That Manic Pixie Dream Girl has BPD

hey folks David St I hope you guys are having a fantastic day that manic pixie dream girl if she were real she would have probably borderline personality disorder this is a little bit of a weird writing video it's prompted by uh of course the last live stream we discussed um different kinds of character archetypes and there's this Trope of the mic pixie dream girl that occurs in a lot of um romantic comedies it's a female character a female romantic interest that um whisks a male character onto some Adventure um initiates romance in such a way that it breaks him out of his shell makes him escape from his mundane life um this is a Trope of again romantic comedies and comedies that are I guess more directed towards a male u a male audience and I think it represents a certain kind of male fantasy which is the fantasy of somebody being active on you as a romantic partner rather than what's typical which is the male having to do virtually all of the initiation at least early in a relationship and also there's deeper male fantasies involved with this um with this Trope the fantasy of the woman being really interested in you and who you are and seeing deep down inside who you are and helping you to break out of your shell and to be to like reach your potential and it in a meta way the manic pixie dream girl causes the male character to ascend to be the man that she wants him to be which is not realistic at all it's that's purely a fantasy because that doesn't that kind of thing really doesn't happen in real life as we were talking about this and um we were looking at it on the Discord server which if you're a member of the channel or patreon or kofar or whatever um you should have an ability to get on the Discord server if not message me and and you can hop on and join the discussion and I made the remark that you know if this person were real I think she would have borderline personality disorder and um Hardwick that's his handle uh in the comments and on the Discord server uh he went and looked it up and yeah there's a lot of people who actually have borderline personality disorder complaining about being compared to a manic pixie dream girl being called a manic pixie dream girl which they find dehumanizing as you might imagine that you exist solely for the benefit of another person like you exist to help to make the man into something and that's the story uh role of the manic pixie dream girl uh she's a foil for a passive and boring uh male character and you can imagine that this is probably a common fantasy for a lot of first world men because they have a life that's full of mundane tasks and routine and is exciting to have the idea of an adventure and also exciting to have the idea of somebody coming in and sort of saving them from the boring life and helping them to be the exciting person that they wish they were inside um I think one of the you know there's elements that you can see in lots of different movies that have this female character type even in Tombstone where you have the actor uh kind of getting Wyatt her to not be such a d fellow and to leave his wife she's kind of a manic pixie dream girl but the example that I thought of immediately was Ramona Flowers from Scott Pilgrim Scott Pilgrim um versus the the world or whatever that there's a comic and then there was a movie and she's always changing her hair color uh and that to me when I thought of her that's what I thought was like this is like an idealization of somebody with borderline personality disorder she's there then she's not there uh her hair color is always changing and we're not really thinking about somebody who has BP BPD why would they be like dying their hair all the time and it has to do with a fragile sense of self they're actually suffering they're not exciting they don't want to be exciting rather they have impulses and really really intense emotions that are hard to deal with and if you're a normal or typical person it's not and you are approaching other people assuming they're typical Here Comes this person it can be really explosive in real life it can be like a romantic comedy sort of fantasy happening right before your but what's always missing from the movies is how that person would be in real life what would they be like in two weeks in two months that's when the reality of uh dealing with borderline personality disorder comes into play and I've known several people who have BPD and I've known people who've had to try to have relationships with people with BPD and it's very very challenging because there's this cycle of um like idealization like I love this person this is the best person ever and then it's followed by like a crash where all of those feelings somehow evaporate you don't understand why you felt that about that person there may be really impulsive behavior because of that uh extreme emotion and then later it evaporates and you don't you may feel intense shame if you have BPD about impulsive decisions you might have made not only that but you won't understand why you made the decisions like they were made by a different person so the dying of the hair is an outward sign of who who am I I don't have a firm identity and my identity feels uncertain I'm not certain of who I am I need to discover who I am I need to find myself um those are things that uh might be associated with someone with BPD and I see them in this character so what you see is like no normal person in real life would just exist to fly around and be erratic and be impulsive rather their life would be full of mundane normal tasks that they have to do in order to live just like the rest of us um so like I had a friend who was in a relationship with someone with BPD well it was a really explosive uh romance and he was like Blown Away by like you know the intense emotion this person like loves you they love everything about you you know they are you know there's maybe an intense like sexual element that happens and then in this case that I'm thinking of the person just ghosted him she disappeared she wouldn't even pick up the phone he had to break up with her they were supposedly boyfriend and girlfriend he had to break up with her via text message because all of those feelings evaporated suddenly and and she had to felt intense shame like she had introduced him to her family you know she was probably really suffering right is my point but it's it's behavior that is really strange if you are coming in as a typical person uh you just it's not going to make any sense to you it's that's why it's like pretty much impossible to have a a relationship with somebody with BPD especially if they're not like getting treatment or