Yankee-kun To Megane-chan), Daichi Shinagawa is totally and hopelessly unable to recognize Hana Adachi as the girl he fell in love with at the entry exam for Monshiro High and the one who gave him his scar, despite interacting with her on a daily basis given they're in the same class and good friends. Adachi is the same. He discovers the truth quite long before the story's end, though.
• No-one in Hell Girl ever seems to notice Ren's giant, disembodied eye watching them in several episodes of the show.
• Is the Order a Rabbit?:
  • Twice with Chino and Cocoa regarding "Rose", or Rize with her hair down wearing normal girl's clothing. Once in episode 6 while the latter was simply walking down the street, and later in Chiya's tea shop in episode 9. Both times the girls fail to realize it's Rize, and she never bothers to correct them either.
  • Played for Laughs in episode 10, when Megu claims she can't tell who the real "Rize" is, when Chino and Maya both put on twintails and stand next to Rize. The latter points out that she doesn't have to play dumb.
• Kaguya-sama: Love Is War:
  • Although she can tell that the council room "reeks of lovesickness", Fujiwara has no idea that Kaguya and Shirogane are the cause of it, having been awkwardly flirting under her nose for over a year (Kashiwagi, a total stranger at the time, realized this fact in under an hour.) It's implied in the spin-off that this is because she doesn't want to think of Kaguya loving someone (i.e, a boyfriend) more than her. In fact, the only reason she found out about them entering a Secret Relationship is because Kaguya told her point-blank (contrast with Ishigami and Iino, who not only figured out on their own but were able to piece together the exact date of their Relationship Upgrade based on nothing but how the two acted around each other).
  • Subverted with Kaguya. It seems at first as though her ignorance of sexuality means she hasn't caught on to Kashiwagi and Tsubasa clearly having had sex, but it's actually just that she had no reason to talk to her about it. When she calls up Kashiwagi to ask about it and she tries to deny it, Kaguya just says "How stupid do you think I am? Now answer the question."
• Lady!!: In one final attempt to sabotage Lynn, Vivian and Phyllis scare her horse Andrews from his stable and he runs to a park, but he's found by Sarah. Coach Jim realizes that they had something to do with it since Mathilda's pendant was found at the stable.
• Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun: An omake shows Hori assumed upon meeting and recruiting Kashima that she was a guy - despite very obvious signs that she was a girl, like wearing the school skirt. It was only when he saw her walk into the girls' bathroom that he realized her gender.
• During the Chunin Exam Finals arc of the Naruto anime, an ANBU Black Op patrolling the forest around the stadium senses a presence and halts, only to brush it off as probably nothing. While no enemy ninja were technically visible in that shot, the following shot displayed an entire squadron of ninja standing next to trees and various shrubbery. Not behind the trees and shrubbery, but next to them.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
  • You have to feel a little bad for Chisame as the only student in a class of 31 girls to really notice and find unusual the fact that one of her classmates is a robot with mechanical joints and antennae for ears. Or that Kaede and Mana look way too old to be middleschoolers and the twins look like kindergarteners. Asuna and Negi don't actually notice Chachamaru until she starts flying using her jetboots. Lampshaded, of course.
  • The presence of the huge occidental dragon in the underground of Mahora gets missed twice — until it literally drools on someone's head.
  • Natsumi later gets an artifact that, as long as she wears it, causes this. She can walk right past the Big Bad and, as long as she wears it and doesn't touch him, he fails the spot check.
• Oh, Suddenly Egyptian God: Apep emerges from the sea to attack Ra (the third time he's done it), but Apep can't find him even though he's sensing him... because Ra's boat is on top of his head, which slides off of him harmlessly and allows Ra to continue his journey, leaving Apep confused as to where he went.
• Yamamoto from Reborn! (2004) lives this trope. Despite fighting in numerous life-or-death battles, seeing himself and his friends be horribly injured, going through extreme training just to ensure his own survival, traveling through time, and finding out that in the future his dad is murdered by his enemies, he STILL thinks all his numerous adventures are just part of an elaborate LARP. This isn't due to lack of intelligence (he's actually one of the smarter guys in the family) but seems to be either a defense mechanism which allows him to maintain his sunny disposition no matter what, or just his way of downplaying the seriousness of the situations at hand. One thing's for sure; he is damn committed to this "mafia role-playing game". Well, in the manga he reveals that he's known all along that it was real, and that it was all an act.
• Saki:
  • While Momo is invisible to most people, and isn't noticed unless she goes out of her way to make herself heard, this goes further than usual with her teammate Kaori, who is surprised to hear that Momo has been in the mahjong club longer than she has. Kaori only officially meets Momo just before the start of the tournament, despite both of them being in the Tsuruga club room at the same time, and her hearing Momo's voice while they were in Satomi's van on a trip to the beach.
  • In the Hot Springs Episode near the end of the first anime series, Nodoka and Saki walk into an outdoor bath together, and it takes them about a minute, after hearing a splash, to notice that Yumi is also there (as well as the aforementioned and invisible Momo).
