In 2005, film critic Nathan Rabin first used the term “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” to describe Kirsten Dunst’s character in the movie Elizabethtown. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl, or MPDG for short, is a character stereotype in which an otherworldly, beautifully shallow female character’s sole purpose in a piece of media is to guide the male protagonist through life, and help him reach his goals and reevaluate life for what it truly is. There’s many examples of it in the media— Natalie Portman’s character in Garden State, Zooey Deschanel in 500 Days of Summer, Mary Elizabeth Winstead in Scott Pilgrim VS the World— you get the gist. It’s a popular trope, one that’s easy to latch onto if you’re a lazy writer and need some female representation in your otherwise male-dominated story.

I define this trope as a way to transition into what I really want to talk about— Alaska Young.

Looking for Alaska is a 2005 YA novel by John Green, which is told through the eyes of 11th-grader Miles “Pudge” Halter. The story follows Miles as he attends his first year at Culver Creek, a boarding high school in rural Alabama. Throughout his time at Culver Creek he meets several new friends— Chip “the Colonel” Martin, Takumi Hikohito, and most importantly, Alaska Young.

Alaska is introduced in a way that, if I had read this book for the first time as a 17-year-old girl, would’ve made me cringe. Page 14, the Colonel takes Miles to meet Alaska in her dorm, to which Miles describes the moment as “the hottest girl in all of human history was standing before me in cutoff jeans and a peach tank top.” But I’ve read this book countless times since my first read back in 7th grade, and I’ve come to distinguish first glance from true intent. Alaska is described by her physical appearance first, intellectual abilities later. And, at first glance, Alaska is a MPDG— Miles sees her as this whimsical, unique, “not-like-other-girls” figure in his life, someone who has been gifted to him by the universe as a way for him to seek “the Great Perhaps”, the last words of François Rabelais he continuously references. As readers living inside Miles’ head, it’s not surprising that we would digest Alaska as the MPDG stereotype. But beneath her strange and sometimes cryptic one-liners about death and dying, Alaska Young was written to be a human, something MPDGs are not written to be.

Looking for Alaska has two acts— the first act, titled “Before” plays out Miles’ arrival to Culver Creek, his blooming friendships with everyone he meets there, and his ever-growing infatuation with Alaska. The second act, titled “After” starts with Alaska’s tragic and untimely death in a car accident/possible suicide, and the rest of the novel is spent trying to decipher why and how Alaska died. Miles becomes obsessed with trying to know why this happened, and it’s this section of the story that, to the reader, it becomes clear that Alaska was more than just Miles’ MPDG— she was a person, and she had issues, and she had demons that nobody except her could resolve. Alaska had watched her mother die when she was a young girl, and spent her entire life blaming herself for her mother’s death. On the night she died, she had realized she’d forgotten her mother’s death anniversary, and drunkenly raced to the graveyard to put a flower on her grave. It’s never revealed whether Alaska purposely crashed her car that night or not— but that’s the whole point. Alaska’s death was not some puzzle for Miles to solve, not an event to give Miles’ life purpose. Her death had absolutely nothing to do with Miles, and in turn, neither did her life.

Miles romanticized Alaska’s existence, saw her an escape from his boring teenage life, but her death and the circumstances surrounding it prove that Alaska would have been Alaska whether Miles Halter ever came to Culver Creek or not. Miles feels guilty for Alaska’s death, as the two of them had shared a kiss the night she died, but this is Miles’ biggest flaw. Miles is unintentionally selfish— he believes Alaska’s death had something to do with him, and is angry at her for dying before she could be the idolized version of herself he had created in his mind. On page 170, the Colonel and Miles get into an argument about this exact selfishness— “All that matters is you and your precious fantasy that you and Alaska had this goddamned secret love affair and she was going to leave Jake for you and you’d live happily ever after.” And, in this moment, the Colonel was painstakingly right— Alaska’s entire existence had been played up inside Miles’ mind, and Miles had convinced himself Alaska was just as much in love with him as he was her.

Looking for Alaska is my favorite book of all time, and Alaska Young is one of the only female characters I actually see myself in. She lived her life the way she wanted to, let herself see the beauty in existence and despite the way she died, Alaska found purpose in life and didn’t let herself fall into that character trope she so easily could have fallen into. Miles was not her savior— her death proves that. Alaska’s death proves that she was a human under Miles’ idea of her, and in fact, the way Miles saw her and thought about her was almost nothing like the real Alaska. Miles is even called out for this by other characters in the story, including Alaska herself. “Don’t you know who you love, Pudge?” she asks him on page 96. “You love the girl who makes you laugh and shows you porn and drinks wine with you. You don’t love the crazy, sullen bitch.” She is telling him straight-up that she knows he’s convinced himself Alaska is someone far more wonderful than she actually is. And he, in his internal monologue, even agrees— “And there was something to that, truth be told.”

Miles, as unreliable as a narrator he is, does finally acknowledge the fact that Alaska did not think of him when she died. In the final pages of the book, page 219, Miles says: “Because I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and everyone but herself and her mom in those last moments she spent as a person.”

People will never stop calling Alaska Young a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and those same people will never stop criticizing John Green’s writing of her. But I know this book like the palm of my hand, and I have loved Alaska Young for so many years. My copy of Looking for Alaska is torn to shreds— the spine is broken, the cover is beat up, the pages covered in smeared ink and messy highlighting— and each time I reread this book, I love Alaska a little more. Everyone around her saw her for everything she wasn’t, and still, critics of this novel do as well. Alaska Young did not exist to help Miles seek his Great Perhaps. She existed for the same reason every other human on this earth exists— to breathe air, to have a heartbeat and a personality.

“So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was a drizzle and she was a hurricane.” This is how Miles described her in his mind— but Alaska Young was not the hurricane Miles Halter so desperately wanted her to be. She wasn’t anything except a girl. A girl from a broken home, a girl with guilt seeping out from within and a girl who never asked to be someone else’s escape.