![]() Many people don’t see the issues behind this trope, and while the manic pixie dream girl may not be the biggest issue in film and media, considering the lack of proper female representation, it is an issue that young women face. She’s reused over and over, and you can see multiples of her on nearly any streaming service in the world. the World, Margo Roth Spiegelman from Paper Towns. She’s Ramona Flowers from Scott Pilgrim vs. She is the manic pixie dream girl, an archetype, a trope that male screenwriters use to give crappy romance movies more ‘edge.’ Perhaps the most important thing about her is that she is not real. She exists solely to teach you life lessons, so that you can transform yourself into a better, more interesting person. But she’s not necessarily the one you end up with, but that’s okay. She will change your life for the short time you keep her around, and odds are you might even fall in love with her. She’s not like other girls - she’s different - and you know it from the moment you lay eyes on her. And sure, she has a chequered past, but that just makes her all the more interesting because you have no idea what she’s going to say next. She’s only a size two, but somehow still has perfect breasts. She conforms to all societal standards of beauty. She’s probably reading Kierkegaard, her hair could potentially be purple or an obscure shade of blue, and she is definitely the last person you ever thought you would meet at this bar, on this night. In engaging with two novels at either end of the Pixie discourse spectrum, my work here argues that the MPDGYA model lays important groundwork not only for research opportunities in the field of YA studies, but for the emergence of collaborative and intersectional approaches to the Pixie – and the texts in which she appears – across multiple disciplines.The manic pixie dream girl is the woman in the corner of the bar who looks deeply disinterested in everything that’s going on around her. To demonstrate this, the article contains two case studies: Robyn Schneider’s The Beginning of Everything (2013), exemplary of a typical Pixie novel, and Gretchen McNeil’s I’m Not Your Manic Pixie Dream Girl (2016), an interventionist text. I argue that this five-stage model can not only be used to understand and analyse typical Pixie texts, but can also function, for example, as a means of assessing attempts to challenge or intervene in MPDG discourse. To address this gap in the field, this article offers a narrative model for a novel type I call ‘MPDGYA’, a pattern I have identified across YA texts, all either published or set in the US, in which the Pixie features. Despite her pervasiveness across film and television, popular culture, and literature – particularly contemporary YA fiction such as John Green’s Looking for Alaska (2005) – the Pixie remains a wholly understudied figure. Coined in 2007 by film critic Nathan Rabin, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG) is a quirky, ethereal figure who exists merely as a tool for self-actualisation and has no narrative purpose beyond that of enriching the life of an apathetic, White, male, cisgender, heterosexual, middle-class protagonist.
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