Manic Pixie Dream Girls

Wikipedia description

TV Tropes description

List of Manic Pixie Dream Girls

No, this is not a thing I pulled out of my butt. It's a term coined to describe the character type of the kind of girl who's free-spirited and teaches stuffy-shirted guys to lighten up and live a little.

Any thoughts about this, other than you might be glad somebody gave this trope a name?

 

More into suicide girls.

 

I think TV Tropes hits it on the head when they say the MPDG is a sub-trope of the Blithe Spirit, only it is easy to look askance at the MPDG because she doesn't have much character outside of her relation to the hero.

I think Portman's character in Garden State was more of a mainline Blithe Spirit than a MPDG. It was pretty clear she had a life outside of the nebish protagonist.

Sweet November was kind of weird, it's clear that Theron's character has a life outside the protagonist, but they spend the movie making it irrelevant.

 

Overlord.........you dare?

 

So like Clementine in Eternal Sunshine?

 

Dare what?

 

Can't believe that stupid movie with Ben Stiller and Jennifer Anniston from a few years back didn't make the list. It's much more of a textbook fit than some of those.

 

I had to think about if for a few minutes because I liked Spotless Mind, but yeah. Part of that may just be that we see the entire movie from the guy's self centered perspective, so maybe that could just be an artifact of how the story was told, and Clementine is really a Blithe Spirit; the movie doesn't do a great deal to support that position (even Dunst's character had more development) but it's clear she has friends other than the guy.

I haven't seen Along came Polly, but yeah from the preview I saw, MPDG and toilet humor seemed to be that movie's entire reason for being.