Characters / DuckTales 2017: Della Duck

DuckTales (2017) character index
Main Characters: Scrooge McDuck | Donald Duck | The Duck Triplets | Della Duck | Webby Vanderquack
McDuck Family Household and Employees | The McDuck-Duck Extended Family | Citizens of Duckburg
Antagonists: Major Antagonists | The Beagle Boys | F.O.W.L. | Minor Antagonists
Others

---

MAJOR UNMARKED SPOILERS AHEAD. You have been warned.

Della Duck

"Nothing can stop Della Duck!"

^{Click here to see her when she was on the moon} 

^{Click here to see her in the past} 

Voiced By: Paget Brewster (English), Akemi Okamura (Japanese)

"Huey, Dewey, Louie, I know you're not used to having a mom and I am not used to being one, but I'll figure it out as we go along in time."

Huey, Dewey, and Louie's mother, and Donald's younger twin sister. She's been missing since before the triplets were born. Her absence is the Driving Question of the first season and continues to have a significant impact even into the second season.

Late in Season 2, she finally finds a way home, and reunites with the McDuck Family. From then on, she's gone on to become a main character, even being added to the opening in Season 3.

---

A-M

• Ace Pilot: As seen by her aviation-styled clothing, she retains this status from the comics. She was Scrooge's pilot for many of their old adventures and gets right back to flying routinely once she returns to Earth.
• Action Mom: Mother of triplets and capable of fighting off pirates, as well as four vikings all at once. Played With in that she's actually never met her own children, due to having recklessly run off and gotten stranded on the Moon before their eggs hatched. Nonetheless, she is shown to have some degree of maternal tendencies, and her feelings of guilt over her absence and desire to return to her children are her main driving motivations during her years of absence.
• Action Survivor: She's somehow survived alone on the Moon for ten years. This is after somehow landing an out of control space-ship that had no power.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: In the comics, she looked an awful lot like Donald in a blonde wig. Here, while she's still Donald's twin sister, she looks a lot more feminine than she does in the comics.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: Blonde in the comics, but her portraits here show she has white "hair" like the rest of her family.
• Aesop Amnesia: Her ordeal on the Moon did little to curb her reckless and impulsive tendencies, at least when it comes to herself. Scrooge explodes over this in "Raiders of the Doomsday Vault!" when Della and Dewey steal Scrooge's plane without telling him. Then, when the two of them go inside Ludwig Von Drake's Doomsday Vault, they proceed to wreck the titular vault trying to find the Seed of the Money Tree. She only starts really getting the message, slowly, as she sees similar recklessness reflected in her children.
  Scrooge: Can you never think anything through, Della?! It's been over a decade and she's still the same headstrong kid jumping into danger or space or any other disaster without a thought of the damage she leaves behind!
• Alliterative Name: Della Duck.
• Ambiguous Situation: A surprising amount of information is given about her past except the identity of the father of her children.
• Anger Born of Worry: In "Timephoon!" she becomes furious with Louie when she sees how much danger his time-traveling treasure-stealing scheme has put the rest of the family (especially her other two boys) in.
• An Arm and a Leg: She was forced to amputate her own leg in order to escape being trapped under a pile of debris when the Spear crashed on the Moon.
• Artificial Limbs: Her left leg was stuck under wreckage after her ship crashed, the next scene, she's shown with a robotic leg. She's surprisingly pleased with the "cool" new leg, and wants to further modify it when she gets the chance.
• Armor-Piercing Response: Louie gives her one in "Timephoon!" After she calls him out on recklessly jumping into a machine without thinking of the consequences of his actions or the people he would hurt, Louie surlily replies, "Wonder who I got that from?" Subverted in that, while she is clearly struck and hurt by the comment, she still sticks to her guns and refuses to let Louie off the hook.
• Ascended Extra: She is never mentioned in the original show or any other animation ^note aside from the letter signed "Dumbella" which introduced Huey, Dewey, and Louie in ''Donald's Nephews'' (1938) , and appeared so sparingly in the comics that, prior to DuckTales 2017, the only character in the Duck Universe that we knew even less about was the triplets' father (whom we don't even have a name for◊). This series makes her a fully fleshed-out character with a central role in the plot, and as of the second half of Season 2, she's effectively part of the main cast. At eighty years, Della may hold the record for how long she was in the background before moving into the spotlight.
