Player: Lil Cosgrove
Age: 32
Contact: LilCosgrove or PM this account
Current Characters: N/A

Character: Helga G. Pataki
Canon: Hey Arnold!, almost immediately after the end of The Jungle Movie
Age: 11


Background Information: Her Wiki page is very thorough, particularly the Personality, Family, and Trivia sections. For a detailed synopsis of her role in The Jungle Movie, see also its section for her profile on Wikipedia.

Personality:

Helga, what a bully; always putting down all the other kids, acting better than everyone else, and treating her nicest classmate, Arnold, with the utmost contempt even when he tries to do the right thing and turn the other cheek. How many resent her, the way she pushes away those who try to help - whether it's her best friend, Phoebe, constantly at her beck and call, or her older sister, Olga, going out of her way to assist Mr. Simmons just to be close to her "baby sister". Why does she have to be so mean anyway? Don't we wish she wouldn't be so stubborn, aggressive, and bossy to everyone around her so she could actually fester some healthy relationships?

And yet...

She's a sensitive soul. Yes, under that hard, abrasive, aggressively-sarcastic shell is a romantic, poetic, compassionate, and dare we say even affectionate creature. From a truly dysfunctional family environment where her needs are repeatedly ignored in favour of her overachiever sister, Helga practically starves for love and attention, which is largely why she latches so obsessively onto Arnold Shortman, the first boy who presented her with an act of kindness. And despite this, she struggles constantly to return such kindness out of an intense fear to expose vulnerability - instead, she spends the next seven years bullying, insulting, and brushing off Arnold to desperately conceal her true feelings, to the point of frustrating herself when she knows it's sabotaging her chance to actually win him over.

Over time, she has managed to occasionally overcome this impulse and be genuinely caring to her crush - albeit almost always secretly (supplying the Christmas gift he needs to find the whereabouts of Mr. Hyunh's daughter, without his knowledge of her involvement), or under cover (providing the information he needs to retrieve a historic landmark document under the guise of "Deep Voice"). But it's not until Arnold's search for his long-lost parents that she finally openly, consistently, and honestly assists him. Her extensive stalking materials allow their class to go to San Lorenzo; she leads the group in allowing her, Gerald, and Arnold to escape Lasombra's band of pirates; she initiates the fight with Lasombra later to save Eduardo; and it's her most valuable of possessions, her heart-shaped locket of Arnold's picture, that substitutes for the lost Corazon to activate the mechanism that releases the sleeping disease cure and awakens an entire village's adult population. By finally allowing herself to be kind and vulnerable in front of Arnold and her close friends, she at last earns his respect and, ultimately, his love.

To strangers, Helga's tomboyish and delicate sides remain at odds. However, her development in her most recent adventure provides a preview into her future existence as a maturing, slightly more accommodating pre-teen girl.

Abilities & Inventory:

Helga is an ordinary 11-year-old girl from an American metropolis. However, despite her age, she has encountered some crazy situations that make her seemingly ordinary skills notably useful, so they're still worth highlighting here.

Physical Abilities: Sports proficiency (i.e. baseball, football, soccer, kickball, bowling, hockey), hand-to-hand combat, sewing clothes, tool improvisation, a single class of Jiu Jitsu, and the typical monkey-like nimbleness every cartoon child seems to have for scaling trees and sneaking into boarding houses.

Mental Abilities: Natural leadership, passion for the arts including history, eloquence (particularly for poetry), keen observation skills/impersonations, acting, quick thinking, cunning schemes, courage, stubbornness, brutal honesty, surprising compassion, and high enough intelligence to top trivia competitions, spelling bees, and an aptitude test.

Potential Future Dreamotion Abilities: As evidenced by her daydreams and soliloquies, Helga has a wild imagination and an even more wild span of emotions. Therefore, I imagine these will manifest magnificently in eventual Dreamotion energy. This could have fun with her costuming skills (for convincing disguises), reproduce items from previous dreams (like her "Golden Magic Slingshot"), and/or simulate some of the urban legends prevalent back in Hillwood (such as the Ghost Bride). Either way, some of it will inevitably implement imagery of a certain football-headed kid...

Inventory: A couple of pencils, some chewing gum, one of Big Bob's Beepers (a pager), her diary, and, most importantly, her precious Arnold locket (it helped cure a disease, you know!).

Suitability & Plans: Even though she originates from a relatively realistic, urban environment, Helga is an incredibly dynamic character who seems unfazed by more surreal situations. This is possibly due to her dramatic flair, her knack for creative schemes, or both - but it suggests that she would settle into a setting such as Songerein better than one might initially think. As previously mentioned, it is at least clear that she'll produce some fascinating Dreamotion energy.

She is also a character who everyone associates with Arnold due to her extreme fixation. Some might think this would inhibit her in a space where the object of her affections is absent, but I believe that's exactly what she needs to further her personal development. Helga just secured one of her lifelong goals back home - a committed relationship with Arnold - only to be whisked away to another world entirely before she could learn how their dating life would even work. In addition, earning that relationship doesn't mean everything is automatically resolved - she still has several years of learned misbehaviour to grow out of, including a multitude of incidents she incited throughout the series that she still needs to confess to her new boyfriend. Needless to say, she is horribly aware of her imperfections and is deep down afraid that she might now mess up this beautiful thing she has inexplicably won.

How does this play into the other characters at Songerein? Helga may be frequently unpleasant, but she's also a team player and a natural-born leader. When there's a shared goal, she's often willing to work with others to achieve it... and despite her sour attitude, her classmates still regularly consider her fun to spend time with because she's smart, sporty, and refreshingly funny. Combine this with her San Lorenzo trip mellowing her out a bit, she is sure to gradually earn some friends here who can help encourage her softer traits and perhaps even address the familial background that has made her so unapproachable in the first place.

Test Drive Sample: Sh-bam

Questions: No current questions, so long as there aren't any for me!