Helga, Helga, Friend or Foe? Evil or Play? Will we ever know?

Helga and Arnold. A screenshot from the show. Credits to Nickelodeon.

Helga Pataki from the hit show, “Hey! Arnold.” was the villain in the cast of all children who played together. Helga bullies, berates, and makes fun of the main character, Arnold. This makes Helga the antagonist, she isn’t seen as the good person on the show, but rather the bad guy. However, after some time of watching the show, the viewer realizes that Helga is actually in love with Arnold but does not know how to reveal this to him. She uses this hard outer protection shell to conceal the fact that she has very strong, positive feelings for him. This deals with the rhetorics of power and identity that is explained in Sutton’s novel. Helga is not truly evil.

This behavior that Helga performs is a pure example of play. Through her actions of negative bullying, she is waiting on Arnold to realize that she really loves him. She represents the power of dominance over Arnold to show that he should belong to her because he is whom she really wants. As stated in the novel, the rhetorics of identity in child play are usually hidden transcripts. This is the perfect example of how Helga is hiding her true feelings.

In an abstract way, her actions are much like the game of hide and seek: a typical game in which one child hides for fun, and the other child is meant to look for the hidden child. In this way, Helga is hiding her true feelings for Arnold underneath a tough exterior, hoping that Arnold will “seek” her true feelings and realize that she really does love him. In all of these ways, Helga is truly just playing in a way that is not so apparent to other children or viewers. She has no true harmful or negative intentions. On this basis, we can see that she is not evil.