• Audience Surrogate: Since Della has never been seen in any media featuring Donald Duck prior to this series, Della is getting to know her family, just as newer audiences are.
• Badass Bookworm: A flashback in the DuckTales comics portrays Della as passionately curious about the history of the lost civilization du jour, and more fascinated by cultural artifacts than treasure.
• Badass Family: Sometime prior to the first episode, it's revealed that she, Donald and Scrooge were a trio of adventurers.
• Barefoot Cartoon Animal: Her original incarnation wears shoes but here, she is barefoot like her brother, both as a child and an adult. However, she wears pants, unlike the rest of her family.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: In "The Shadow War!" and "Last Christmas!", it is shown that she is able to breathe on the Moon without the need of a space suit. This is achieved by Oxy-Chew, an oxygen gum invented by Gyro.
• Berserk Button:
  • In "Last Christmas!", she doesn't take kindly at all to Donald calling her Dumbella.
  • She doesn't like being replaced as Scrooge's pilot either, given how she reacted to a photo in Donald's houseboat of Launchpad being Scrooge's new pilot.
• Big Eater: After about a decade of only being able to subside on black liquorice flavored gum, she wolfs down everything at her reunion feast. She even stops Beakley from taking her plate because there's a still a pea on it.
• Book Dumb:
  • Her first plan to get back to Earth after crash-landing on the Moon was to jump back. Naturally, this did not work.
  • Gyro in particular considers her this, as in the Spear of Selene's instruction manual, he leaves a note saying it's so simple "even Della can do it." This is later confirmed when she attempts to actually read Gyro's instruction manual in order to fix the Spear of Selene. She reads it for a few moments and then collapses from complexity and boredom. It eventually takes her six years to learn it by heart and fix her rocket.
• Born Unlucky: She and Donald both have the same bad luck, but Della deals with her luck differently.
• Break the Haughty: Her motto is "Nothing can stop Della Duck!" But being stuck on the Moon for a decade and having every escape attempt thwarted put a damper on that.
• Broken Ace: She's too irrepressible to be completely broken, but her natural Action Girl nature and wide range of skills (not to mention the fact that she was never a Chew Toy like her brother) led to an overconfidence and recklessness that came back to bite her hard and left her stranded on the moon for ten years. She still has a ton of issues she's not very good at dealing with.
• Character Catchphrase: She has a tendency to say "Nothing can stop Della Duck!" before rushing into something potentially foolish. Like her brother, she also regularly says "Aw, phooey" whenever her bad luck gets her in a poor situation.
• Character Development: Slowly undergoes this in Season 2. In "Raiders of the Doomsday Vault!", despite Scrooge rightly calling her out, Della proves that even though she's still reckless, she at least has backup plans and exit strategies when she jumps into danger, since being stuck on the moon for a decade has forced her to keep an eye on all the exits. Throughout Season 2, she also acts as a Cool Big Sis at best, Pushover Parents at worst to her kids, but undergoing parental worries in "Timephoon!", with Mrs. Beakley's help she learns to call her kids out when they behave too recklessly and give Tough Love when necessary.
• Cool Big Sis:
  • Tends to act like this towards Donald, despite her technically being the younger twin. And she must have been so beloved by him to make him so resentful at his Uncle Scrooge for her absence. Goddess of the Moon, Selene, claims that Della was pretty much this to everyone.
  • Played more for drama as having zero experience actually raising her kids causes her to act more like one of these than a mother, having trouble realizing the damage it could do.
• Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: Averted. Della risking her life to go on one last adventure before the triplets even hatched is a major point of contention for a lot of the characters.
• Daddy's Girl: Scrooge was Della’s surrogate father as well as her uncle, and they shared a closer bond as likeminded, adventurous individuals compared to Scrooge’s relationship with Donald.
• A Day in the Limelight: The second season episode "What Ever Happened to Della Duck?!" focuses solely on her.
• Deceased Parents Are the Best: Subverted. During the first season, the boys revere her memory, and her best friend Selene claims that Della loved her family more than anything, and always made everyone around her better. Then, "The Last Crash of the Sunchaser!" reveals that she put adventuring before her unhatched children, which her brother Donald called her out on, and stole an untested, experimental family rocket that Scrooge planned to surprise her with for a solo joyride. In short, she was flawed. Of course, she turns out to be not deceased at all.
