N.C. Harrison attempts to redefine a hackneyed trope while coming to terms with his own masculinity.
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl, or Boy if that better fits your mode of sexual orientation and expression, is a much maligned trope in the contemporary world. This mysterious character is defined, by the magnificent time-suck known as TV Tropes, as a stock character who exists solely to aid a struggling artist (usually male and socially awkward) in living up to his potential. The poor dear has been accused–often correctly–of existing only as a static character, violating the Alison Bechdel test (a crime deserving of death if nothing else is), encouraging young, vulnerable men to view women as objects instead of people and making it more difficult for stories with better developed female protagonists to find an audience. The things that hack writers do to innocent pixies! The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is also often played by Zooey Deschanel in what is probably an offense greater than all the rest of these put together.
I, however, will always hold this particular trope–at least expressed in this fashion–in a place of affection in my heart because for several years I dated, and was later engaged to, the closest thing I have ever known to a flesh and blood embodiment of said trope. She, like one of Neil Gaiman’s Endless, incarnated an idea so effectively that it was sometimes difficult to disentangle the actual young woman and my understanding of her. Nevertheless, I can say without reservation that I loved her.
A little biographical detail puts the story into more meaningful relief against the trope’s larger backdrop in (especially online) society. In the fall semester of 2007, while planning a paper on the rape epidemic in Pakistan for a class on international relations theory, I struggled to uncover a particular theory which I could use to frame the issue. My professor, a wonderful lady and mentor of mine, suggested feminist theory. “It deals with power imbalances mostly,” she said, “and you are doing a women’s rights issue, after all.” This made sense to me and so I acquiesced, giving up my original plan to study it from a Realist perspective and diving headlong into the library.
I had to ask myself: Is my mere presence harmful or upsetting to those I care about most? I slunk around campus with my head lowered, eyes averted, and tried to avoid giving offense.
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This theoretical framework paid academic dividends for the rest of my undergraduate career. I made A’s on all of my research papers and won more than a few awards for presenting them at local research conferences. My personal life, however, was not necessarily enriched by my adventures in feminism. Always a shy and somewhat socially phobic young fellow, I encountered a “feminist blogosphere” that sometimes put me in a state of absolute paralysis. Strange, confusing terms swirled around my skull. “Nice Guys (TM)” and “Schrodinger’s Rapist” haunted me. As a much larger than normal, very physically powerful person with mostly petite female artist friends, I felt like I had to ask myself: Is my mere presence harmful or upsetting to those I care about most? I slunk around campus with my head lowered, eyes averted, and tried to avoid giving offense.
You might imagine that I didn’t go on many dates during this period. You’d be right. I also did not shop, write, or get out of bed more than was absolutely necessary. In retrospect, it might actually count as a major depressive period, but let’s not get too technical about that.
In an effort to recover from my Net-induced horror of humanity, I made an effort to see what, if any, counter-narratives were available to what had damaged me. Some seminal works of masculine theory like Robert Bly’s Iron John and Sam Keene’s Fire in the Belly, along with the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and philosophy of Ken Wilber and Sean Esbjorn-Hargens, helped to lighten my heart and open my mind just as much as my early forays into feminist theory helped to understand the world’s screwed-up power structures. Given that these were the early days of The Good Men Project, I read all that I could, fascinated and excited, and the site has remained in rotation as one of my homepages to this very day.
Go on living, go on loving, go on growing–always.
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Most of what I found in the “manosphere,” however, did not appeal to me. Unlike the gentlemen producing this work, I actually love women in general (just as people) and quite a few in particular. Most my friends, as I mentioned before, are women. Do most of these jeeters (I daren’t use the word “creeps”), I often wondered, even have mothers or did they just spawn? In general, their words just made me feel icky and stained. I could not find healing in their halls.
In reality, though, I don’t think I could find healing outside of the arms of another person, and my Manic Pixie turned out to be the one. We met in the hospital, visiting someone, and while I’m not sure if I even believe in love at first sight, I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. It struck me like a thunderbolt. She asked for a package of Trolli sour bright crawlers because she hadn’t eaten all day. I bought them and we shared our first kiss right there in the gift shop, whiff of candy on her breath.
We didn’t last, for a variety of reasons, but that’s okay. We’re still friends and keep up as much as possible. She challenged me, pushed my boundaries and helped me to grow as a person, forcing me to become (largely against my stubborn fool’s will) more like the person that she believed I could be, the person with my potential could become but which was being held back by fears. I like to think, during those dark times in her life when demons assailed her, that I did the same thing for her. Isn’t that what those beautiful Manic Pixies are for, what they deserve from us? And can’t the same be said for lovers, too, or even just humans in general? Go on living, go on loving, go on growing–always.
