Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-241978-20141030044711/@comment-241978-20141114173511

If I wanted to tone down Verdona's implied callousness, I would speculate something like this:

Verdona and Max either had a son named Manny or had a daughter who married a guy named Manny (in any case Manny is hirsuit enough for a small child to mistake him for Bigfoot). Their third kid left Earth for some reason, possibly because s/he joined the Plumber skeleton crew or something. S/he met and married/cohabitated with a human/anodite/other alien and had Sunny. Sunny was born or later became an energy being (in any case her powers weren't useable as a toddler). Sunny met and started dating the space biker boy Antonio (which explains why her parents thought he was in with a bad crowd, even if he is a slavishly devoted boyfriend). Her parents send her to responsible cousin Gwen (who is a skilled anodite despite being a meatbag) in the hope that Sunny will become more like her. This fails spectacularly because they were irresponsible parents to begin with and Verdona sends Sunny back home (while chastising her for being a spoiled brat when all her cousins turned out great, and Sunny has no excuse for Verdona being preferential because Max is her grandfather too), putting her parents right back where they started. Mercifully for them, Sunny and Antonio eventually break up on their own. Seriously, did Sunny's parents ever teach her that destroying stuff is bad or is she such a terror that they sent her away because they couldn't deal with her anymore? You could spend an entire episode exploring her relationship with her parents.