• Determinator: Della will NOT let anything stop her from going back to see her boys once and for all.
• Didn't Think This Through: Her defining character trait. Stealing the Spear of Selene and getting stranded on the Moon is a direct result of this. And later, that tendency sabotages her efforts to inform Scrooge of her whereabouts and later fix the Spear of Selene.
• Disabled in the Adaptation: Unlike her comic book self, Della in this series is an amputee. The producers stated a major reason for her inclusion is to raise awareness of amputees.
• Dismemberment Is Cheap: Della lost her leg when her ship crashed on the moon. Despite her prosthetic being cobbled together from junk, it functions identically to a natural one. However, she is greatly inconvenienced without it, able to only get a good hop or two in before being immobilized on the ground.
• Disappeared Dad: Not her father, but given how Donald got the triplets, one wonders just who their father is and what happened to him.
• Ditzy Genius: She’s smart enough to make her own improvised prosthetic leg and rebuild a rocket ship on her own with nothing but scraps. However, she's scatterbrained enough that she doesn’t think to check the ship’s fuel supply until after she’s failed to fire the rockets, then wastes four years wandering the surface of the Moon before she realizes that she already had what she needed inside her own mouth.
• Does Not Like Spam: She hates the flavor of black licorice. Unfortunately for her, it's the flavor Gyro used for Oxy-Chew, and she has to keep it in her mouth to breathe on the Moon's surface.
• Driving Question: What happened to her? She's been gone since before the triplets were even born. The only clue is that it was what caused the rift between Donald and Scrooge, led to Scrooge retiring from adventuring, and involved Della taking something called the "Spear of Selene" from Scrooge.
  • Answer: The Spear of Selene is a spaceship that Della designed, and Scrooge had secretly built to take his family into space once Della's then-soon-to-be-born triplets were old enough. Della stumbled upon the Spear early and, being her brash and impulsive self, took it for a joyride without permission, wanting "one more adventure before motherhood"; when Scrooge tried to intervene and order her back, Della foolishly refused, and ended up flying into a cosmic storm that cut off communications and damaged the ship, sending it crashing into the Moon. Scrooge tried desperately (and unsuccessfully) to track her down, driving himself nearly to bankruptcy before his Board of Directors forced him to stop. Donald blamed Scrooge solely for the tragedy, and cut ties with him. Scrooge became a bitter, jaded old man who gave up adventuring, at least until the nephews came into his life. Finally, The Stinger of the Season 1 finale established that she actually survived the crash landing, and was still alive (though stranded) on the moon.
• Establishing Character Moment: While the entire episode is devoted to showing off her character, the first three or so minutes of "What Ever Happened To Della Duck?!" do a good job of summing up the key points of her personality. She's reckless (taking the Spear of Selene for a joyride), a skilled pilot (landing the Spear on the lunar surface in more or less one piece without any power), determined (cutting off her leg to escape the wreckage with only a minor complaint), resourceful (building a prosthetic from scraps), family oriented (stating her intentions to get home to her children), and boundlessly optimistic (showing off her "cool robot leg" to the camera without the slightest hint of trauma).
• Et Tu, Brute?: Betrayed Scrooge and Donald at some point prior to the series by stealing the Spear of Selene. However, this was more to prove nothing can surprise her.
• Everyone Went to School Together: "The Lost Cargo of Kit Cloudkicker!" revealed that she attended flight school with Kit Cloudkicker and Molly Cunningham.
• Expository Hairstyle Change: She had shoulder-length hair in flashbacks, but in the present day it's grown almost down to her waist. Presumably she couldn't find anything to cut her hair with during the time she was trapped on the moon, or she was simply too distracted to remember to cut it. After returning back to Earth, she cuts it down a bit. It's longer than before she left but shorter than when she was stranded on the moon.
• Fatal Flaw: Depending on how you want to interpret her underlying mentality, Della's fatal flaw is either Pride, Selfishness, or Impulsiveness. A hard-core adrenaline junkie, Della is revealed in "The Last Crash of the Sunchaser!" to have been too impulsive for her own good, with her desire for adventure giving her a tendency to ignore common sense which is the reason why she went missing in space. She stole the Spear of Selene and took it into space to have one last adventure before she settled down into motherhood, all without thinking about the consequences or how things could potentially go wrong.
