Helga Pataki

Anti-Heroine Overview

Gallery

Anti-Hero

The Jungle Movie
TV Series

Full Name

Helga Geraldine Pataki

Alias

Madame Fortress Mommy

Harold Cecile
Mighty Falcon
Deep Voice
Olga (mistakenly; repeatedly by her father)

Origin

Hey Arnold!

Occupation

Elementary school student

Powers / Skills

Above-average strength

Hand-to-hand combat
Trickery
Cunning
Weaponry skills
Detective skills

Hobby

Writing love poems about Arnold.
Creating shrines dedicated to Arnold.
Bullying and antagonizing her friends and classmates.
Causing mischief.
Calling Arnold "Football Head".
Hanging out with Phoebe and others.
Being touched by Arnold (sometimes).

Goals

Hide her true feelings of love from Arnold (successful up until the films, later abandoned).
Ensure that Arnold would never be on her side (formerly).
Prove that she is better than her sister Olga (formerly).
Prevent the other girls from hanging around or having a relationship with Arnold (presumably abandoned).
Confess her feelings to Arnold (indirectly succeeded).
Help Arnold in his adventures (sometimes; succeeded).
Help Arnold and Gerald save their neighborhood from Scheck (Hey Arnold!: The Movie; succeeded).
Reunite with Arnold and help him find his parents (Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie; succeeded).

Family

Robert Pataki (father)

Miriam Pataki (mother)
Olga Pataki (older sister)

Friends / Allies

Arnold Shortman (love interest; occasionally)

Phoebe Heyerdahl (best friend)
Gerald Johanssen
Harold Berman
Sid
Eugene Horowitz
Rhonda Wellington Lloyd
Nadine
Brainy
Sheena
Lila Sawyer (all occasionally)

Enemies

Arnold Shortman (arch-rival)

Gerald Johanssen (both usually)
Everyone above (all occasionally)
Curly
Mr. Scheck
Lasombra
Ruth McDougal
Patty Smith
Wolfgang

Type of Anti-Hero

Insecure Anti-Hero

“	MOVE IT, FOOTBALL HEAD!	„
	~ Helga's famous line in the opening sequence of "Hey Arnold!".

“	If I ever get my hands on that Arnold, I'll, I'll... soothe his fevered brow. Oh, my poor, lost sweetheart, how I love you. And yet I hate you! And yet I love you. And yet I hate you! And yet I LOVE YOU!	„
	~ Helga's conflicting feelings towards Arnold.

Helga Geraldine Pataki is the tritagonist and occasional antagonist of Nickelodeon's animated series Hey Arnold!, and the deuteragonist of the 2017 television film Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie.

She is a tomboyish and creative, yet deeply insecure fourth grader who is often portrayed as the resident bully of her class at P.S. 118. She is especially hostile to Arnold, whom she constantly provokes and claims to despise deeply. However, this is all merely an act to cover her true feelings toward Arnold; in truth, she is secretly in love with him. In fact, despite her antagonistic and cynical nature, her love for Arnold drove her to commit benevolent and courageous acts in the name of others, including herself, on numerous occasions. Thus, she is both Arnold's arch-rival and love interest.

She is voiced by Francesca Marie Smith.

Appearance[]

Appearance-wise, Helga is 50/50 between her parents. She has her mother's blonde hair, skin, and head shape. She has her father's uni-brow, nose, and ears. She wears her hair in long pigtails without any visible hair ties. In the earlier episodes, her pigtails were longer and thinner, but as the character designs were refined, her pigtails became more short and thick.

In Hey Arnold!, she wears a pink dress with a red stripe over a white shirt and a pink bow on her hair, along with white shoes.

In Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie, she wears a similar dress, but without a shirt underneath. As an indication of her age, she also appears more well-developed. Her dress receives an upgrade, becoming more fitting on her shape and gaining a pink stripe under the red stripe, as well as red and white converse shoes, and her pigtails become a tad bit longer and more flowing.

Personality[]

Helga is a tomboyish girl, as evidenced by her interest in playing contact sports alongside her male classmates, blatant lack of femininity, and disregard, to near dislike, for stereotypical female behavior, as seen in the episode "Helga's Makeover". Despite her occasional disdain for more feminine things, on several occasions, she tries very much to make herself appear as an attractive female, with varying degrees of success.

Helga can be very cynical, violent, and a bully, bossing around her fourth-grade classmates with an iron fist, including her best friend, Phoebe. However, Helga also has a much softer side, which becomes apparent only when she is alone. On instances, she has conformed and tried to protect her friend Phoebe. She dislikes for Arnold on occasions because of his dreamer personality while she mocks his head for being different from most others. She has been periodically been depicted as bully, usually going so far to develop as the anti-hero of the entire franchise.

Several times in the series, Helga has also gone to considerable lengths to make her secret love Arnold happy. Some such episodes are "Arnold's Hat", in which she spent literally hours digging through the city dump to find Arnold's lost hat, and "Arnold's Christmas" in which she gave up a highly coveted gift in order to facilitate the fulfillment of a holiday wish for him.

Helga is heavily emotional, and able to comprehend spectrum emotions such as love and hate. This emotional extremity is a running joke throughout the series, as Helga is often the first to go into hysterics in times of crisis.

Helga is also quite intelligent. In the episode "The Aptitude Test", in which the class takes a standardized exam, it is eventually revealed that Helga achieved a perfect score on the test and the most outstanding result since her perfectionist sister, Olga, took the test. The types of grades she receives on an average basis in school, however, are low; in the episode "Quantity Time", Helga tells her parents that she failed another math test at school.

