Paula is The Girl in every sense. She's feminine and well-loved like a young Miyazaki heroine, she wears pink like Princess Peach, she wears a bow in her hair like Ms. Pac Man, and she uses a frying pan as her weapon of choice.
I'd like to think the frying pan was an ironic choice - like, they knew how funny it would be. I'm also confident that Paula's use of a frying pan would lead to Princess Peach being able to use a frying pan (among other things) in Super Mario RPG, and then again in Super Smash Bros. Melee.
Paula was raised by loving parents who also run the preschool in Twoson - how community-oriented they are! Paula seems to lend a hand at the school as well, which goes to show how she grew to be so kind and likeable.
Like Ness, we discover that Paula also has psychic powers, her specialty being telepathy. When you first rest at a hotel after completing Giant Step, Paula will contact you and request your aid.
Despite her talent and resourcefulness, her parents actually seem pretty dopey! After Paula's kidnapped, her father doesn't realize she's missing until you ask to see her at their home. He panics and runs around town looking for her [P P P Paula! Where are you? It's time for a yummy piece of pie!] and presumably never tells his wife, who does not mention Paula's absence.
In a lot of ways she's a stereotypical girl in an RPG, but I think this is done with purpose. She does get kidnapped, and she is heavily suggested to act as a love interest for Ness, and she IS the most magically (psychically) talented member of the group. So she's girly. But, in the 90s, I feel like if a fictional girl wasn't wearing pink with bows in her hair, she could have been Boomer from the Burger King Kids Club.
She's also the most versatile attacker. All of Ness' iconic attacks in Smash Bros. - Fire, Thunder, Freeze, Magnet - were actually borrowed from Paula. She gets more Psychic Points than Ness, and can even use PSI Magnet to leech PP from enemies - an explicit encouragement to use her special skills as often as possible. Her sheer offensive potential, I believe, does a lot do balance out her girliness. Hey, she doesn't even learn restorative skills.
There's also something about Paula I never took seriously before. To spoil something: before you recruit your remaining party members, you take control of them for very brief but very illuminating moments.
You never take control of Paula. I can't think of a more eloquent way to illustrate how an adolescent male like Ness has no idea what goes on in the mind of a girl his age. When I first played this game, I was an adolescent male like Ness, and I never even thought to want to play as Paula.
Another interesting thing about Paula is revealed in looking back at the Japanese version of the game. When naming your party at the beginning, you can choose "Don't Care" to have the game cycle through a set of pre-made names.
In Japanese, these names are, of course, different, but some of them are very special. If you were to name everyone with the 4th set of names,
Ness would be John
Paula would be Yoko
Jeff would be Paul
Poo would be George
and the dog would be Ringo.
Yoko: a lady among men, a non-Beatle among Beatles. The ultimate "other" is paralleled with Paula.
Right from the get-go, Earthbound has so much to say about men and women.
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