I think what gets missed a lot by folks who don’t like her character is that it’s good to have a character who is flawed and that sometimes those flaws arise from what they’re going through.

She definitely has her issues, for sure. Yet it read to me that her issues arose far more from the combination of this world-changing event and losing her romantic partner in a very traumatic way. Not a lot of time has passed, at the end of the series less than three months have passed since “the joining” and Carol losing her partner. These traumatic events combined: losing the person you trusted and love the most and the whole world changing overnight with everyone thinking the event that killed your loved one is the best thing that could possibly ever happen. She has not had a lot of time to grieve and she obviously is grieving badly partially because her entire world has been turned upside down and she lost the person she loved. Carol’s partner isn’t one of the “others” waiting to be pulled out of their joined state back to normalcy, no she’s dead and gone forever.

That’s why she tries to fall in love with Zosia. That’s why she’s so broken when Zosia admits they will infect her with the virus when they have the chance, that Carol’s consent is immaterial. She is trying to fill the hole in her heart with this perfect avatar that is shaped like the dashing lover of her own fiction, chosen by the others specifically for that reason. It’s unhealthy, but she has no other people to speak to in a “normal” way, and it’s part of why she even tries to entice Zosia to speak as an individual, to make it more comfortable for herself. She is so filled with grief from loss of her partner and the world she knew that she is trying to recapture what she can of a feeling of being loved.

None of this justifies her being kind of an asshole, but I think that’s the point. That she’s imperfect, she knows something is wrong, but she doesn’t have the skills to do anything about it, and she is spiraling from grief and loss of not just her loved one but her entire known way of life. She can’t even do simple things like go to a grocery store and have it bustling with individuals anymore. Every aspect of life that was normalcy and comfort has been torn from her and she’s in a bad way. This new world leaves her uncomfortable and feeling alienated. I can see myself spiraling and making selfish bad decisions in a similar situation as well, especially when only two and a half months have passed.