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Coined in 2007 by film critic Nathan Rabin, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG) is a quirky, ethereal figure who exists merely as a tool for self-actualisation and has no narrative purpose beyond that of enriching the life of an apathetic, White, male, cisgender, heterosexual, middle-class protagonist. Despite her pervasiveness across film and television, popular culture, and literature – particularly contemporary YA fiction such as John Green’s Looking for Alaska (2005) – the Pixie remains a wholly understudied figure. To address this gap in the field, this article offers a narrative model for a novel type I call ‘MPDGYA’, a pattern I have identified across YA texts, all either published or set in the US, in which the Pixie features. I argue that this five-stage model can not only be used to understand and analyse typical Pixie texts, but can also function, for example, as a means of assessing attempts to challenge or intervene in MPDG discourse. To demonstrate this, the article contains two case studies: Robyn Schneider’s The Beginning of Everything (2013), exemplary of a typical Pixie novel, and Gretchen McNeil’s I’m Not Your Manic Pixie Dream Girl (2016), an interventionist text. In engaging with two novels at either end of the Pixie discourse spectrum, my work here argues that the MPDGYA model lays important groundwork not only for research opportunities in the field of YA studies, but for the emergence of collaborative and intersectional approaches to the Pixie – and the texts in which she appears – across multiple disciplines.

Seven years ago, James MacDowell (2010) detected a new aesthetic and narrative sensitivity pertaining to American independent cinema, characterized by a balance between ironic distance and emotional sincerity. Since the publication of McDowell’s article, the word quirky became quickly associated with the works of directors such as Jim Jarmusch, Wes Anderson or Michel Gondry, turning into a catchphrase that has been used to describe every film protagonized by eccentric characters, utilizing a perfectionist visual language, and endowed with a certain naïveté in the tone and treatment of pathetic situations. These productions appeal to the sentimentality of a millennial audience that is no longer as cynical or politically engaged as their predecessors; in fact, the narrative and formal transgressions that are typical of quirky productions tend to stay on the surface, never questioning issues of gender, race, or class. In this sense, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl stereotype constitutes a perfect example of the quirky aesthetics; its ambivalent relationship with postfeminist ideologies, incorporating a neoliberal sexual freedom to a traditional performance of femininity becomes a sign of identity rather than a political stance, while the stereotype’s childish look and naive attitude respond to the exaltation of ingenuity that happens in quirky. On the other hand, the fact that typical Manic Pixie Dream Girls such as Summer ([500] Days of Summer) or Ruby Sparks are more defined in terms of their cultural preferences and outfits than by their fears or ambitions also aligns with the postmodern prevalence of the form that characterizes quirky productions.