It's her legal name, not her birth name

She originally didn't know her own name. When she was two, she was rescued by Wonder Woman from a fire that killed her family. She lived on Paradise Island as an adopted sister. She was given the fake ID Donna Troy in Teen Titans #22.

In the Who is Donna Troy arc, it was revealed it wasn't her parents that died, it was shady adoption people. Her mother was Dorothy Hinckley, who passed away from cancer. She was adopted briefly by Fay and Carl Stacey, but when the latter died, Fay was forced to give the child up again. Donna was handled to shady adoption people, and they were the ones that died in the fire when Wonder Woman rescued her.

Then things get messy. Because Wonder Woman was rebooted after Crisis, she was excised from Donna's origin. Wonder Woman was replaced with Rhea and she was raised with the Titans of Myth on New Cronus - as part of their Titan Seeds program. They named the Seeds after Greek cities - Troia, Athyns, Sparta and others. She was returned to Earth aged 13 and joined the Teen Titans shortly after.

So in this new chronology, she is Donna Hinckley > Troia > Donna Troy.

We're ignoring the later changes made by Byrne and Jimenez because they don't really interfere with this line.

And I'd place an asterisk with Donna Hinckley. We know her name was Donna, and her mom's name Hinckley. Whether her birth certificate used her mother or (unknown) father's name is unclear. She later changed her name so her legal name is Donna Hinckley Troy.

Holy crap! That's one messy origin!

You sure can say that again!

That should definitely be simplified, just make it that her actual parents died and Wonder Woman brought her in. Not every origin needs to be some huge scale event. Things were better in the New Teen Titans, at least she had an alias.

When Haney introduced her, he didn't know the Wonder Girl appearing in Wonder Woman's own title was actually a time-displaced Diana. And it didn't matter because most Teen Titans readers at the time didn't read Wonder Woman either. She was just WG, Wonder Chick, the girl. Eventually she was turned into her own character.

The Byrne and thing I skipped? He really wanted to reconnect her origin with Diana.

So he retconned her into being a magic mirror duplicate of Diana. She was stolen by Dark Angel (who was later revealed to be the Donna Troy of Earth-Seven) and her consciousness was placed in the body of abused women. She reincarnated into a new lifetime of domestic violence and eventually killed by the abuser. Dorothy's daughter was the last in that line, the intervention of Rhea broke the cycle.

Despite her having the passive memories of dozens of lifetimes, this is never brought up again.

Her origin had to be convoluted because of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Wonder Woman was rebooted, but New Teen Titans, the biggest selling title, wasn't. But this was a fresh young newly arrived Wonder Woman so she couldn't have saved Donna as a baby.

The New 52 origin is that she was a weapon made of clay created by hardline Amazons to destroy the Sons of Themyscira. All other origins were falls memories implanted in her to make her feel more human. Or something.

Amazons love implanting false memories to suppress trauma. How do you stop grief? Simple, just wipe that part out of their memory.

That's all well and good but I just feel like the more convoluted something is the less appealing it is, at least for me. Simplicity rules out. Imagine if Superman's origin was messed with and instead of it being what we know (Rocketed off-world by his parents moments before destruction) It is instead made into a convoluted rollercoaster with a bunch of unnecessary twists and turns added in. Like for example he gets captured before reaching earth and is cloned, among other things. I just don't see the point.

Simplicity is nice for most characters but convoluted origin stories and retcon to the odd character here and there add flair to comics. Every writer just does what they want. That has happened since forever.

I disagree. For me simple and straightforward origins are better, when it gets convoluted and messy It gets ridiculous and I just roll my eyes because there is no reason why it should be that way in my opinion. It makes me not even want to bother with reading anything to do with that character, since they just keep changing everything to do with them every couple of years. That's my main problem with DC in general as well, too many reboots and nothing ever sticks.

Every time they bring in a reboot to fix something, they just create two more problems. That's interesting to document.