• Fate Worse than Death: Flying into a cosmic storm, crash landing on the Moon, and then spending every single day without her boys as her own sanity takes a dip? That's torture worse than death for her.
• First-Episode Twist: She used to be an adventurer alongside Donald and Scrooge.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: Since Della grew up in The '90s, she only knew of Earth up to that era, prior to getting stranded on the moon. It’s rather telling that despite Earth being almost nothing like Della described, Moonlanders Zenith and Gibbous adopted 90s aesthetics based on what Della last described to them.
• Fish out of Water: Once she gets back to Earth, she not only has to get used to Earth's gravity again but gradually learn how to be a good mother since she has no idea on how to raise her kids.
• Foil:
  • To Scrooge. Scrooge is the adrenaline junkie, but even he knows when to stop and listen to his family, that they come first. He's survived to be a hundred and fifty years old by knowing when he's gone too far. Della never learned that lesson, and got trapped on the Moon for it.
  • Also to Donald. While their basic personalities aren't that dissimilar — they're both Hot-Blooded, stubborn and impulsive Determinators with a tendency towards Didn't Think This Through — their attitudes and priorities are pretty much opposite: Della is a Broken Ace, Donald is a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass. Della is a perpetual optimist with a sunny disposition and a reckless streak a mile wide, while Donald is a pessimistic worrywart who's far easier to knock out of balance, and who's a lot more cautious and overprotective. Della is a big dreamer always chasing the next adventure while Donald is far more down-to-earth and finds more pleasure in the small things. And of course, thanks to Della having been gone for so long and leaving Donald to raise the triplets, Donald is an experienced and responsible parental figure while Della is irresponsible and has no clue how to be a mother.
    • Going further, Donald and Della have almost complete opposite approaches to the children during adventures, leading to her episodes having an opposite flow from his. Donald is very protective and dislikes the idea of the kids going on adventures, but knows them well enough to trust them to take care of themselves in a dangerous spot. Della, meanwhile, loves the idea of taking the kids on adventures, but is petrified of losing them and becomes even more fearful and overprotective than Donald is when danger strikes. This comes to a head when both of them lead the kids together in Moonvasion: Donald - the responsible one - is ready to help the kids make a crazy plan, while Della - the impulsive one - wants to hide everyone forever on a deserted island.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: Had this dynamic with Donald. Della was all gung-ho for going into space even while she was expecting the triplets, while Donald thought it was too risky. The two had a very nasty argument over it.
  • Inverted in her childhood days. She would be the one encouraging Donald to interact more with his family while he stayed on the sidelines doing his own thing.
  • When she finally returns home, it turns out she doesn't know how to raise her kids, in contrast to her brother.
• Forgiveness: Della outright told Louie in Timephoon! that his quick rich scheme nearly cost their family and punished him for his actions. After he went to his room, Della got a hold of herself and hoped that she wasn't too harsh with Louie. In the next episode, Della forgives Louie when he sees his effort in helping Scrooge and hearing that he was truly sorry for his actions.
• Gadgeteer Genius: The Spear of Selene was a rocket she designed the blueprints for, and Scrooge commissioned it according to her specs. She is singlehandedly repairing it from the wreckage in the Moon despite being in a "cave with box of scraps" situation.
• Gamer Chick: She's a big fan of Legends of LegendQuest, and played a lot of a flight simulator as a kid.
• Genki Girl: Dewey's picture shows her gleefully smashing her brother's face in a cake. The portrait Scrooge keeps of her (seen above) has her wearing a big grin.
• Genre Savvy: If there's one thing Della and Donald know after seeing so many movies, it's that using time travel to Set Right What Once Went Wrong never goes well. It's for this reason they stop a time traveling Dewey from telling them anything about the future or himself beyond "relative from the future."