Thank you for writing this 🙂 My problem with the way people hate on the Manic Pixie is that she is signled out as this “horrible badly written character” – because let’s face it, there are tons of bad female character tropes, and most of them are badly written. You have the smurfette (aka the token woman in a team of boys), the femme fatale, the bombshell, the ditsy blonde, the mamma mia mother-figure, the happy housewife, the unhappy housewife… The list goes on and on, and all these female characters ALSO only exist for the benefit of the male… Read more »
Tropes A) are not bad, per se but B) are very limiting, sometimes. That’s why you’ve got to complicate the heck out of them to make good writing because life is often quite complex. I have discovered this in my writing of genre fiction–which is the kind that I generally prefer to write. It’s also why–with this particular comic book loving girl (my MPDG) and others–I have generally picked up the nickname “Beast.” A huge, bearded guy who bench presses 400+ pounds but ALSO writes poetry, paints, cooks gourmet meals and holds an advanced degree in theology… well, he’s just… Read more »
I think that this is an argument for living empirically. The woman you encounter is a full empirical woman. She isn’t an entity out of feminist (or non-feminist) literature. I thank God that I’ve had the ability to turn off the overarching discourses when living with real people. Some of my friends haven’t been so lucky.
Definitely, definitely… I feel lucky to have learned this lesson about interacting with people and how they act (instead of how they “should” act or how I “should” feel about them) at a fairly young age.
“She challenged me, pushed my boundaries, and made me grow as a person…”
How did she do that? I would to hear that story….
There wasn’t space in a roughly 1000 word article to do so but writing this brought all of those memories WHOOSH-ing back and I will probably tell this story in the future.
The anti-MPDG-in-movies critique has always struck me as being pretty thin. They seem largely to be basically just critiques of “Garden State” and while I’d agree the message of “Garden State” is pretty unrealistic and silly (something along the lines of “don’t worry, soon you’ll meet a MPDG and all your troubles will be over!) all it is really doing is using a stock (MPDG) character to make a stock (bildungsroman) story. Which is what movies do all the time! As I see it, it’s fine to think these sorts of characters are pretty unrealistic and used too much, but… Read more »
Hey, as a writer of genre fiction I personally love tropes and archetypes. The best way to use them lies in subverting, deconstructing and complicating them to tell better stories, but trying to write without them is just… boring.
I think what he was trying to say, was manic pixie dream girls are people, and while there is a trope about them, they still exist much like the movie says they do. And for an individual (who is hopefully the main character in his own story….as all people should be) he benefited from having her in his life, and he hopes to have helped her out too… as she is the main character in her story (manic pixie and all). At least that’s what I think he was shooting for given the title…
You seem to be hitting the nail on the head. I can only see the world as myself and try to be the best me as I can, same as you or her or anyone else. We all act in different roles at different times to different people.
My partner has a minor in Women’s Studies, so I had to smile when I read this (the Alison Bechdel test is awesome) and realized that I’ve absorbed the language…and still have some of the same anxieties in places I perceive as Women’s Spaces. Even if I am welcomed, I am a little worried if I am an intrusive presence. Ditto with a lot of the “manosphere”, don’t fit there either. Thank goodness for GMP, eh?
I’m glad you found you Manic Pixie Dream Girl just when you needed her.
Yeah, it was a slightly weird time in my life. I am also constantly thankful for a space like the GMP where men and women can talk together like, y’know, people (funny notion). I am even grateful to that mentor for introducing me to the notion of power differential analysis which has been a great boon even in the world apart from gender studies.
I’m having trouble understanding what your point is. So, you had a MPDG-type girlfriend, and you liked her. And you read a lot of things about feminism that scared you and prompted a depressive period. Most of manosphere was disappointing as well. OK.
What’s the throwaway here? How is this a defense of the MPDG concept? It still seems like an objectifying stereotype to me.
It’s mostly just a story from the personal files of my own life involving a person who, if written into a work of fiction, would be denigrated as one of these “Manic Pixie Dream Girls” and how different relationships mean different things, at different times, to different people. It doesn’t have to be anything deep or world changing, I guess. But I do agree that often the character is handled in such a way that she is not presented as a real person. Most authors don’t handle any characters well.