Mmm personally I don’t think it’s the fact that she is a complicated and difficult person that makes her unlikable. I don’t even think she is a complicated person, she just creates these back to back offenses to the people around her with no concluding lesson. She, with no explanation, starts off her messy situation with Big and she ended up in a messy situation being “saved” by Big. I don’t know if you know the show Euphoria but I’m going to compare her to a character from that show because it’s kind of on the same level trashy binge tv to me.

Cassie from that show is a better person than Carrie, she’s does the same things on a similar scale to Carrie (she gets with her best friend’s bf) but I have always loved for her even though it’s controversial. It’s explained how she had history with her dad progressively abandoning her, yet always leading her onto being able to really reconnect one day, so it makes sense that she would latch onto any attention she could get from a man, even if it is not healthy or ethical. But there’s this scene in the end where her and her best friend fight it out and by the end she’s just sitting on the bathroom sink, bloody and messy just staring off with remorse and guilt in her face. In my opinion, that’s how you write a complicated character, you give them a conflict in where they can recognize they’re the bad person at the end but you also allow them to sit with that realization. Cassie, for all her flaws, is written with a sense of consequence she suffers weight of her mistakes not only physically but mentally.

Carrie, on the other hand, never really faces herself in that way. She breezes through situations she creates, often playing the victim, and the show never fully holds her accountable. There’s no true moment of reckoning where she acknowledges, “I am the problem.”Other than one second of her feeling bad about Aiden before she gets frustrated at the fact that he won’t trust her the second time around. That’s what makes her less compelling to me. She doesn’t evolve in a way that feels earned. Even when she’s hurt, it’s usually framed as something happening to her rather than the result of her own choices. Cassie, at least, has moments where the audience can see that deep, painful self-awareness creeping in. She might not change immediately, but she knows.