From Katherine Hepburn’s character in Bringing Up Baby to Kaori Miyazono in Your Lie in April, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl has become a staple in not only small independent movies but also big-budget, studio films. The term Manic Pixie Dream Girl was first coined by film critic Nathan Rabin after studying Kirsten Dunst’s character in the film ‘Elizabethtown’. A ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ was described by Rabin as “that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”.

Although Nathan Rabin now regrets coining the term, there are many truths in the phrase. In Bringing up Baby, Kathrine Hepburn’s character Susan Vance is not like ‘other girls’ – she plays golf, and has a pet leopard named ‘Baby’. In Your Lie in April, Kaori Miyazono is a prodigy violinist, sent to ‘fix’ the main character Kousei Arima. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is ‘the perfect girl’ not too loud, or shy for that matter, not too smart, but not an airhead, and of course, the MPDG is solely there for the purpose of helping the male protagonist.

However, in recent years ‘The Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ seems to be stepping out of fiction and into reality; during the early 2010s, the ‘Tumblr Girl’ aesthetic became a widely sort after persona for teenage girls. Features of the ‘Tumblr Girl’ aesthetic included a messy bun, spiked ankle boots, high-waisted skater skirts, and most importantly a grunge outlook on life. An aesthetic fuelled by arguably misogynistic ideology became an almost replica of the ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ aesthetic. Although many of the teens who took part in the ‘Tumblr Girl’ movement believed it advocated for more self-assertive teenage girls and that the ‘Tumblr Girl’ served as an aspirational figure for other girls on the social media app at the height of the movement to look up to, people like G-Eazy used the term as a way to put down young woman, describing Tumblr Girls in one of his songs as shallow and attention-seeking.

 While the popularity of the ‘Tumblr Girl’ did eventually die down, there appears to be a new ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ persona on the rise, emerging in the form of overly read Sylvia Plath, crystals, incense, and Vivienne Westwood pearl chokers. The new persona, fuelled by an ever-growing pressure from social media to be the ‘it-girl’, has had an almost completely negative effect on the teenagers and young women perusing this new aesthetic. An identity that in recent months has seen an uptake in pro-ana (a way of promoting eating disorders) conversations and increasingly self-deprecating ideology has seemingly not come under any critical scrutiny. Although the new persona does not yet have a name, I believe that when it does garner a title, the title must be as wicked as the harm it causes the teenagers and young women it has trapped in its snare. So, is the ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ really the ‘It-Girl’ or is she just a victim of her own success?