i think initially she was scared of the burden of responsibility - after all she was raised to "see no evil, hear no evil", to be constantly ignorant whether intentionally or unintentionally. but it seems that towards the wedding, especially after her "training arc" with eris, she grew to love the reward of her position. we saw with the previous flashback that she loved the pride she would get from a days of hard work as a maid - the only thing stopping her from that was the crown prince and the empress.
in a way, even though the last we see of helena is bittersweet, i believe that she already is happy in her position. although it seems she will never love the crown prince again, the moment she woke up she went to work because she *wanted* to. eris also mentioned that even in the original novel, helena would grow to be a competent and well respected ruler.
i think their ending is perfect! if anything, helena would be the real ruler of the couple b/c we know the prince was incompetent. and their ending beautiful parallels the emperor and empress's ending: the prince will never have helena because he repeated the same arrogance that his father did. he only saw helena as a possession and took her for granted. now he must live with that.
sorry about the rant i just finished binge reading this (〜￣△￣)〜
THE KARMA IS SO SATISFYING FOR ALL OF THE MEN WHO WANTED HER??
I feel for Helena because of how she didn't want to be empress, I hope she finds genuine happiness in the palace even though she probably wont. when I saw the ending for these two absolute cuties, eris and anahkin, i adore them so much. I literally want to see more of them develop into modern society, I'm not getting over this manwha any time soon