anything for it um so yeah I bring this up because a lot of times when we think about characters if you start to think deeply about um who they would be in real life the fantasy starts to break down a lot think of James Bond James Bond would be someone that um you know might have might be someone you wouldn't actually want to know in real life they might have antisocial personality disorder or something like that they're deeply manipulative they have an extreme distance from from their own feelings right they're not a uh they're a person that doesn't feel guilt or Shame about doing certain things right like James Bond is maybe attractive to women because he's got the impulsivity and the danger and the things that the man in the romantic comedy wants to have in himself and the manic pixie dream girl helps him have those things um but James Bond just has him but if you were to have a James Bond in real life it might be you know like living with someone narcissistic personality it might be just like hell like it might be terrible to try to live with someone like James Bond so there's a difference between our fantasies and what characters uh actually would be in real life like a fantasy exists to fulfill uh the emotional needs of the reader and usually the reader kind of looking at a character as and and empathizing with that character thinking about what they it would be like if they were that character and therefore experiencing um the fantasy right fantasies exist to fulfill the emotional needs of the reader they don't exist to be realistic or to represent real life because the truth is if you had you know if you met a Romona flowers yeah she might seem intensely interesting to you but the reality of trying to have a relationship with that person might be hellish because she has borderline personality disorder and is like deeply Disturbed perhaps um those sorts of things like and that's why I think of Scott Pilgrim as like this is like an idealization of of BPD like you're only trying to focus on the good parts and you're not really understanding that that person might be like experiencing horrible suffering because of behavior that they feels like out of control that they can't control their own behavior so yeah there's fantasies and realities you notice that women's romance novels will have ah which hot guy am I going to pick it's like like that like that ever happens in real life um or you know male fantasies of having two women fighting over them it's like when does that really happen in real life it's it's not a very realistic thing it's a fantasy about what your emotional needs are so the female picking between two men who desire her and having that selection fantasy is about I am so valuable and attractive that men will kill for me I wish I was right instead I have to settle for men who are are average right the male fantasy I'm so so attracted that multiple women like I can have a herum of women that's why the male fantasy is a Herm it's like I'm so high status that I can be you know I can basically be polygamous that's the male fantasy for that so that they have like all the things they want variety plus access to sex plus status that gets you more variety and more access to sex so male fantasies and female fantasies kind of shoot past each other based on what the emotional needs of the of the um viewer or the reader are and so in the case of romantic comedies that have a manic pixie dream girl it's more about the male fantasy of escaping the mundane and becoming a better man becoming the kind of man that the manic P pixie dream girl would actually want which is kind of a reversal of how real life actually would end up working and it's definitely different from how real life with a kind of person like that a person that had that kind of explosive attraction to you and then impulsivity would then have the negative cycle that happens later and that would be really hard to deal with so keep that stuff in mind when you're thinking about tropes and you're thinking about characters that they may serve to fulfill a viewer or a reader's fantasy and they're really not would not work out in real life they just would not be something or someone that you would uh be able to just easily end up having a romantic relationship with so anyway leaving your thoughts down below about the manic pixie dream girl or anything else borderline personality disorder or maybe you know the fact that any kind of character especially a foil character because the manic pixie dream girl is not the protagonist she's a secondary character she's the romantic interest character for a male character and is therefore a foil to him like what most Beast story romances are the the female or the male character they're they start off as a strong foil and then they resolve their differences in some way to be able to matriculate a romance the male character is boring the female character is exciting the male character has to be more exciting they can matriculate the romance right the uh if you're going to reverse it and it's a female character and a male character right the male character is too wild and rebellious and he has to be tamed and then the female can matriculate the relationship after using his his masculinity basically taking his masculinity and capturing it and turning it outward into the world for her benefit that's the way that you know those sorts of fantasies end up working for males and females respectively um so anyway leave me your thoughts about those below it's about a certain kind of storywriting and I think it's important to just think of you know this wasn't this isn't really real life right this is something that's for the reader and wouldn't be very realistic and if we're going to get really realistic we'd end up writing a very different story from a romantic comedy you'd end up writing something that is a lot more dramatic because the reality would be so much harder harder to deal with so take it easy and I'll see you all next time of course if you join my patreon and any other way to support me you get ke Relic creativity help you establish and maintain your creative process to finish your projects and get them out and I just put out a live album It's already on the channel but you can you can get it at Zol online.com that's just like two hours of you know the most liked live stuff I did last year on the music channel so let me let me know what you think down below about this topic and I will see you all next time

Channel: David Stewart

Views: 4,415

Keywords: movies, books, fantasy, science fiction, writing, publishing

Id: 0BVRQv3PqVk

Length: 13min 39sec (819 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 14 2024