dating a "quirky" girl

long before I even started making YouTube videos I've been on ironically watching and enjoying rom-coms romance movies you know stories about boy meets girl they fall in love oh oh the world's keeping them apart but it's okay in the end because true love yippee in watching as many of these movies as I have which I'm sure is way too many for my own good one constant trope or character archetype that shows up quite regularly even now is the Manic Pixie dream girl [Music] now I have to be honest I used to eat up these stories so much when I was younger and by younger really I just mean like up until a couple years ago that is the story of this girl who's so full of life always happy and exciting and for some inexplicable reason she chooses me of all people so that was fun but the more I thought about it and the older I've become maybe not wiser but older all the same I really started wondering about Manic Pixie dream girls and and sometimes manic Incubus dream boys I guess but for the sake of this video I'm just gonna focus on the former I suppose we should probably define what Manic Pixie dream girl actually means just so we're all on the same page the term was first introduced in 2007 when Nathan Raven reviewed that old Kirsten Dunst Orlando Bloom classic Elizabethtown in his review he described Kirsten Dunst character as a bubbly shallow cinematic creature aka the Manic Pixie dream girl who exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer directors now the idea of this character trope has probably been around since the history of time really a girl who's constantly happy excited about life quirky doing whatever she wants whenever she wants just constantly given middle fingers to societal expectations on a surface level this sounds like a pretty great thing write a story about a girl who just is herself all the time doesn't care what people think or how she's supposed to act look you can throw me out if you want to but you look so cozy in here and you're decorated friend had gone home and was beginning to get a bit cooled out there on the virus Kate and I always heard people in the heart never get to know their neighbors we see this in movies like Breakfast at Tiffany's 500 days of summer all the way up to the recent Disney Plus movie star girl but when you start pulling back on the surface layer of these stories it really kind of starts to fall apart because movies about Manic Pixie dream girls are never actually movies about Manic Pixie dream girls these movies always start off with the first ingredient a sad boy like Leo from star girl Tom from 500 days of summer or me from like six months ago and right then I knew if I wanted to survive it was better to lay low I was gonna have to be just like everybody else no one would see me no one would hear me I was going to disappear the boy grew up believing that he'd never truly be happy until the day he met the one why are they sad well it's because life is hard no one understands me love is a lie I didn't get any Valentine's and I gave one to Jenna but then I saw it in the garbage can after fourth period so looks like it's brooding time first we have the sad boy and the only thing that can fix him turns out is when the new girl shows up at school or work or whatever [Music] and immediately he's attracted to this girl because she represents everything he wishes he was happy spontaneous quirky can pull off bright red overalls I mean come on what these stories almost always end up being about is how this girl comes into this boy's life and just by being herself and existing she gives him confidence helps him find purpose or interest in life maybe she gives him his first kiss or something that's really all he needed the whole time the job of the Manic Pixie dream girl is to fix the sad boy and lead him to wherever he's supposed to go to be whoever he's supposed to be and then disappear just as suddenly as she appeared in the first place now an interesting little thought experiment I did was comparing this to I guess like the girl version of the same fantasy let's take a look at Twilight for example we start off with a lonely brooding misunderstood sad girl and we know all this about her because she wears Chuck Taylors I would miss Phoenix I'd miss the heat I would miss my loving erratic harebrained mother but they want to go on the road so I'm gonna spend some time with my dad and this would be a good thing I think so what happens to her well the first day of school she catches the eye of the superhot every girl wants him sad brooding guy who helps her transform into a completely different but better version of herself right nope once again it's the girls job to transform the boy to help him stop doing whatever bad things he's doing and turn him into the guy she wants him to be say it vampire are you afraid no what do we eat you owner be in both of these scenarios the fantasy is about changing the boy into someone else get more confidence dress better learn how to play more than one song on the guitar maybe don't stare so much you get the idea boys have to change girls get to be themselves boys need to be fixed girls need a project it assumes that all change must come externally a girl's job is to change a boy and a boy cannot change or improve on his own I don't know matter I think is official I'm in love with summer I love her smile I love her hair her knees I love this heart-shaped birthmark she has on her neck I love the way she sometimes licks her lips before she talks of the sound of her life now one key difference in these fantasies I noticed is that in the girl version the newly-minted perfect boyfriend gives up