Her bad grades are most likely caused by her lack of motivation, attention and academic concern. Mainly, Helga displays a remarkable gift for poetry, creating dramatic soliloquies expressing a situation or feeling with a generous use of vocabulary, especially for someone her age. These instances were more simple in the earlier episodes, but as the series progressed, grew in their intensity. Aside from poetry, Helga exhibits further aspects of cultural experience, being able to identify the work of Edward Hopper and make reference to George Orwell's 1984 in "Helga on the Couch".

Helga also possesses an almost shocking ability to memorize written works. Such examples of this include preparing for a vocabulary contest in "Spelling Bee", and successfully memorizing all the lines of Juliet for Romeo and Juliet in a single night in "School Play".

It is also insinuated throughout points in the series and also stated explicitly as an opinion by her older sister Olga Pataki, that Helga is highly perceptive and a good judge of character. Though her judgement of people is often overshadowed by her feelings, her gruff cynicism or pessimism, emotions and sometimes petty irritations, in the show she has perceived trustworthiness or the lack thereof in characters correctly, including even her own family members. Some such examples are "Olga Gets Engaged", in which she quickly realizes the man her sister is engaged to a is a charlatan, or in "Helga on the Couch" in which she realizes she can indeed trust her psychiatrist.

Backstory[]

Helga was born the 2nd child to Robert and Miriam Pataki, where she was completely neglected by her parents shower all of their attention onto her older sister Olga, depriving her of the love and attention she needed growing up. When it was time for her first day of preschool, seeing her parents were still so caught up with Olga playing piano, she decides to walk to school herself. But when it starts to rain, it was then that she meets a young Boy named Arnold Shortman, who was the first person to ever show kindness to her, Helga was so touched by it, that she developed a big crush on him.

However, because the other kids took note of this and began mocking her affection, she immediately developed a tough & mean front to avoid ridicule for having a softer, more sensitive side, and constantly bullies Arnold is to hide her feelings for him out of fear of rejection. Despite this, Arnold still continues to show kindness towards Helga, which amplifies her feelings for him even more. She would also befriend another girl named Phoebe Heyerdahl, who would become her best (and only) friend.

Hey Arnold!: The Movie[]

In the movie, Helga learns that the neighborhood has been scheduled to be destroyed by a ruthless businessman man named Scheck, while at first against the demolition (mainly because she might never see Arnold again), she ultimately sides with the demolition project when she learns from her dad that he'll be getting a new super-sized branch of his beeper store in the proposed mall (without knowing that Scheck will be owning 51% of his company), though she's hesitant to do so because of her love for Arnold.

Ultimately, her feelings for Arnold is enough for her to side with him in his attempt to save the neighborhood, and after secretly hearing his plan to find a document that would make the neighborhood a historical landmark, she phone-calls him and hides her identity as someone named "Deep-Voice", obviously to hide her identity from her family & Arnold, and tells him that Scheck has the document in his office.

Later, when she is unable to get ahold of Arnold and Gerald, she decides to head over to Scheck's building and phone-call Arnold on the roof, advising him to use a recorded footage of him burning the document. However, when Arnold is evading capture from Scheck's guards, she bumps into Helga and unmasks her as Deep-Voice, and once that happens, after some pressing from Arnold, confesses her romantic feelings for him and (while forcing him back against a wall), kisses him at the top of the tower, much to his shock. Afterwards, they both head down the tower and meet up with Gerald, where the trio board a bus heading to town, despite Scheck chasing after them and creating various obstacles to stop them, they ultimately make it on time to show the footage to everyone, saving the neighborhood and getting Scheck arrested.

After watching Scheck and his henchman Nick get arrested by the police, Helga is once again confronted by Arnold about her confession of love for him, but since neither of them were ready to deal with it's aftermath, agree it was all a "in the heat of the moment" scenario, and while once again acting rude to him, Helga is secretly overjoyed with herself to get the courage to tell Arnold about her feelings for him, and happily runs down the streets in joy.

Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie[]

In The Jungle Movie, which continued where the animated series left of via "The Journal", Helga was shown to have an extensive video library of her personal recordings of Arnold. She and Phoebe convinced Gerald to use her library for the contest for the class field trip that Arnold hoped to win to search for his parents, which proved successful.

During the trip, Helga attempted to express her true feelings to Arnold who, unbeknownst to her, was not in the right frame of mind at the time and left. A furious and heartbroken Helga then ripped up the picture of Arnold in her locket before throwing them down the river. Although angered by Arnold's inconsideration, after they were captured and imprisoned by Lasombra, she softened after seeing him crying while he gazed over a photo of his parents. Quietly forgiving him, she reached for her locket, only to remember that she discarded it along with the photo. Fortunately, they were recovered and repaired by Brainy, who personally returned the items to her. Following this, she convinced Gerald to help her free Arnold so they could reach the Green Eyes before Lasombra get there first.

After the ordeal at the prison camp, Helga, along with Arnold and Gerald, managed to find the Green Eyes. During their earlier altercation with Lasombra, the Corazón the trio were searching for was forever lost after being knocked off a cliff. Despite the loss of the Corazón, Helga came up with the idea to use her locket in place of the Corazón to cure the infected of the sleeping sickness. This allowed the temple to activate the mechanism and release the cure to the sleeping sickness, purifying the afflicted Green Eyes and Arnold's parents. While she was attempting to retrieve her locket, Arnold thanked her for all she did and, finally realizing how she really felt about him, returned her feelings. The two then shared a kiss, only to be interrupted by Gerald.

At the end of the movie, while it is implied that she and Arnold are now a couple, Helga nonetheless pretended to be her old belligerent self when Arnold attempted to hold her hand on their way to school, possibly to hide her affections for him in public and avoid embarrassment.

Trivia[]

Craig Bartlett revealed in a 2018 interview that Helga's appearance was inspired in part by a young Frida Kahlo.

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