35 “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” Things Women Used To Do, Thinking It Made Them So Cool And Mysterious

To find out more about the significance of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl character, we reached out to Lauren McMenemy, a writer, a journalist, and marketer dedicated to running workshops and training to help people get their words down right. Lauren was happy to share some insights into the topic.

Lauren told us that there was a time when the Manic Pixie Dream Girl was everywhere, especially in the indie scene. “Heck, I idolized those girls on screen: Natalie Portman in Garden State, Zooey Deschanel in literally everything. I did the '50s dresses with Converse trainers. I did the black-rimmed glasses and had (still have) a fringe (or bangs for our American friends),” Lauren recounted.

She said she used to call herself quirky, just like many girls out there. “I met my now-husband on a dating site under the username 'QuirkyWriter' - and I still do. Because to me, and to many women out there, these aren't tropes but aspects of our personality.”

Lauren explained that the issue with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is the way these characters are handled by the writer, who is inevitably a "sensitive" man.

“It was film critic Nathan Rabin who, when referring to Kirsten Dunst's character in Elizabethtown, said the Manic Pixie Dream Girl ‘exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.’”

“At that point, the quirky girls ceased to just be quirky girls and suddenly became tropes and white male fantasies. This problem isn't just confined to the MPDG; it's the problem with any two-dimensional character in any story who serves to provide important life lessons to the protagonist while having no discernible inner life. They're just a plot device.”

Lauren believes that the same is true when this carries over to young girls finding who they are. “If they only have Garden State's Sam, they're going to focus on looking right and having some weird quirk and being available to interested, sensitive men. But if they have Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or they have Summer in 500 Days of Summer, then they'll at least meet MPDGs who have flaws and seem more real to anyone who's not the sensitive male soul attracted to them,” she explained.