| rdfs:comment | - 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 naturally has a prominent role in the series' Christmas episode, "Arnold's Christmas". Early on in the special, Helga seems to think that Christmas is all about presents and is hoping to receive a pair of Nancy Spumoni snow boots. However, she also wants to find the perfect gift for Arnold, but cannot seem to figure out what he would like. While trying to find the right present, she finds out that Arnold and Gerald are doing Mr. Bailey's Christmas shopping for him, and it turns out that a pair of Nancy Spumoni snow boots are the only item they cannot find. Intrigued by this, Helga follows them around and eventually finds out that Arnold is trying to reunite his fellow boarder, Mr. Hyunh, with his missing daughter, Mai. When Helga receives the snow boots from her mother, she is at fir
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| abstract | - 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 and a bully, bossing around her fourth-grade classmates with an iron fist (especially 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. Several times in the series, she 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 extremely 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 perfectionistic sister, Olga Pataki, 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 as when she prepared for a vocabulary contest in "Spelling Bee" or when she successfully memorized all the lines of Juliet for the play Romeo and Juliet in a single night in the episode "School Play." It is also insinuated throughout points in the series and also stated explicitly as an opinion by her older sister Olga, that Helga is highly perceptive and a good judge of character. Though her judgment 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 charlatan, or in "Helga on the Couch" in which she realizes she can indeed trust her psychiatrist.
- Helga naturally has a prominent role in the series' Christmas episode, "Arnold's Christmas". Early on in the special, Helga seems to think that Christmas is all about presents and is hoping to receive a pair of Nancy Spumoni snow boots. However, she also wants to find the perfect gift for Arnold, but cannot seem to figure out what he would like. While trying to find the right present, she finds out that Arnold and Gerald are doing Mr. Bailey's Christmas shopping for him, and it turns out that a pair of Nancy Spumoni snow boots are the only item they cannot find. Intrigued by this, Helga follows them around and eventually finds out that Arnold is trying to reunite his fellow boarder, Mr. Hyunh, with his missing daughter, Mai. When Helga receives the snow boots from her mother, she is at first ecstatic to have gotten what she wanted for Christmas, but she then remembers that Arnold was desperate to find these for Mr. Bailey. After some moral agonizing over this, Helga brings the boots to Mr. Bailey and gets him to search the records by making a passionate speech about Arnold needing a Christmas miracle. On Christmas morning, she brings Mai to the boarding house to reunite her with her father and, as Arnold is wondering how this miracle happened, silently wishes Arnold a Merry Christmas.
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