The Problematic (Im)Persistence of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl in Popular Culture and YA Fiction

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Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks go to the editors of this issue, my anonymous reviewers, Emily Corbett, Sarah Cullen, Kate Fama, and Clare Hayes-Brady for their insights and comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Facebook was founded in February 2004, followed by Twitter in March 2006.

² For example, see Kat Stoeffel “The ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ Has Died” and Aisha Harris “Is The Manic Pixie Dream Girl Dead?”. See also Margaret Eby “The Death of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.”

³ A TikTok, ‘sound’ is the audio accompanying the video. Users, called Creators, may use sounds from TikTok’s Sound Library or create their own (known as Original Audio), often for humorous or ironic effect. Sounds are often used over and over again by multiple Creators, either leading to a micro-trend or to the sound going viral (that is, becoming incredibly popular and used in lots of TikToks in a short space of time).

⁴ Emily Tannenbaum makes a similar observation in her article for Glamor.

⁵ For more on this, see Gouck, “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl in US YA Fiction: Introducing a Narrative Model.”

⁶ Although Stargirl was considered to be a YA text at the time of its publication, it is now marketed as a middle-grade book.

⁷ In capitalizing ‘White’ throughout this article, I intend not only to draw attention to the racialization of the MPDG trope and the male protagonist, but also to emphasize how they both enact and embody an explicit and particular form of privileged, cultural Whiteness. For more on this, see Gouck, “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl in US YA Fiction.”

⁸ While I focus on the ‘quirky’ Pixie of popular culture here, it is worth noting that, although her narrative purpose remains the same, the kind of femininity represented by the MPDG across her multiple forms is not homogenous or fixed. For example, MPDGYA often features Pixies who are not ‘quirky’ or ‘light and fluffy’ and instead possess a dark secret and/or are dealing with trauma. While a full discussion of these nuances is beyond the scope of this article, I gesture to this in “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl in US YA Fiction” and discuss it at length in another, ongoing project.

⁹ For more on the cuteness aesthetic, see Ngai Our Aesthetic Categories and Dale et al. The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness.

¹⁰ While (500) Days has been viewed by many as a Pixie movie, those involved with the film’s production maintain that Summer and Tom’s story is, in fact, the opposite, intending to highlight the biases that arise when men do not listen to women. However, given its broader cultural reception, for my purposes here I consider it a Pixie film. For more on the film as anti-Pixie, see Gordon-Levitt’s 2019 interview with Larry King (“It’s Tom’ Fault”) and the video essay “Why 500 Days of Summer is So Misunderstood” by online cultural commentators, The Take.

¹¹ While Deschanel’s role as Jess is often considered emblematic of the Pixie, this assessment is complicated by the fact that Jess is the show’s main character. Moreover, that the show ran as a weekly sitcom for multiple seasons means that it is almost impossible for Jess’ character to remain undeveloped. Nonetheless, that Deschanel-as-Jess is so entwined with the Pixie in popular discourse means that New Girl is worth mentioning as a cultural Pixie artifact.

¹² Part one of this skit aired the same night Deschanel hosted the show and in which she played Mary-Kate Olsen. “Zooey Deschanel” (played by Abby Elliott) and “Björk” (played by Kristen Wiig) also feature in this parody of ‘quirky girl’ culture.

¹³ For more on interventionist novels, see “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl in US YA Fiction.”

¹⁴ I discuss the MPDB, the EEDG, the Transgender Pixie, and the (im)possibility of a Pixie of Color in another, ongoing project.

¹⁵ I am indebted to one of my anonymous reviewers for this point.

¹⁶ The earliest known use of the word ‘twee’ is in 1905 in Punch magazine, a satirical British weekly publication. However, here I am concerned with ‘twee’ as it manifests in the twenty-first century.

¹⁷ The ending of Stargirl implies that Stargirl will never be heard from again. However, a sequel entitled Love, Stargirl was published in 2007 and picks up a year after the ending of Stargirl.

¹⁸ An in-depth discussion of McRobbie’s p-i-r- is beyond the scope of this article, but for more see McRobbie Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on Gender, Media and the End of Welfare (2020); “Disavowing Dependency: On Angela McRobbie’s Feminism and the Politics of Resilience (Rottenberg, 2022); and “Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Spectacular girls and the place of psychoanalytic approaches in feminist media and cultural studies during the Coronavirus crisis” (Kennedy, 2022).

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Funding

The research conducted in this publication was funded by the Irish Research Council under award number GOIPG/2018/2048.