While the character trope has been around for decades, film critic Nathan Rabin coined the term “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” in 2007 to describe Kirsten Dunst’s character in Elizabethtown, defining it as a woman who “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” Natalie Portman’s free-spirited nymph in Garden State became a prime example of the problematic archetype. Seven years later, Rabin denounced the term after observing that, like so many things on the internet, it was being stripped of its nuance and overused as a misogynistic shorthand. “I’m sorry for creating this unstoppable monster,” he wrote, pleading: “Let’s all try to write better, more nuanced and multidimensional female characters: women with rich inner lives and complicated emotions and total autonomy, who might strum ukuleles or dance in the rain even when there are no men around to marvel at their free-spiritedness.”