An unpopular opinion from a Shadowhunters fan
So, The Wicked Powers is coming out this year, and I just have to say this: Diana Wrayburn is also to blame for the Blackthorn family trauma. You are welcome to disagree with me, but just, think about it:
She knew Arthur was mentally ill, and that he wasn't running the LA Institute. She knew Julian was managing the budget, forging signatures, making tactical decisions, dealing with the Clave, and parenting Ty, Livvy, Dru, and Tavvy. You cannot spend that much time in the Institute as their tutor and mentor without noticing that a 12-year-old boy is carrying the weight of an entire household.
Diana had a very valid, life-or-death reason for keeping her head down: she was protecting her secret (being trans). However, in prioritizing her own self-preservation, she actively chose to let Julian drown. She used the Blackthorn children's need for stability as a convenient place to lay low. She saw Julian burning himself out at the stake to keep his family together. She let him play parent while she played "just the tutor." She stood by while a child destroyed his own adolescence out of terror that the Clave would separate his family.
There’s a specific cruelty in watching someone bleed themselves dry and calling it "respecting their boundaries." Diana acted like Julian was just extraordinarily mature, rather than a severely traumatized, parentified child doing what he had to do to survive while missing Helen and Mark and dealing with the guilt of having to kill his father to protect his siblings. When you are the only competent adult in the room, passive sympathy is non-intervention and a form of negligence. You don't get the right to just wash your hands and pretend like everything is fine. Ok, she couldn't take over the Institute because of her secret, being a caretaker was not in her job description, and she wasn't their legal guardian or even related to them, but she was the adult in the situation. She could have helped Julian in other ways, like cooking, checking the kids, caring for Arthur. She didn't even need to tell him that she was trans if she didn't want to, she could have just told him that she had her own reasons for not taking over the Institute but that she would help in other ways, that he wasn't alone. "Oh, but she didn't know how to care for children' well, Julian didn't either. He had to learn it because the Clave took Helen from him and abandoned Mark. In my view, Diana used her secret as an excuse to step back and do nothing. If a child could run the Institute and make the Clave think Arthur was the one taking care of everything, then why couldn't she step up and help?
The Clave failed the Blackthorns, Arthur failed the Blackthorns, but Diana watched them fail the Blackthorns from inside the house and chose her own safety over stepping in for a suffering child. She’s a nuanced character, but her complicity in Julian’s parentification is huge. She could have done so much more for them, but she didn't, and Julian paid the price for it with his own childhood and mental health. As Martin Luther King once said: "The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people."