• Gentle Touch vs. Firm Hand: A running theme in Della's character arc is her being Maternally Challenged. In particular, Mrs. Beakley espouses the need a Firm Hand while Della would much prefer the Gentle Touch and let the kids be kids. This comes to a head in the episode "Timephoon!", where Louie's actions nearly cause the entire family to be lost in time. Ironically, Mrs. Beakley is among those who are willing to forgive Louie, since everyone knows nothing he did was done out of malice, while Della realizes that she needs to put her foot down and grounds Louie for his actions, with the next episode showing her taking extreme measures to make sure he doesn't try to sneak away when the family leaves the house without him. When Della acknowledges how hard doing that was, Mrs. Beakley commends her and assures her it will make her son a better person in the long run. Then, Della does adopt Louie’s way of thinking involving seeing all angles, allowing her to dispense with this dichotomy, thus expanding her approaches (some more subtler than others) in dealing with her kids if they step out of line. In "New Gods on The Block!", Della understands that what matters, at the end of the day, is that her kids are given room to grow.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Staying on the Moon with no one to talk to gradually ate away at her sanity. She never quite went crazy because of how stubborn she is, but it clearly took its toll on her. In "The Richest Duck in the World!", she says that her desperation for any kind of human contact resulted in a staring contest with the mirror that lasted for three weeks and that, to this day, she can no longer look at any mirror for fear of seeing her.
• Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: Upon arriving back on Earth, she has to take some time to adjust to the differences in gravity between the Earth and the Moon. She learns the hard way when she tries to jump from Scrooge's driveway to his front porch, only to smack face-first into the mansion's gate.
  Della: Dumb Earth gravity...
• Handicapped Badass: She lost her left leg during the crash and replaced it with a robotic leg, which has not diminished her capability as an experienced adventurer in the slightest.
• Her Own Worst Enemy:
  • Getting stranded on the moon was her own fault. She totally ignored warnings from Scrooge and Donald, and when the ship inevitably failed, she had no way to get back.
  • In her A Day in the Limelight episode, there are several instances where her impulsive nature directly sabotages her efforts to get home. Because of her short-sightedness, she can't inform Scrooge of her whereabouts and/or fix her ship. Also, her impulsiveness causes her to go into a Wild Goose Chase which wastes precious time.
• Hero Worship: She idolizes Scrooge, believing he can do no wrong, and even parroting his beliefs without question (as seen in "How Santa Stole Christmas!", which depicts her accepting Scrooge's hatred of Santa without even wondering why he hates him so much).
• Hubris: There's something classically Greek, i.e. like Icarus and Daedalus from Ancient Greece, where the rocket she designed for her ultimate adventure which she believed would give her children "the stars" ended up separating her from them for their entire childhood while leaving her stranded in space, while also estranging her family in her absence.
• Humble Pie: She angrily rips Gyro's manual after she sees a note reading "even Della could it". After attempting to fix her rocket without instructions and failing miserably, she is forced to swallow her pride, fix the manual she previously ripped to shreds, and learn it by heart.
• Hypocrite Has a Point: Even when Louie passive-aggressively points out that his actions with the Time Tub were similar to her recklessness during the Spear of Selene incident (much to everyone’s discomfort as they know he’s right), Della still had every right to be angry with him for what he did.
• I Have No Son!: Played for Laughs. Her irrational fear of fish sees her immediately disown her son Dewey (and the rest of the McDuck family for good measure) after he shows her his new mermaid fish tail (though it obviously doesn't last more than five seconds).
• Innocently Insensitive: Della has a good heart but she doesn't think her actions through: more specifically how her actions will affect others.
• Inexplicably Tailless: Her tailfeathers didn't poke out from her pants in the earlier episodes of season 1.
• Informed Attribute: In "The Deadliest Game... Night!", Scrooge tells Louie that he inherited his ability to see all the angles in a situation from Della. And yet, Della has never shown this trait herself, often charging into situations without stopping to think or planning ahead.
• Insistent Terminology:
  • According to her, the Sunchaser was originally named the Cloudslayer when she was its pilot, and she re-renames it while she's behind the controls.
  • She wanted to name Huey, Dewey and Louie as Jet, Turbo and Rebel, respectively. It takes a while for her to get used to using their proper given names.
• It Runs in the Family:
  • Like Donald, Della inherited the legendary McDuck temper.
  • She loved pulling all kinds of pranks on Donald, just like her sons do.
  • A glimpse of her child self in Last Christmas shows her being quite a bit like Huey, making traps, being knowledgeable about nerd stuff with Donald as Dewey, and insisting on spending time together.
