Belle Carter

Belle is the main antagonist of Hypnosis Doesn't Work Like That!.

She is a popular girl at /Leonard Juiban High School, and the little sister of [Carter/].

She is initially presented as a mean-spirited bully from [[1]]'s perspective, but will be shown to have more depth later. She is on the school volleyball team, was a former cheerleader, and has a lot of fans but few real friends. She isn't in Adi's Literature class at the start of the story; we don't know which subjects she's doing extra classes for.

History

Before starting at high school, she was kind of overshadowed by her awesome big brother. She adored him, maybe in a kind of inappropriate way. She decided to become a cheerleader because they were the only girls he seemed to be interested in; and because he was already in the high school basketball team, she knew that most of the parties he went to would be players and cheerleaders.

This position meant that she easily became popular in school, and she was kind of lucky. She was cool enough that everybody wanted to be seen with her, so people did things for her and looked up to her, even though she never really shared anything or opened up to her friends. She's quite lonely, but doesn't understand why because she has so many 'friends'. She's ended up playing popularity like a game, always trying to have more devoted followers, in some kind of unacknowledged hope that this will make her feel less empty.

Somewhere along the way, she realised that the basketball team were all jerks, including Dean. Because he didn't give her the affection she craved, her infatuation with her big brother slowly soured and turned into jealousy. She wanted to be popular in the way he was, with a small cadre of friends who shared all their secrets and would do anything to help each other, but she couldn't see a way to get there other than becoming more cool, more successful, and treating everyone else like her minions. So she's kind of unhappy, but will never acknowledge it.

In her own mind, her bullying of [[2]] is for the girl's own good - she believes that if the unpopular kids stop being weird, they'll be able to take a proper place in the social hierarchy somewhere below her, and they'll have a place to fit into. She really doesn't understand that not everyone needs public status to validate themselves.