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Main Manic Pixie Dream Girl Discussion
One is here
Is Giselle from Enchanted really a MPDG? She seems a little more of a classic Mary Sue parody than a MPDG. The whole point of a MPDG is that she isn't the main character, but only exists to help out the main character. Giselle is the main character of her movie, of course.
Unknown Troper 72.224.133.152 went through and asterisked out all instances of "mad" or "ship" (ie., two each). I'm fixing it, of course, but it seems just bizarre enough to have happened for a reason and I thought I'd ask.
Maybe Unknown Troper is just a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, full of wacky quirks and idiosyncracies, like a complete antipathy towards the words "mad" and "ship".
Removed this line:
Not only is the bit about 'Thank Heaven' unnecessary, but the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope is not the "whole basis" for the film. The film is just as much about Gigi growing up, and growing out of her role of being a shallow, self-centered child (while still retaining her essential spirit), as it is about Gaston realizing he wants more in a companion than a pretty face and a bit of fun.
Is it just me, or is seeing a spoiler tag at the end of an example a better indication that the character dies than actually highlighting the spoiler tag?
Iffy examples:
?
Anime & Manga
- Milly Ashford of Code Geass is a bit of a subversion given her unrequited crush on Lelouch. Nonetheless, she uses her powers as Student Council President to pair up Lelouch and Shirley, and finally succeeds at the end of Cupid's Day. The very next episode, Shirley is murdered.
- The title character of Nodame Cantabile, though her status as a citizen of Cloud Cuckooland is as much a liability to herself as an asset.
- Nino from Arakawa Under The Bridge. And she's one of the saner ones amongst her folks.
- In Princess Tutu, the protagonist is deconstruction she wasn't the chosen one of the boy's heart of this to Mythoand in a more straight form to Fakir, well kind of ...[1]?
- Penny Century ("Wotta name. Wotta phenomenon") from Love And Rockets.
- Hermine in Hesse's Der Steppenwolf.
- Alice from Twilight is SO a MPDG, to the point that she literally uses Bella as a doll, kisses everyone, sprints and dances instead of walks, etc. To be fair she's already dead.
- Actually, Edward Cullen is more morbid than manic, but he sort of plays the role for Bella.
- Leslie from Bridge To Terabithia. And then ... yes, you guessed it. She dies.
- (Paper Towns example)
- John Green is fond of this trope: Alaska of Looking For Alaska and Lindsey Lee Wills of An Abundance Of Katherines exemplify this trope to varying degrees throughout this novel.
- Amy Pond, companion to the 11th Doctor in BBC's Doctor Who may qualify. Though the Doctor would be her Raggedy Bonkers In A Box Alien, and he would be alone in that trope.
- In Dollhouse, Topher makes himself one of these to play with every year on his birthday.
- Krysten Ritter is this in just about every role she has had:
- Lucy in Gilmore Girls
- Allison in Til Death
- Gia in Veronica Mars
- Carol Rhodes in Gossip Girl
- Natasha seems to be one for Andrei and Pierre in the 1972 miniseries version of War and Peace.
- Punky Brewster is a platonic version of this for Henry Warnimont.
- Taylor Townsend is this for Ryan on The O.C.
- Variants are present, or at least played with, in other plays of the same era. In August Strindberg's Miss Julie and arguably Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (the latter is a much darker variant, as Hedda is downright vicious at times), the titular characters at least resemble the type, but their free-spirited ways have severe consequences: both plays end with the title character's suicide. Or they're critiques of 19th Century gender roles. Your Mileage May Vary.
- Rent is very fond of this trope. Mimi and Maureen are both MPDGs for brooding Roger and uptight Joanne, respectively. And then there's Angel, who acts as MPDG for the entire group as Collins is quite the free spirit himself.
- Joanne, however, winds up more and more annoyed with Maureen as the show goes on, culminating in the duet "Take Me Or Leave Me" where they hash out their incompatible differences.
- By the end, however, it seems they've learned to accept those differences.
- Goldie Hawn as Toni in Cactus Flower.
- Goldie Hawn as Marion in There's a Girl in My Soup.
- Goldie Hawn as Dawn Divine in $.
- Goldie Hawn as Jill in Butterflies Are Free.
- Goldie Hawn as Lou Jean in The Sugarland Express.
- Goldie Hawn as Oktyabrina in The Girl from Petrovka.
- Goldie Hawn as Jill in Shampoo.
- Goldie Hawn as Gloria Mundy in Foul Play.
- Judy Maxwell in What's Up, Doc?.
- Ariel (Ann-Margret) in Grumpy Old Men.
- JenniferAniston's character Polly in Along Came Polly.
- Zach Braff is a magnet for Manic Pixie Dream Girls. Some of the women who taught him how to love:
- Natalie Portman in Garden State.
- Heather Graham on Scrubs.
- Rachel Bilson in The Last Kiss, who is something of a subversion in that he tires of her immaturity and returns to his pregnant girlfriend.
- Young Winona Ryder heals Richard Gere's broken heart in Autumn in New York. And then she dies.
- Charlize Theron changes Keanu Reeves's life forever in Sweet November. And then she dies.
- Juliette Lewis' character in What's Eating Gilbert Grape? may qualify as this.
- Sandra Bullock in Forces of Nature. Subverted in that Ben Affleck goes back to his fiancee at the end.
