I hear you on the way supernatural children usually have a negative effect on the plot and relationships within a given ‘verse, but…I dunno. I actually find Diana kind of fascinating? Possibly because she’s written very realistically as a child.

One of the things that always bugs me about supernatural children is that they tend to be written like fully-grown adults in children’s bodies which, aside from occasionally giving rise to some very gross and creepy storylines, is just boring to me. Take, as an extremely bad example, the infamously-named Renesmee Cullen. She’s a small child who seems capable of communicating with adults on their level practically from birth, albeit through supernatural means, and who gripes the tiniest bit about their “special diet” before being a good little girl and adopting it.

Kids aren’t like that. Kids are messy. Kids are picky eaters. Kids ask ten billion questions a day and balk at early bedtimes and push their boundaries. Kids understand things in very black-and-white terms, most of the time. What causes them pain, fear, discomfort, or sadness? Those things are bad. What makes them comfortable, happy, secure? Those things are good. 

Now Diana is written very much like a kid in that respect. There’s an innocence there that is both endearing and terrifying because of the amount of power she has to make whatever she decides she wants a reality. I’m actually very tense whenever she’s on-screen, because I never know what she’s going to do or how she’s going to react.

She doesn’t seem inherently malicious or inherently good…just inherently a child. She wants what she wants and she wants it now, she’s very curious and disinterested in the world around her by turns, and she doesn’t seem to understand right and wrong, or the ramifications of some of the things she does. Right is what makes her happy and keeps her family together. Wrong is anything that threatens that.

Her mommy and daddy should be together, she thinks, so she tries to make them love each other. She doesn’t understand consent, or how two people who’ve had a child together might still be completely unsuited to one another or even hate each other. She has to have that explained to her later…and I think it’s noteworthy that once it is explained, she abandons that course of action and moves on to another.

She sees Renard with Rachel and thinks that must be the reason her daddy doesn’t love her mommy anymore, and the reason her mommy is so sad. So she kills Rachel. Her daddy’s “friend” Bonaparte hurt her mommy, and her daddy should protect his family…so she makes him kill the bad man. Terrifying, but…oddly realistic in terms of how a child would most likely understand that situation.

It’s also telling that she doesn’t ever attack Nick, even though he’s as much or even more in the way of her parents being together than Rachel was. This could be because Nick is her brother’s father, and she likes her brother. It could also be because she’s already noticed that killing Rachel doesn’t seem to have worked, so there’s no point in killing Nick.

She’s probably the most accurate depiction I’ve seen of what it would look like if you took a little kid, with all their little-kid capriciousness and innocence and their id running everything, and gave them unmatched superpowers. It would be terrifying. Not least of all for the parents charged with trying to teach her to control and use her powers for good without pissing her off before she’s old enough to understand that some things can’t be fixed, forgiven, or undone.

So I’m interested to see where they go with the character in the episodes we have left. I just hope it’s as good as what we’ve seen so far.