Manic Pixie Dream Girl

A Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG) is a stock character type in fiction, usually depicted as a young woman with eccentric personality quirks who serves as the romantic interest for a male protagonist.

[5] In December 2012, Slate's Aisha Harris posited that "critiques of the MPDG may have become more common than the archetype itself," suggesting that filmmakers had been forced to become "self-aware about such characters" and that the trope had largely disappeared from film.

Bartyzel argues that "'Manic Pixie Dream Girl' was useful when it commented on the superficiality of female characterizations in male-dominated journeys, but it has since devolved into a pejorative way to deride unique women in fiction and reality".

[8] In July 2014, writing for Salon, Rabin stated that the term "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" had frequently been deployed in ways that are sexist and had become as much of a cliché as the trope itself.

[11] A male version of this trope, the Manic Pixie Dream Boy or Manic Pixie Dream Guy, was found in Augustus Waters from the film version of The Fault in Our Stars (2014); he was given this title in a 2014 Vulture article, in which Matt Patches stated, "he's a bad boy, he's a sweetheart, he's a dumb jock, he's a nerd, he's a philosopher, he's a poet, he's a victim, he's a survivor, he's everything everyone wants in their lives, and he's a fallacious notion of what we can actually have in our lives.

The female protagonists of these shows marry men (Adam Scott's Ben Wyatt and James Marsden's Criss Chros, respectively), who, according to a 2012 Grantland article, "patiently [tamp] down her stubbornness and temper while appreciating her quirks, helping her to become her best possible self.