his old life to be with her forever whereas the Manic Pixie dream girl more often than not somehow disappears from the boy's life by moving away or breaking up with him or something he should have told me [Music] wedding dancing well he hadn't asked me but he was in your life yeah so why did you dance with me you just do what you want don't you and just like that she was gone her mom sold the house I imagine they were on the road somewhere I suppose one reason for this is because being with a Manic Pixie dream girl for an extended period of time would probably not be a great relationship to begin I mean if the person you're with is just always being quirky and doing whatever they want whenever they want I'm sure that can be fun at the beginning every day is exciting and you never really know what's gonna happen but in the long run can you really base a relationship off of uncertainty and doing everything on a whim in every relationship whether romantic or platonic there has to be a certain level of compromise now too much of this and beginning into a different problem but having a relationship based on the idea of I do whatever I want and you have to deal with it or leave doesn't really seem like a happily ever after kind of thing no don't pull that with me don't even try it this is not how you treat your friend kissing in the copy room holding hands in Ikea I like you Tom I just don't want to well you're not the only one who gets to say in this I do too now to be fair in 500 days of summer we come to find out that tom is kind of like the bad guy the movie but you get what I'm saying I'm not gonna let you do this you're not only I'm in love with you so what so what so plenty no gonna let anyone put me in a cage I don't want to put you in a cage I want to love you the same thing this whole idea of the quirky Manic Pixie dream person or whatever at its core really just kind of seems like glorified selfishness it allows the person to shrug off all responsibility and empathy for how their actions are affecting people around them and if you bring this up to her and express how her actions are making you feel she'll brush you off with something like well this is just who I am so deal with it or find someone else now of course there are countless nuances to all these situations and it would probably take many hours to dive into all of them and certainly there's nothing wrong with just being yourself up to a point of course everyone is different and unique in their own way and being in any relationship with anyone has its ups and downs but when being yours supersedes basic human decency and respect for people and their time I'm not sure this is really something you should aspire to be or fantasize about now obviously nothing I've said in this video is particularly unique or revolutionary or whatever because you know this people have been sort of dissecting and talking about this whole Manic Pixie dream girl trope whatever for like a long time but in watching this star girl movie on Disney Plus and then I went back and I watched 500 A's a summer and then Breakfast at Tiffany's and like just kind of looking at this whole quirky girlfriend Manic Pixie type of whatever trope and like there's a lot of discourse about the trope itself and how like you know no woman would ever be like this and it's completely unrealistic that's all very true but I wanted to kind of look at it a little bit from the guy's perspective the way this entire trope portrays the man like that the guy is also something that like no one should fantasize about because the whole point of this trope is it assumes the guy is just such a worthless schlub that he can't do anything on his own and she needs like a literal magical creature to like fix his life you know I mean but it's portrayed in this sort of like realistic almost attainable way and like looking at this trope from the guys perspective or the girls perspective like no girl wants to be with a guy who is just this like completely pathetic like I can't do anything on my own you know obviously the fantasy is that girls want to fix guys but I feel like in real life that gets really old really quick and also in the perverse it's like trying to have a relationship with someone who lives their entire life based on whatever they feel like doing in the moment they have no sense of like responsibility or like they can't really see outside of their own head type of thing like like who would ever want to be in a relationship with someone like that you know I mean where it's like well you're every day you're just like well is she gonna remember I exist today or like everything she said yesterday that like did she mean it or was that just how she felt at the moment and today she feels different like being in that relationship would make you so neurotic like there's nothing desirable about either of these positions oh so the whole trope in and of itself completely falls apart but anyway thanks watch everybody it's good to do a video essay especially with recent events and stuff trying to sit down and write a bunch of jokes about stuff is really kind of difficult and it feels a little bit weird so I kind of wanted to be a little more serious I'm not subscribed go ahead and subscribe I don't do video essays too often but I mean every now and then you get one and also follow me on Twitter anyway everybody have a great day and I'll see you all next time

Channel: Alex Meyers

Views: 2,084,990

Rating: 4.955533 out of 5

Keywords: alex meyers, alex myers, alex mayers, stargirl, stargirl disney plus

Id: _Gro6hVDE94

Length: 10min 47sec (647 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 03 2020