Paper Towns Is An Amazing Deconstruction Of The Manic Pixie Dream Girl Trope.

Paper Towns is an amazing deconstruction of the manic pixie dream girl trope.

I don’t understand how anyone could read “The fundamental mistake I had always made…was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl,” and not understand that the whole of point the book is that Margo is not a mpdg and that Q is wrong for treating her like one. The whole of the book is that Margo wanted to cultivate this image and persona but ultimately it just makes her feel worse.

This quote from Margo summarizes a lot of it: “I was the flimsy-foldable person, not everyone else. And here’s the thing about it. People love the idea of a paper girl. They always have…Because it’s kind of great, being an idea that everybody likes. But I could never be the idea to myself, not all the way.”

Growing up, I felt this so much. All of this pressure to be funny and smart and pretty and perfect, but the truth is that no one can be all of those things all the time. We are all people, with all of the complexity that that entails. When we pretend not to be, we lose out on having people love us for all the parts of ourselves.

So much of it is related to being a woman too. This pressure to make ourselves smaller so that we can be a supporting character. Every time I show a man that I know something he doesn’t, I can feel how uncomfortable (at best) and angry (more likely) they are. Paper towns is a great reminder that I am not here for anyone else’s development. I am my own story.

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manic pixie dream girl John Green paper towns margo roth spiegelman mpdg

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