How John Green Created A Character With Depth In The Era Of The ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’

“You don’t sound like you’re in high school,” a convenience store attendant tells Alaska (Kristine Froseth) in the opening episode of Looking for Alaska, the Stan series based on the award-winning John Green novel.

“And that,” she responds with a knowing smile, “is the whole point”.

Alaska, in this scenario, is just trying to buy alcohol, but the exchange feels like a cheeky nod to the frequent criticism John Green receives about his hyper-aware, hyper-articulate teen characters: “What actual teens talk like this?!”

But the appeal of John Green, and the reason his characters have resonated with hundreds of thousands of teens (past and present) around the world, is that he doesn’t think teens are stupid. He takes them as seriously as they take themselves – and as they deserve to be taken, but too often aren’t, by the wider world.

Green’s characters are smart – they use big words, talk about lofty ideas, and yes, occasionally do extremely pretentious things (Augustus Waters’ metaphorical cigarette in The Fault in Our Stars says hi). But here’s the crucial part that makes all of this work: these characters also feel incredibly real.

There are teens who talk and act like the characters in a John Green novel. A lot of them are the ones who are reading John Green novels. The truth that Green recognises and conveys in his books is that teens think and feel incredibly deeply. To be a teen is to be in-between; you’re caught between childhood and adulthood, your own small world and the big wide one you’re about to step into, you’re simultaneously experiencing a multitude of lasts and firsts. It’s a complicated labyrinth to navigate, and Green explores this in a way that feels authentic and free from condescension.

This labyrinth is at the core of Looking for Alaska – quite literally (well, more metaphorically, but you know what I mean). The main character, Miles ‘Pudge’ Halter (Charlie Plummer), is obsessed with famous last words, and when he meets Alaska at his new boarding school, she tells him Simón Bolívar’s: “Damn it. How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?!” Alaska makes a deal with Pudge: she’ll help him get laid if he can help her figure out what those words – what the labyrinth – means.

Alaska and Pudge’s deal encapsulates the two pillars of teenagehood: the quest for meaning and being incredibly horny. It also sets up their relationship as transactional but, critically, in a way that goes both ways rather than one. This becomes significant particularly when viewing the character of Alaska, who is, as Green says himself, arguably the main character of the story, despite it being framed through Pudge’s point of view.

On the surface level, it’d be far too easy to dismiss Alaska as a token Manic Pixie Dream Girl. We know her through Pudge’s narration, and to him she is that archetype. He romanticises her, idealises her, sees her as the key to adventure and whimsy and escape from his mundane, lonely existence. She’s quirky and cool; profound and mysterious; beautiful and damaged.

It’s the kind of dynamic that we’ve seen hundreds of times before. It’s 2019 and the idea of still seeing Manic Pixie Dream Girls in pop culture is incredibly boring and tiresome; it’s a trope that reduces female characters to one-dimensional cutouts who exist purely for the male character’s benefit. But here’s the thing: Looking for Alaska doesn’t do this. In fact, it actively pushes against the idea.

Both in the book and the show, Pudge’s view of Alaska is actually a character flaw – one that’s explicitly called out by other characters. The real Alaska exists separately from the fantasy version Pudge has in his mind. While Alaska herself occasionally leans into it for her own benefit, she also places boundaries around it. She makes it clear that she doesn’t exist for Pudge; her world doesn’t revolve around him, and she has a rich interior life that he can’t possibly understand – something which speaks to his own failings and shallowness, not hers.

While it’s all there in Green’s novel, it’s even more clear in the show, which benefits from being untethered from Pudge’s first-person point of view. As an audience, we’re introduced to Alaska before Pudge is, allowing us to get to know her and see her as a character in her own right, not one that exists in relation to him.

Even when Pudge meets her, the camera first takes in her bedroom and all its artefacts – piles and piles of books, posters, photos – as we hear Alaska’s voiceover talking about a funny sexual encounter, before panning to Alaska herself. The focus is on the externalisation of Alaska’s internal life – or at least a small part of it, as we learn through the series’ progression.

While Pudge is interested in Alaska for what she represents in his mind, Alaska has her own goals, her own grief, her own quest. She’s drawn to Pudge not because of what she can offer him, but what he can offer her.

To dismiss Alaska as nothing more than a Manic Pixie Dream Girl – or Green’s characters on the whole as superficial fantasies of teenage-hood – is to fundamentally misunderstand not only the characters, but teenagers themselves.

Alaska is the perfect example of the way Green’s teens, like real teens, are allowed to be the exact thing they all want to be seen as: people. Real people, with all their flaws, and complications, and ideas, and ambitions, and dreams. It’s a simple idea, and yet it’s so rarely achieved in pop culture. Seeing it in Looking for Alaska feels like a tiny revelation – and more important than ever in 2019.

—

Get ready for the brand new series Looking for Alaska premiering October 19 – only on Stan. Start your 30-day free trial now!

—

(Lead image: Steve Dietl / Hulu)