Manic Pixie Dream Girl

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a stock character in fiction: a young woman of eccentric, quirky personality who serves as the romantic interest of an everyman protagonist and exists mainly to lift his spirits and teach him lessons about life. The film critic Nathan Rabin coined the term in 2007 while writing for The A.V. Club about Kirsten Dunst's character in the film Elizabethtown, and he named Natalie Portman's role in Garden State as another prime example. Critics have applied the label to characters from Bringing Up Baby (1938) to Daisy Jones & The Six (2023), while others, including the actress Zooey Deschanel and Rabin himself, have objected that it is reductive or sexist. A male counterpart, the Manic Pixie Dream Boy, has also been identified.