WARNING: This column contains big spoilers for the Season 3 finale of “The White Lotus,” which aired Sunday night on Max.

Pop quiz: Which of these fictional characters is the real villain?

A) The filthy-rich finance guy considering killing most of his family with poisonous piña coladas so they don’t find out he lost all their money and is probably going to jail.

B) The dark and disturbed dude who brought his too-trusting girlfriend to Thailand with the secret agenda of shooting the man he believes ruined his life by murdering his father.

C) The working-class spa employee who accepts a multimillion-dollar bribe from a straight-up fugitive for her silence in his plot to kill his wife, so that she can start a new life far away and not get killed herself.

D) The actual fugitive killer.

If your answer is C, you’re in good company on social media Monday morning. The pile-up on poor Belinda (played by University of Maryland, College Park alum Natasha Rothwell) is one more depressing sign of how women can’t win for losing — even the fictional ones.

If your choice was either dead, poor and principled or alive and paid, you know what you’d pick. It’s so weird that fans expect Belinda to do anything differently. Girl, me and my money and my still-beating heart would be gone. Y’all would never hear from me again. I would not even finish typing this sentence.

We met Belinda during the first season of Mike White’s saga of rich American jerks who descend on various outposts of the eponymous luxury resort chain. She was basically the audience surrogate, a relatable person with aspirations of opening her own spa with the offered help of wacky heiress Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge).

But Tanya retracts her support to run off and marry the shady Greg (Jon Gries), who soon plots to have her killed at a White Lotus resort in Italy, and Belinda becomes just another normal working stiff whose dreams are crushed by the wealthy. That is, until this season, when she does an employee exchange with The White Lotus in Thailand and begins to realize the beauty of relaxing. She falls under the romantic gaze of fellow spa worker Pornchai, who suggests after their one night sleeping together that they could jointly open that spa.

She also realizes that Greg, now going by the name Gary, is living in an astonishingly huge house directly overlooking the resort with his opportunistic girlfriend and all of the late Tanya’s money. Belinda figures out that Tanya died escaping the guys Greg/Gary paid to kill her. After initially denying his real identity, Greg/Gary makes Belinda an insultingly low $100,000 to keep her mouth shut — and then $5 million. He doesn’t say that he’s going to kill Belinda if she talks, but it’s strongly suggested he will because he’s currently on the run for suspicion of killing his wife.

Because Belinda initially tried to report Greg/Gary to the authorities but was discouraged by the hotel manager, negotiating her silence for a pay day might seem like she’s sold out. She and her son leave a sad Pornchai alone in Thailand and she hops the next available boat the hell out of there, their spa dreams unrealized. Some social media users believe she’s become as craven as Tanya. To that I say: Oh, come on!

There is a huge difference between a cluelessly wealthy woman being unaware of the way she sets people up to have hope and rips it away, and a single mother who knows she and her kid are probably done for if she doesn’t take the money and run.

But somehow, so many fans are holding Belinda to a standard that’s not only impossible but potentially lethal. She’s an ordinary person who works as a cog in the machine that pampers the wealthy, and it seems expected for her to be grateful to be there. And yes, I think her status as a larger Black woman is a part of that. She’s supposed to be a righteous, smiling part of the scenery, the absolute pinnacle of morality, even with this literal assassination-prone grifter glowering at her over his ever-present drink.

Not to mention that she never, ever promised Pornchai, a man she has known for one week, that she was going into business with him. He attached himself to her dream and now she’s the bad guy for cutting out before she gets killed? Nah, y’all.

I guess it’s that we’ve gotten so used to hating these very rich Americans in the series that we wanted to believe that our girl, our beloved stand-in, would emerge unscathed and innocent. But she got written into a literal murder plot, and I don’t believe for one second you’d be like “Yes, Mr. Grifter! I’m going to refuse you and then open a spa you can see from your living room!”

Women, even fictional ones, aren’t required to live out anyone else’s purity, especially when someone’s offering them a way to start over and not get murdered. As Belinda exasperatedly tells her son, “Can’t I just be rich for five f——ing minutes?”

You know you’d want that, too.