- Arguably, Maria in The Sound Of Music, at least initially.
- Most definitely (descriptions of) Evan Rachel Wood's runaway Southern girl, Melodie, in Whatever Works, especially considering the man she's influencing is ultimate misanthrope Larry David (they get married).
- This might qualify as a partial subversion, since Yelnikoff changes her more than she changes him.
- The wacky character SanDeE* played by Sarah Jessica Parker in the Steve Martin movie L.A.Story.
- Izzy of Total Drama Island is a lot like this, but without the romantic part; she didn't get a love interest until more than halfway through the first season, and she's paired off with Owen, a cheerful but dim-witted Big Eater. And perhaps more realistically than most of these examples, their relationship isn't stable—-while he has a continual crush on her, Izzy is fickle, resulting in a somewhat off-and-on romance.
I'll work on finding a new quote to demonstrate the MPDG concept, but this old one has to go. The one and only page quote for a trope shouldn't be a character furiously railing about them not being that trope. O.o
Looking on the Quotes page, the Isaac Asimov or Ricky Martin one would both work better as straight examples, rather than the bitter deconstruction of the Eternal Sunshine example (which really doesn't demonstrate the character type at all). The Ricky Martin one's really the most straightforward, but La Vida Loca is also Deader Than Disco, so I get the feeling listing it would just spark a quote-swapping frenzy. So Isaac Asimov it is!
One of Haruhi's more upbeat "save the world by overloading it with fun" rants might work even better, but that'd probably trigger still more of a backlash, even if she really is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
To whoever removed Shirley Maclaine's character from Billy Wilder's night perfect classic The Apartment from the example list: THANK YOU. Her character was so much more in the film than a mere love interest for Lemmon's, and the AV Club list really did a disservice to her and one of the most perfect movies ever made by including it.
Here are the questionable examples I deleted. I'll explain each deletion, underneath each:
- Arguably one of the oldest ones in the book. Eve is this for Adam in the first chapter of the Bible. Even does the petty crime thing.
- Eve represents lots of things, but not the kind of carefree character of a Manic Pixie.
- It might not count, but a character in one of the X-wing novels was once in love with an actress who played manic pixie dream girls, and was shocked to learn that she was married and had children. This comes to bear on his crush on a squadronmate, as he learns to accept that she's more than a pretty face.
- It doesn't count.
- A gender-inverted, not-quite-romantic version of this trope features heavily in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland; Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter is, by and large, there to help Alice figure out what's really important in her life, and then he gets left behind in Wonderland, while she goes on to become a successful businesswoman.
- Male, not romantic interest, no petty crimes, it just doesn't fit.
- In Firefly the insanely happy Wrench Wench Kaylee to Fish Out Of Water Simon, a stuffy, fugitive, kid genius doctor.
- She's a happy girl but she isn't
- Although she's more of a Genki Girl, Lorelai Gilmore often shows shades of this whenever she's talking to Luke.
- She isn't one.
- Subverted in Don Quixote. The love interest Aldonza is often mused about by the titular character as beautiful and deeply attractive, though she is a plain peasant girl who he has only seen in passing on occasion. Further subverted in that she ends up neither with him, nor dead.
- Subversions of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl are.... a regular girl? It just doesn't fit, for me.
- Dory in Finding Nemo. While, a romantic relationship with Marlin isn't suggested, she does teach him to love in a paternal way: the creators of the film stated on the DVD's audio commentary that she was meant to be a surrogate child figure for Marlin while he tried to find his own son.
- She's brain damaged, not manic.
Why does it mention leonardo di caprio in the titanic hes hardly manic. i get that there is a double standard but thats hardly an example.
Took Amelie off because by virtue of the film being about Amelie's own life, which eventually deals with her having the courage to pursue a guy she has a crush on but has trouble expressing, she cannot be a one-dimensional quirky love interest that serves no purpose except to make a male main character's life exciting.
So, it strikes me that a disproportionate chunk of the examples in the film section are listed as subversions, aversions, deconstructions, and/or uniquely justifiable partial examples, when the normal definition of the trope broad enough for them to qualify as straight examples.
Our current description might be giving people the impression that it's a subversion or aversion if a Manic Pixie Dream Girl love story doesn't end in death or happily ever after. It isn't. "Too free spirited to ever be tied down" is an extremely common MPDG characterisitic, and a MPDG pulling out some "eccentric" reason why she can't stay with the protagonist in the closing moments of the film is a standard method of wrapping these sorts of stories up — the girl's purpose is fulfilled once she's turned the male protagonist's life around, so off she goes.
Secondly, it's not a subversion or aversion just because the MPGD has issues of her own, or learns something from the male protagonist in the end. It's common for a MPDG to have One Big Issue of her own which is confessed somewhere late in the second reel, then forgiven/forgotten/fixed/healed by the power of love; these are only treated to a significant amount of screen time if they're causing problems in the relationship though.
What happened to the trope namer notification? And why are the first examples not at the top? Why is an example I think is younger than the page at the top of its section?
Under Video Games
Mystic Maya fits the role of MPDG to Phoenix Wright in the Ace Attourney series.
In what way is Jess from New Girl a MPDG? She's basically the opposite: a woman who is a mess and needs help getting her life together and can't help anyone with their problems, because hers have destroyed her.
Could we consider the Lorelai and Rory from Gilmore Girls MPD Gs? They seem to follow the mold.