  • "What Ever Happened to Della Duck?!" reveals that all three of her children inherited traits from her. Like Huey, she was a Junior Woodchuck and adds her own notes to the guidebook. Like Dewey, she hums her own theme song while behaving foolishly. And like Louie, she is savvy enough to guess how a situation is going to go (thinking she and Penumbra will become friends).
  • Just like how in the Carl Barks comics and the Cartoon Donald's Nephews where Huey Dewey and Louie sent their father and Della's husband to the hospital with a Firecracker under the chair, she and Donald did the same thing to their father Quackmore Duck which is why their mother Hortense had to send them to live with Uncle Scrooge for a while.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: While Della is very reckless, it does not change the fact that she is a very kindhearted person and is usually laid back, although she does get rather volatile when she is upset.
• Kid Hero All Grown-Up: Her and Donald were Scrooge's main adventuring partners prior to the Spear of Selene incident, even going back to when they were the same age as the triplets and Webby.
• Leeroy Jenkins: She impulsively stole an experimental rocket, ignored Scrooge's pleas to come back, got caught in a cosmic storm and got lost in space. And later, she attempts to just jump off the moon's gravity, without considering that she might get stuck on the moon's orbit, or how she will enter the Earth's atmosphere without burning up even if she escapes. Luckily she was unsuccessful.
• Leitmotif: The Moon theme from the DuckTales video game is frequently used when she's around, whether it's a few bars from just before it's revealed she's stuck on the moon, to her singing it a-capella during her first attempt to get off the moon, to her lullaby, and all around the soundtrack of "What Ever Happened to Della Duck?!"
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again:
  • According to Webby, there are few pictures of Della, including the portrait that Dewey found, and no one talks about her.
  • Webby mentions that one time, a letter for or about Della come to Scrooge's doorstep. Scrooge seized the letter, bought out the post office, stopped mail from ever coming to the mansion, and made sure nobody saw the postman again. Though Webby is probably being overly dramatic about the last part.
  • Scrooge has seemingly gone to incredible lengths to cover up what happened to her. Even the newspaper we see in the first episode "McDuck Hangs Up Spats After..." has the rest of the headline ripped off, showing that this was at least local news, but he has done such a good job covering it up that even Webby can't find anything on her.
  • Donald likewise never discusses the boys' mother in front of them, merely telling them that she's "gone".
• Lethal Chef: It seems she's not much better of a chef than her brother or eldest son. When she tried making cakes for her kids as a gift to start taking mom responsibilities, whatever she fed Dewey gave him stomach cramps that lasted over a day. It seems she can at least make a decent flan though, which made Huey unexpectedly giddy.
• Like Parent, Like Child: All three of her sons are in some way similar to her, a fact that isn't lost on Scrooge.
  • Like Huey, she relies on the Junior Woodchuck guidebook for life advice and has some level of mechanical ingenuity; though she tends to let her own impulsivity get away with her while one of Huey's biggest flaws is that he isn't impulsive enough.
  • Like Dewey, she is an adrenaline junkie who finds the danger and mystery to be the highlight of their adventures, this being the very thing that got her stranded on the moon in the first place.
  • Like Louie, she possesses a Genre Savviness that helps her exploit certain situations and find exit strategies. Louie however does this to avoid involving himself in danger and prefers being the planner while Della usually throws herself into it, Della's savviness geared more to on-the-spot moments of stress and danger.
• Like Parent, Unlike Child: Della is more reckless, impulsive, and Hot-Blooded than cautious Huey and scheming Louie.
• Mama Bear: Spent the last decade working tirelessly to return to Earth to see her boys. Now that they're reunited, Della is never letting anything come between them again.
• Maternally Challenged: She was separated from her children from before they hatched to when they are about eleven and struggles to figure out how to parent from a combination of inexperience, her own personality being more 'one of the kids' than anything, and some sanity damage from being gone for so long. That being said, Della Duck is hard at work trying to figure it all out, and everyone around her is willing to help and give her some slack while she learns the ropes a decade in.
• Missing Mom: We already knew that Donald has been raising the triplets since they were babies; now it seems that, unlike in many adaptations, we're going to find out why. Indeed, Dewey admits to Webby that all Uncle Donald told them about their mother was that she was gone.

