Bestiary

She’s cute! Spunky! Adorable! Bizarre! Flighty and unconventional, she’s just what you need to get your life in order and headed off down whatever whimsical path you were scared to follow until she showed up. Why, it’s almost as if she’s part of you, existing only to further the novelty of your own story! Oh, yeah… that’s because she is part of you, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl who’s literally part of your own soul.

Although the Manic Pixie archetype tends to show up in popular culture as a superficial and rather sexist trope in stories where a dude takes center stage, Manic Pixie can, in fact, become the Avatar for a female magus, too. In this as­ pect, she’s the untamed inner self that the mage represses in her daily life — perhaps a “better self” embodying the mage’s hidden fearless side. Manic Pixie can be a best friend, a lover, an antagonist, or a rival. Whatever guise she assumes in a mage’s life, whether she manifests to other people or exists only in the mage’s mind, Manic Pixie is stylishly rebellious, stubbornly impractical, and more than a little bit absurd.

Manic Pixie’s Seekings invariably force her magus to confront inhibitions and challenge social norms. Such jour­ neys can be fun, of course, but they feature quite a bit of fear as well. As the mage discovers, those obstacles exist for a reason, and cannot be flouted without cost. Before each Seeking ends, Manic Pixie will have turned some element of her mage’s normal life to ruins.

In physical form, Manic Pixie upends conventions and manners whenever she appears. This could be a problem for a mage who’s sworn to a strict order or hiding out in mundane society. It’s sort of a tradition that Manic Pixie Dream Girls make shambles of their host’s life before that person finally wakes up. In the case of this Avatar, however, there’s no way, really, to get rid of her… except to embrace her, and perhaps even become her.