I hope Chell is a bad person too.
"Good people don't end up here" is a quote that's really emblematic of the character writing in the Portal series, and it brings me great joy to apply it maybe too literally. Let's have the same kind of fun with Chell.
Of course, her characterization is sparse compared to the rest of the cast, as she is the silent protagonist. And yet, there are examples of Chell doing things on her own volition:
She incinerates the Companion Cube - sooner or later, but inevitably;
When a random, mildly unpleasant but not yet actively mean guy comes to check in on her, she maliciously complies with his request by jumping instead of communicating more normally;
Later, she refuses to catch that same guy, still in his relatively palatable mode;
Picking up PotatOS can be interpreted twofold. Pick your poison, I guess, but for the sake of the argument let's chalk it up to Chell being pragmatic and not as her exhibiting The Solitary Act Of Kindness Reserved Specifically To Prove She Is Romantically Attracted Back To The Person Who Tried To Kill Her;
With how chaotic P2's final battle ended up being, the intentionality, let alone intent, of letting go of Wheatley is even more debatable, but the notion is still there - she didn't catch him again, it's a rhyming moment for a reason;
I always subscribed to the philosophy that, excluding truly self-contradictory stuff, 100%-ing a game gives you the most accurate version of the narrative. Side content may be optional and more driven by the player interactions than something more mandatory, but if it's in the game and you're not playing some sort of dеltаrunе, chances are the playable character did do that. Considering that, Chell becomes a ruthless vandal and a cold-blooded turret slayer. This is a joke, but only partially.
And I know all this sounds like me splitting hair, but think about it this way: if you were to put another, truly compassionate person in these circumstances, would they act the same? Many people try to catch Wheatley, both on blind and repeat playthroughs. A person of infinite tenacity could probably come up with a way to save the Cube and progress through the testing track, if it was important enough to their personality.
By virtue of being a sci-fi story with robots, one of the questions Portal automatically poses is "what makes us human". It's most prominent in GLaDOS/Caroline's storyline, but none of the characters are really exempt from it. How close of a human caricature a core has to be to pass the Turing test and be granted personhood and respect that the Intelligence Dampening DLC Pack doesn't get? Would he want that, to pass as one of those smelly humans? Would Cave really have been happy to transcend humanity as he planned (spoiler: PeTI and other semi-official materials are skeptical on the matter)? Are Atlas and P-Body actually capable of replacing human test subjects?
Going back to the test subjects: Chell has got to be the most human character in the series. In that regard, she beats two other candidates:
Caroline seems relatively good-natured. Can a kind person be broken by all the suffering enough to develop all the misanthropy seen in GLaDOS? Maybe. But before that, she was the backbone of the facility, and it's most definitely her who shaped Aperture's most recent, impersonal and sinister iteration. A sort of Eisner to Cave's Disney.
Doug is verifiably the Token Good Person, but an argument could be made that him being employed within the oppressive system mars him by association? You could play devil's advocate with Doug a lot, but that's outside of the scope of this post. Also, something something rodent motif something something dehumanization in a way that is similar to Caroline's, but not all that different.
While GLaDOS is the Aperture's literal and metaphorical body and Wheatley represents Aperture's spirit (as in, the mindset of a model Aperture employee, for better or worse), Chell is also the perfect embodiment of everything anti-Aperture. She exists outside of Aperture's hierarchy, she doesn't mesh with the locals all that well and her solitary goal is to get the hell out of here.
And I think that a story as cynical as Portal would never answer the question of "what makes the most human-like character we have actually human?" with something as cliche as "kindness" or "love" or "moral compass". Chell has her defining quality spelled out to us, and it's none of the above. It's tenacity.
So, I like to think about a version of Chell who's aware of her anti-Aperture nature and is proud of that knowledge. Who found the hearts on the sides of the cube tacky and manipulative and felt nothing as it burned. Who is as dismissive of anything remotely robotic as Wheatley is towards humans. Who hopes Caroline suffered. Who thinks she's better than her tormentors, but not necessarily is.
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