Hi Rhia, now I will state I'll completely agree with you in how people kind of treat Donatella as some unforgiving, guilt-tripping parent that's "kind of the boss" of the whole family....But there is one point I will I will disagree on.. it won't be heated as others.
Now I admit, I was one of the people that saw Donatella as a one-sided, typical bossy mother (I had that in my community alot), and to not be long winded.. the speculated reason why she (Could ! but only due to circumstance) acts how she acts is due to her job as a mother, wife and circus performer (I might be quoting a fanfic) : "Safety never brought food to the table." Juggling between children and teaching the trade was never an easy task, and with that came with suppression (speculation) of her motherly personality (could be wrong, but I never really felt that, you know.. motherly instinct), yes she could talk to them softly, talk to them with care, like a mother does at times; but she needed that to be distinct to her manager-like behavior: it would be impossible to worry about every single thing about a child (though she WOULD NEVER BE THE WORRYING TYPE) getting hurt when doing dangerous stunts.
thats all I have for now. Tanks for joining this horribly crafted query question people.
Hm... I do agree with you on the front that a lot of the harshness of her personality is very likely due to the circumstances of her life and career and how difficult that is but i don't really see where you're coming from with saying she has a lack of motherly instinct or suppresses her motherly personality
I think it's pretty easy to overlook a lot of her more motherly moments when you're kind of being blasted with all the other out of left field shit she says but she's very very open about how much she loves her children, I mean she calls Raz her "little pootie" and her "middle baby" and "darling" and if the flea lines are intended to accurately reflect their real selves (which it's implied they are because they have the exact same reaction lines as the real aquatos) then we have evidence of Donatella being very warm and supportive with Raz trying a trick, even going so far as to defend him from his brother ("Dion, please, he's just a baby"). We also have her telling Raz "Darling, you need to eat, you're so thin!" which is honestly classic mom behavior. And of course, my favorite cut line from when you would have used the love bottled emotion on her is "Oh, darling, I think if I loved you any more I'd be forced to eat you! In fact, come over here you little biscuit"
As for textual evidence aside from just the language she uses, she's very clearly concerned about her children and the family's relationships with one another. When Raz mentions that Dion is really mad at him Donatella accurate sums up the reasons why Dion is mad and tells Raz to go help him and bond with him and that Dion won't be mad at him forever, and she later asks Raz to go check on his dad. I would call this a motherly thing to do, in my opinion at least.
I also think she IS the worrying type, although not when it comes to circus tricks (which might be what you mean here specifically?) because she asks Raz to go find Queepie because she worries when he wanders off, and she locks the children's doors at night because she worries that because Queepie started sleepwalking that means all of her kids might be in danger of sleepwalking, so a lot of her controlling personality comes from a place of concern. She only relents some of this control at the end because she realizes that psychic abilities give her children defenses against some of these dangers and she doesn't have to worry about them quite so much. She doesn't worry about her children when it comes to circus tricks because that's an area she DOES have control over. She's the one designing the tricks so she's the one making sure her children are safe, and if they do get hurt they've been taught ways to make that hurt less (Augustus mentions "this is why we taught you all how to fall when you were babies"). She has full confidence in how talented her children are and their ability to carry out the tricks properly
Now, to your credit here, I DO think that she gets very preoccupied with the circus and that bleeds into how she treats her children. But here's the thing: I don't think she has a distinct difference between being a mother and being head of the circus! When she's training her children she does so with motherly support (again, flea circus as evidence for this because we don't have much evidence otherwise) and vice versa she treats her family like a circus (with her trying to improve familial relationships in a directorial way much like she directs the circus)
So she's not really motherly in the traditional sense, but i think it's kind of unfair to her to say she isn't motherly. She's very vocal about how she loves her children and treats them in a motherly way but she's also a fairly harsh woman with a job that bleeds into family life which makes her more motherly moments kind of hard to pick up on
Thank you for the ask and being super nice about it! I'm not trying to bash you at all, I honestly don't think your opinion is wrong and that you can view her in whatever way makes sense for you but I just wanted to state my personal opinion and my reasoning behind it. I do like to hear how other people view her, it's very interesting to me!
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