Helga G. Pataki

"Arnold my love, My sultry preteen, Why must I hold you only whilst I dream? Will I be forever enslaved by your spell? Why must I worship you and never ever tell? Arnold, you make my girlhood tremble, My senses all go wacky. Someday, I'll tell the world, my love... Or my name's not Helga F. Pataki!"

- Helga's love poetry of Arnold

Helga G. Pataki is the deuteragonist and occasionally was the main antagonist (but anti-villain) in the Nickelodeon animated television series Hey Arnold!.

She is voiced by Francesca Marie Smith in series and movies.

Appearance
She has yellow hair from her mom and a unibrow, a nose and ears from her dad.

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 indication of her age, she also appears more well-developed. Her dress receives an upgrade, becoming more fitting on her shape and gain a pink stripe under the red stripe, as well as red and white Converse sneakers, and her pigtails become a tad bit longer and more flowing.

Personality
Helga is something of a tomboy, as evidenced by her interest in playing contact sports alongside her male classmates, blatant lack of femininity, and disregard/dislike for stereotypical female behavior, as seen in the episode "Helga's Makeover". She can also be very cynical and bossy, bullying her 4th-grade classmates with an iron fist, and often taking advantage of her best friend, Phoebe, making her a bit of a spoiled brat. However, Helga also has a much softer side, which becomes apparent when she is alone and involved in her school work. She is very emotional, and as such, able to comprehend a spectrum of emotions such as love and hate. This emotional extremity is a running joke throughout the series, although Helga is seen as a "tough girl" by her classmates, she is frequently the first to go into hysterics in times of crisis. Her personality fits that of a tsundre (i.e. showing signs of bipolar disorder). She has also been known to be somewhat materialistic. Helga is occasionally clumsy, but is also a genius. In the episode "The Aptitude Test", in which the class takes a standardized exam, it is eventually revealed that she achieved a perfect score on the test and the most outstanding result since her perfectionist sister, Olga Pataki, took the test. Presumably, however, the types of grades she receives on an average basis in school vary from low to high — in the episode "Quantity Time", Helga tells her parents that she failed another math test at school, though in "A Day in the Life of A Classroom", her teacher Mr. Simmons encourages Helga to help Harold because she received excellent scores on the past two math exams. Her bad grades are most likely caused by her lack of motivation, attention, and academic concern. Helga appears to excel academically in literature classes as evidenced by Mr. Simmons' constant praise of her literary work, though he always withholds her name possibly out of respect as she gets embarrassed when he reads them aloud. Helga displays a remarkable gift for poetry, and is able to create, often on the spot, dramatic soliloquies expressing a situation or feeling with an impressive use of vocabulary, especially for someone her age. These poems and monologues were simpler in the earlier episodes, but grew in their intensity as the series progressed. Aside from poetry, Helga exhibits further evidence 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's catch phrase is "criminy", which she apparently picked up from her father. Her hair looks like brooms and she has a monobrow. She is allergic to strawberries (see "Quantity Time"), which cause her to break out in hives.

Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie
She is shown to have an extensive video library of Arnold which she and Phoebe convince Gerald to use for the contest for the class field trip that Arnold hoped to win to search for his parents, which proves successful. During the trip, Helga attempts to express her true feelings to Arnold who was not in the right frame of mind to hear it at the time and left abruptly leaving Helga heartbroken to the point she ripped up the picture of Arnold in her locket which she discards along with the fragments in the river. She briefly becomes angry at Arnold though after the class is captured by Lasombra and she sees Arnold crying while looking at a picture of his parents she forgives him and reaches for her locket only for her to remember she discarded it but finds that it and Arnold's torn picture was recovered and repaired by Brainy. She convinces Gerald in helping her free Arnold so they could reach the Green Eyes before Lasombra got there first. Together with Arnold and Gerald, they manage to find the Green Eyes. Helga also comes up with the idea to use her locket to replace the Corazon which was lost while they were struggling with Lasombra, which activates the mechanism to release the cure to the sleeping sickness curing the afflicted Green Eyes and Arnold's parents. While she was attempting to retrieve her locket Arnold thanked her for all she did and returns her feelings, resulting in them kissing, only to be interrupted by Gerald. At the end of the movie while it is implied that she and Arnold are now a couple, she reverted to her old ways when Arnold tried to hold her hand on the way to school with Gerald and Phoebe but secretly liked that Arnold made that attempt, implying that she is only showing hostility for him in public to maintain her tough girl reputation.

Trivia

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