N-Y

• Nephewism: It's implied that Scrooge raised her and Donald, and losing Della was as devastating as if he had lost his own daughter.
• Never Speak Ill of the Dead: Despite her disappearance being largely her own fault, Donald and the triplets ignore her actions and put most of the blame on Scrooge for building the rocket. Even when Scrooge defends himself, he chooses to point out everything he did to try to save her rather than Della's poor choices. However, when Della gets back to Earth and reunites with the family, they start to get more critical of what she did to get stranded on the moon in the first place — especially Mrs. Beakley. Scrooge tries to give her the benefit of the doubt, up until "Raiders of the Doomsday Vault!" when she exhibits the traits that got her stranded on the moon, and he explodes over her immaturity.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Her refusal to control her impulses and hijacking of the Spear of Selene led to her own disappearance in outer space, her uncle and brother's relationship being strained, and her sons having to grow up without their mother and their uncle struggling to provide for them.
• Not Quite Dead: The Stinger for "The Shadow War!" (and thus for Season 1 as a whole) reveals Della is still alive, crash-landed on the Moon, and only just now learning that her family has come back together.
• Oblivious to Hatred: She absolutely cannot see that Penumbra cannot abide her presence, let alone consider her a friend. Penumbra belatedly considers Della a friend after Lunaris reveals his true colors, leaving Della none the wiser.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: After several episodes of purely being the cool mom who lets her kids get away with anything, her furiously snarling Louie's name upon discovering he's behind the Timephoon shows just how bad things have gotten. After everything's cleared up, she insists on grounding him, and goes to quite impressive lengths to make sure it's a fitting punishment.
• Pals with Jesus: She is fondly remembered by Selene, goddess of the Moon, as well as the demigod Storkules.
• Parental Abandonment: Even worse than the comics version; she leaves her triplets to go joyriding on a spaceship before they even hatched. Though "abandonment" is a bit inappropriate, given that she fully intended to be back in time for their hatching.
• Parental Hypocrisy: Is hit with this in "Timephoon!" when she chews Louie out for stealing the time-travelling tub without thinking of the consequences or the people that could be hurt. Louie replies "I wonder who I got that from". This doesn't stop her from putting her foot down and grounding him (in fact, it just seemed to encourage it).
• Parents as People:
  • By all accounts, she was a loving niece to Scrooge, sister to Donald, and friend to Selene; and, in Scrooge's words, "wanted to give [her] kids the stars." But she was also a hard-core adrenaline junkie who balked at the new responsibilities facing her for motherhood, and (at the very least) put her thrill-seeking before her own unhatched children, and disappeared into a cosmic storm, crash-landing on the Moon in the process.
  • This was shown as a driving theme in "Nothing Can Stop Della Duck!" She finally meets her children, and goes out of her way to try and make up on lost time. But considering she basically missed the necessary transition into motherhood, there's no way she would be mentally prepared to be a proper mother right off the bat. Scrooge knows this, and lets the boys know that, like they will have to get used to having a mother, she will have to get used to being one.
  • In "Timephoon!", she allows the kids to do what they want, believing it was fine to let kids be kids and because she's still new to parenting. But as the episode goes on further, she realizes that Beakley pointing out that small problems can slowly grow into big problems has become relevant when she discovers the storm was Louie's fault. At the end of the episode, despite how hard it is for her, she puts her foot down when Louie is Easily Forgiven by everyone else and points out how reckless he was in putting his family in danger. After she grounds him and sends him to his room, she is visibly tired at having to be tough on Louie, but Beakley does praise her for it.
• Parental Neglect: The flashbacks in "The Last Crash of the Sunchaser!" show her distracted by her desire to go into space, to the point where Donald was stuck looking after the triplets (who, for the record, were still eggs at this point). Turns out she never wanted to neglect them. She did everything she could to get back, but kept failing miserably due to an alien monster sabotaging her efforts.
• Parental Substitute: As first shown in "The Golden Armory of Cornelius Coot!", her motherhood extends to Webby, who presumably doesn't have a mother.
• The Pollyanna: She's Born Unlucky like Donald, but unlike him she's optimistic and always sees the bright side of thing. Most people would be upset about having to amputate their leg — but Della's positively giddy about having a cool new prosthetic limb.
• Power Trio: Was this with Scrooge and Donald, stabilizing the dynamic of the greedy Scrooge against the downtrodden Donald with someone who enjoys adventuring, but isn't in it for the money, accepting the quest and cheap trinkets as her rewards.
• The Prankster: She loved pranks and even left a big elaborate prank at Castle McDuck just for Donald.
• Present Absence: Though she's not around, her fate is the first season's Driving Question.
• Promotion to Opening Titles: She's been edited into the opening sequence in Season 3, officially establishing her as a core cast member.
• Pungeon Master: It's easy to see where Dewey got it from, and that's putting it Della-cately.
  Louie: Euh boy, now there's two of 'em.
• Pushover Parents: Is often criticized by Beakley for not disciplining her boys. Though she would ultimately subvert this by grounding Louie for using a stolen time travel device to steal treasure from the past, which resulted in a massive disruption of the space-time continuum that nearly got everyone killed and/or lost in time.
• Riddle for the Ages: Who is the father of Della's children?
• Sanity Ball: She picks it up when having to teach Launchpad how to fly.
