Confessions of a Wannabe Manic Pixie Dream Girl
By Katie Lotz
I have a confession to make: I am a 20 year old woman, and I still think that John Green’s iconically infamous 2005 Y/A novel Looking For Alaska might be one of my favorite books. I know - ew! Grab your metaphorical torches and pitchforks.
If you had the fortune of going through your adolescent years in any time period that wasn’t dominated by romantic comedies co-starring Zooey Deschanel, you may be wondering, what is so wrong with loving a John Green novel? The answer to that (surprisingly loaded) question, is that John Green’s writing tends to be plagued with the controversial character of The Wildly Impulsive and Confusing Female Love Interest Who Has Some Kind of Weird, Endearing Hobby and is Also Smart but More Importantly Hot.
In fact, most of the books and movies that I loved as an adolescent girl featured this character. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Stargirl, and yes, nearly anything written by John Green, were all stories that incorporated a vivacious, unpredictable, beautiful young woman who swooped into a guy’s boring life and magically gave it meaning.
She is more commonly known as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
In short, the idea of the MPDG originated as a criticism of vivacious female characters who are written as static plot devices with no backstory, whose only purpose seems to be to drag the sulky male protagonist out of their mundane life. The concept of the MPDG is not new. Although the term was coined back in 2005 by film critic Nathan Rabin, in his review of Kristin Dunst’s character in Elizabethtown, this film trope has been used in recent years to describe characters from as early as the 1930’s.
There are certainly characters that fit this mold to a tee; think Zooey Deschannel in the 2008 movie Yes Man. In this movie, Deschannel plays an eccentric woman who drags the male protagonist out of his boring, routine life with her wild antics, which include, but are not limited to: her jogging/photography club, punk band, and reckless moped driving (yes, those are all things that her character actually does). It seems harmless enough, but the trouble with this story is that we have no idea who Allison actually is. Sure, we know she has a passion for taking blurry photos while jogging and singing in dive bars and driving a moped with her eyes closed, but who is she? Does she have friends? Family? Is there a particular reason for, despite being an apparently amazing person, devoting the entirety of her time to improving a wholly uninteresting man?
Of course, these questions are never answered, because that would ruin the magic of the MPDG. You can hear my disdain, right?
But don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe that everything to do with this trope is bad. After all, I have loved and continue to love countless characters who have been categorized as MPDGs. When I first became infatuated with these characters, it was because they were exciting. They were girls who were outspoken and self assured and eccentric. As a painfully shy, agreeable, prepubescent girl, that was everything I wanted to be.
In fact, I remember the first time I stumbled across the term “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”: it was in an online article that detailed an extensive list of female characters who supposedly fell into this category. As I quickly skimmed the list and found that it included many of my favorite characters, I thought, “Oh, shit. Am I really aspiring to be nothing more than a plot device that exists only in the mind of some sad, brooding male writer?”. If I’m being honest, it kind of sucked to see so many characters that I loved and idolized be reduced to nothing more than an event in someone else’s story. In many ways, loving these characters built me into a better version of myself. They inspired me to be confident, to pursue my interests, no matter how niche or embarrassing they may have been. These characters challenged me to be outspoken about what was important to me. Did I really have to reject the Holly Golightlys, Stargirls, and Alaska Youngs of the fictional world?
Well, not necessarily. The problem with a true MPDG character isn’t just that she is underwritten, but rather that she is very intentionally written to do nothing more than cheer on the male protagonist to help him reach his “full potential”. A character like this, with no agency or motivations of her own, teaches young girls that they are only as valuable as they are useful to men. Their antics, quirks, and interests are only worthy if they can be used to build up or heal someone else.
Those characters exist, and are just as harmful as they are criticized to be, but Manic Pixie Dream Girl has quickly become a catch-all term to describe any off-beat or enthusiastic woman in fiction. Afterall, if the defining characteristic of a MPDG is her complete and total lack of agency or backstory, why does a character like Holly Golightly, played by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, appear so frequently on many of the internet’s long running lists of MPDGs?
That’s kind of the problem. We assume that everything a woman does is for the benefit of men, even down to the fictional ones, to the point where, even when we see well written, nuanced, developed characters, we infer that their sole motivation must be for the benefit of a love interest. Even when we encounter a character with a complex backstory, full agency over her own actions, and an intricate inner life like Holly, we can’t seem to separate her from the man chasing after her. It’s almost as if we can’t imagine a woman, fictional or not, who isn’t created to pander to the male gaze.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t expect more from the people who write our beloved fictional women, and call them out when they fail us, but a female character shouldn’t be considered a failure if she is eccentric or charismatic or even, God help me, “quirky”.
Rather, we should critique these characters over more valid and pressing concerns. The large majority of these important, albeit controversial, leading ladies, are white, thin, cis women, who hardly serve to represent a large portion of the young girls and women who look up to them.