The Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

Dear Reader.

you know when you come across an idea or a phrase  that just describes something so perfectly that you realise you've already had the idea in your head but you've just been waiting for a way to describe it.

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a recurring stock character in (mostly indie) films and novels who has all or most of the following characteristics

1. Brightness (this can just mean that they are smarter or more strong willed than anyone else or like something that is bright they just seem to stand out from everything else in the universe)
2. Loveable weirdness (be that an unusual obsession, philosophy or simply a hipster taste in the arts)
3. An ability change the way the moody male protagonist sees the world.
4. They are very pretty, not necessarily in a kind of sexy (maybe even predictable) way, but always seeming like they are way out of the protagonist's league even though she inexplicably is still attracted to him.
5. Like a pixie, being free and wild, they inevitably leave the protagonist returning him to his perhaps even more depressed and moody state.

Famous examples I know of are the character Summer Finn in the film (500) Days of Summer played by Zooey Deschanel (who almost defines the general look and feel of this stock character) and the character Clarisse McClellan in the wonderful book Fahrenheit 451 who is famous (in my life at least) for being the first fictional character from a novel I may have actually fallen in love with.

and the whole thing raises a couple of questions the first is one I can't even start to understand which is "why is it always a girl?" Don't moody girls want to meet weird wonderful imaginative boys who brighten up their lives and change and challenge how they think? Maybe I'm thinking about this all wrong or maybe its because in stories where the male characters are weird or unusual they are also the main character and a bit of an underdog which the female character eventually realises they should have been in love with all along (which is kind of the opposite of the male version).

The second cluster of questions I suppose is probably the questions asked by most of the men who go to see these films or read the books is do these women really exist or are they entirely idealised wish fulfilment fantasies? If they exist, where the hell are they? Because, like pixies, these Girls are almost mythological. Do people not see them simply because other men find them so attractive and appealing that none of them are single any more they just disappear as soon as they're created? (after a year of working in a creative writing course I can tell you this might indeed be true because there are a lot more writer arty types in a relationship than than not) but finally if women are constantly trying to emulate people they see in the media like super models and almost comically dressed celebrity idiots why aren't they emulating the Manic Pixie Dream Girl?

And before you ask I am in no way saying women look like these characters or whatever. Its just women have always had this idealised version of the perfect man who listens and is funny and bakes cakes or whatever, which has all come from the media and similarly I think what a lot of men have been trained to want by the media is someone who's just unbelievably cool.

Coolness by the way is a standard that has fallen out of favour in recent years and its a real shame. Probably because it should never have been used to described the "cool kids" at school because they weren't. My friends are, and much like the pixie I fear for the day when they realise I'm not really one of them.