• Sanity Slippage: Time on the moon did NOT bode well for her sanity, and she kept losing it the more she failed. Unfortunately, it has become chronic; certain things trigger it like mirrors, because Della found herself talking in a mirror while she was stranded on the moon until she couldn't take it anymore and wanted contact with real people. And then when she gets stranded on a deserted island, she starts regressing back to her lack of sanity due to being in a similar situation when she crash-landed on the moon.
• Scarf of Asskicking: She is always seen wearing a teal scarf, is an adventurer, and a picture of her showed her sword fighting with a pirate. Said scarf was a gift from her brother, and she still sports it while stranded on the moon.
• Shared Family Quirks: While she doesn't have quite the temper of her brother Donald, when she snaps, she goes into the exact same Unstoppable Rage as he does.
• Stock "Yuck!": Is less than happy that her Oxy-Chew only comes in black licorice flavor. She also spits out buttermilk upon an attempt to drink it, just like Webby.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Della greatly resembles a younger version of her Aunt Matilda. She also looked identical to her cousin Webby as a child.
• Suddenly Voiced: After 5 silent appearances in the first season, Della suddenly speaks in the season 1 finale, "The Shadow War!".
• Thrill Seeker: It's ultimately established by "The Last Crash of the Sunchaser!" that Della was the biggest adrenaline junkie in the family, always obsessed with exploring new vistas and going on grand adventures. So much so that, when the family came to the realization they'd explored just about everywhere on Earth, Della decided she wanted to go into space. She vanished before the triplets hatched because she impulsively stole the prototype rocket that Scrooge made, only to be swept away by a cosmic storm which she refused to turn back from.
• Time-Passage Beard: Gender-Inverted, her hair is shown to have grown very long during her years stranded in space.
• Tomboy: She’s a feisty, adventurous, and rambunctious adrenaline junkie who is almost always seen in her pilot uniform and has a knack for pulling pranks.
• Too Dumb to Live: Subverted: While it was extremely foolish to steal the Spear of Selene from Scrooge and drive it into space all alone, the season 1 finale reveals that she's still alive and kicking on the moon.
• Tragic Heroine: Della Duck had everything going for her: heir to the richest duck in the world, a massive mansion to live in with servants at her beck and call, three children on the way, a storied adventuring career at the ripe old age of 20-something, and was getting a rocket ship for her birthday. And in classic Tragic Heroine fashion, it was all taken away from her by her Fatal Flaw when she took said rocket for a joyride.
  • Her Pride kept her from turning back when she got caught in a cosmic storm.
  • Her Impulsiveness caused her to get into a fist-fight with an alien, kicking up so much dust that a rescue party could not see her crash site.
  • In a fit of Anger, she tore apart the ship's instruction manual when she saw that Gyro had insulted her in the margins.
  • And to top it all off, she had to spend the entire time chewing Black Licorice Oxy-Chew to stay alive.
• Trauma Button: Her time alone on the moon serves as this for Della. Whenever she talks about it she gets a Thousand-Yard Stare and her voice becomes more monotone until she snaps out of it. "The Richest Duck in the World!" suggests she went slightly mad from the isolation as her desperation for any kind of human contact resulted in a staring contest with a mirror that lasted three weeks and a fear of her own reflection from then on.
• Walking Spoiler: It's hard to talk about her without spoiling the answers to the first season's Driving Question.
• Was Too Hard on Him:
  • In "The Golden Armory of Cornelius Coot!", she gets increasingly frustrated with Launchpad for his unorthodox methods in operating the Sunchaser/Cloudslayer, eventually blowing up at him for crashing into the mountain, nearly getting them killed. When she later has a heart-to-heart talk with Webby about not having to measure up to someone else's estimation of "worthiness", she realizes she was trying to force Launchpad to do exactly that, and decides she must apologize to him.
  • It is implied she felt this way about Louie as well after grounding him in "Timephoon!". She admits that it was a very hard thing to do, and in "Moonvasion!", she interacts with him very warmly, having a lot more screen-time with him in particular than the others.
• What Is This Feeling?: In "Timephoon!", the look on her face when she sees that her kids are in danger and space and time is unraveling in front of her, and it was all caused by Louie, reveals that this is the first time she's ever felt real, maternal Anger Born of Worry.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Gives a big one to Louie in "Timephoon!" when his scheme goes out of control and nearly erases the present characters from existence, finishing it off by grounding him.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: She can't stand fish, even anything related to fish. Della immediately arms the family submarine's torpedoes upon meeting a race of merpeople, and chooses to stay on the sub instead of going out to meet them.
• Womanchild: Very immature and impulsive for a mother of three, Della more-or-less still has the mindset of a teenager instead of an adult. She wanted to her name her sons Jet, Turbo and Rebel and is rather put-out that Donald went against her wishes. And whenever she encounters an obstacle she can't simply power her way through, she pouts and calls it "dumb". Justifed by the fact she hasn't been able to actually act like a mom and spent a decade without raising them. The fact she spent a decade in isolation on the Moon likely adds to this.
• You Are Grounded!: It takes a while for her to stop trying to be the cool parent and just be "Mom", having spent so long away from her kids and not wanting to lose them a second time. However, "Timephoon!" has a moment where Louie nearly causes everyone to be Trapped in the Past over trying to shortcut his way to money — again. Della finally shows some Tough Love and grounds Louie for it.

---