I didn't give a shit about Catherine much. In my head if I could pick i would have had some fun with her but never married her or make her a proper girl with a collar. Then we visited her house and met her sisters and I did a full 180...
Totally agree, and thats the WHOLE point. She isn't 'just' the heir apparent first daughter of a founding family7 head with a stick up her ass like some Queen bitch...in fact if you compare to an archetypical queen bee, shes nothing alike...
High school 'queen bees' are al about appearances and attention and popularity but Catherine has been swarmed by sycophants ALL her life, so she isnt wearing her high and mighty act to lord over others, its simply 'who she is' in a conditioned elitist way that can actually invite empathy once its understood. Notably shes not a narcist despite a superficial appearance as one as evidenced by the fact she's willing to bleed self sacrifice... both her her duty to marry someone she doesn't like but also to care for her sisters.
Moreover the point in the story where the MC gets fed up with being in the spotlight and starts tuning out everyone else and than understands Cassandra's attitude having of only founding family people matter is a moment of epiphany for understanding her character. She's lived that fake song and dance her whole life as opposed to merely a month... And it take the players mindset of judging her the entire time and confronts them with the MC's revelation in a way that is humbling.
And the way she wants to be pushed past her limits of testing if MC has the balls to be hard as a way of weeding out the possibly of him being a lapdog like her father is SO real. Id honestly LOVE to have a psychology chat with the writer and dev of the story some time because its fascinating to observe the various characters.
*And also the story was in no rush to justify her.* It didn't break her out of her character to 'be likeable' to fit the harem... she was the antagonistic plus one who juggled her pride with her own duty... she never crossed MC's red line of how to treat the girls and it was only through genuinely believable events that lead to us getting to see her human side, culminating in her catastrophic fall from grace and sacrifice for her sisters. The adherence to characters being real and unlikeable in human ways, not 'tropey' ones, and then also letting them have redeeming qualities in human ways by letting the patience of story development and believable character development is refreshing.
And all that is just one of a dozen characters in the story.
And to your comment i think the endgame is clearly a Gilbert/Bennet/Fletcher power block... Gilbert schisming with Gloria over honor and past wrongs plus some 'straw that breaks the camels back' and a dozen different ways to flip the financial troubles of Bennet with Hamilton, probably using Sarah and/or her mother as a means of doing so, and that all before Alison and Brians sister have their plans added to the mix.