• Sgt. Frog:
  • Dororo often winds up on the other end of this, as his friends tend to not notice his presence or forget about him. In the anime, this often sets off his Trauma Switch. The only exception to this is Koyuki; the only time she failed to notice his presence was when she was temporarily Brought Down to Normal at one point.
  • Dororo's Unknown Rival Zoruru is a half-metal cyborg assassin with red and black eyes. Everyone fails their spot checks when it comes to him, for some reason. One chapter ramps this up by having the readers potentially fail their spot check: after Dororo leaves for a bit of waterfall training with Koyuki, we're shown a typical Keroro Platoon meeting... with Zoruru sitting in Dororo's usual seat.
• In one episode of Shima Shima Tora no Shimajirō, Torippi manages to trick Shimajiro into thinking he’s Torippi’s robot alien friend from another planet. Despite the Paper-Thin Disguise^note Well, a bunch of cardboard boxes and cardboard tubes, and a pair of cans for glued to his shoes with parts of his body exposed and the fact that he did not even bother disguising his voice, Shimajiro buys it.
• Sonic X: In "Cracking Knuckles," Eggman traps Amy, Chris, and Tails in his robot and sets him on the other side of the lake they're next to, knowing Sonic can't swim. He somehow fails to notice there's an entire ring of land around the lake that Sonic can easily run on to get to his friends.
• Sunday Without God has a fairly humorous example. After setting out on their journey, Ai and Julie fix up an abandoned van and drive off in it, but fail to notice a person sleeping in the backseat until Scar mentions him well into the drive. Cue brakes and interrogating their sudden new companion.
• The Tower of God anime: In episode 10, Bam has a conversation with Khun and Rak and only notices at the end that Rak has been shrunk from much much taller than a human to much smaller. (It's harder to say what happens in the original webcomic at this point. Bam also doesn't react to the small Rak until the end, but then he doesn't even recognise him.)
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • During his duel with Dinosaur Ryuzaki, Jounouchi has forgotten that he has set his Time Magician^note Toki no Majustushi (Time Wizard) since the first turn, a card that could easily turn the table to his favor at several points throughout the duel. But he doesn't notice his card until Ryuzaki points out that Jounouchi has a card on the field that can be wagered.
  • When Kaiba and Mokuba are setting up to blow up Duel Tower/Alcatraz, with 25 minutes to go, Mokuba comments that he hopes "the rest of the gang" (his friends, their employees, and everyone else) already left. A video screen right in front of him shows the blimp they came on, and at the time, "the rest of the gang"'s only means of transportation, has not moved from its spot.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! GX:
  • When Judai is trying to return to Duel Academy, he somehow fails to notice a sign pointing the way, and the fact the buildings are visible.
  • In another episode, Misawa is pondering his self-worth on a hill overlooking the oceam, when his idol, Dr. Albert Zweinstein, appears and starts to give him advice. Misawa pauses for a minute to take this in, and when he looks back, Zweinstein seems to be gone. Believing it was a divine vision, he runs off. In reality, Zweinstein had tumbled off the edge of the hill. (The exact same thing happens at the end of the episode.)
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds, nobody seems to notice Bruno having permanent Dull Eyes of Unhappiness, which is the one unusual part of his appearance. Obviously, it's a hint that he's the Mysterious D-Wheeler who dueled Yusei just recently since that man also had such eyes (although, that can be excused, since nobody can apparently see through his Opaque Glasses), but it's also more or less that he's an android; although other androids like Paradox, Aporia and his three components had normal eyes.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL: The first time Yuma confronts Cathy, she confides in him that she had a crush on a boy who never notices her; Yuma thinks he understands, and tells her she has to come out and tell him. Of course, its obvious to everyone but Yuma that he is the crush, but even as she tries to take this advice to heart, he never realizes it.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V:
  • At the end of Yugo's duel with Duel Chaser 227, the latter has completely forgotten about Yugo's face-down card since the first turn. Roget picks up on that and orders DC227 to stop the attack, but the officer doesn't notice that either and he loses the duel and his career on top of that.
  • During their second duel, Crow doesn't notice Yuya screaming in pain and his sudden shift in behaviour and he believes that the latter tricked him. After a while, he does wonder what is going on with Yuya, but he doesn't realize that it is indeed the truth until Sora points it out and when Crow sees Yuya's terrifying Death Glare. The dark and sinister Battle Aura surrounding Yuya and his D-Wheel might be excused, since nobody seems to be able to see that, apparently.
• Subverted in Zatch Bell!. Zofis shoots an explosive spell at Sherry and, believing her killed, departs the area. Obscured by the smoke from the spell, Sherry had actually survived when Brago arrived and Took The Bullet for her. When they next met, Brago points out that with Zofis's Supernatural Sensitivity the idea that he could miss another demon standing right in front of him is absurd, which Brago takes to mean Zofis knew full well he was there and ran rather than face him.

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