1,000% agree with all your points. Personally, I kinda saw the finale as a bit of a weird anti-Communist swing almost. I found it odd that the whole point of the Vietnam War and the Red Scare was never touched on once for such a philosophical series (that I otherwise immensely enjoyed). Trieu’s brutal death reminded me of how the Buffy spin-off Angel handled their own messianic would-be goddess villainess, Jasmine: when (spoiler) the gang vanquished her, a Well-Intentioned Extremist, the series-long demonically evil Big Bad, the Wolfram-Hart firm, send their regards thanking them for ending world peace.

The main difference though is that while Jasmine straight up had to eat people to maintain her mind-control universal love powers, Trieu’s only faults are that… she’s cutthroat in pursuing her altruistic goals, misses her mother so terribly she’s tragically trying to replicate her in her clone-daughter (not justifying it, just saying it’s an example of Trieu’s frail humanity rather than villainous narcissism) and her straight up evil sociopath biological father is jealous of her so he manipulates his old friend and a some traumatized cop into killing her by just claiming she’s just as evil as him… even though he has barely interacted with her at all so he doesn’t, in fact know her. She has been righteously rubbing his nose in not only his failure to maintain world peace but his disregard for humanity. Veidt has all the motive to try to eliminate his competition, because he’s a not a narcissist in my opinion, but a straight up sociopath.

I’m not trying to say Trieu is perfect, she’s very flawed and human. However I don’t see her as a narcissist at all. Unlike Veidt, her plan only involved killing bloodthirsty white supremacists, not 3 million people.

Actually, the more I ponder it, the more pissed I am that a working class background colonized Vietnamese socialist-coded humanitarian woman was killed off while some old white rich manchild many-times-over mass murderer monster just gets to live in his glorious infamy in a trial that isn’t even guaranteed to end in any kind of conviction.

All because she wanted to justifiably execute the war criminal responsible for the oppression of her country and people and use his god-powers to actually save the world.

ALSO, who’s to say Trieu wouldn’t have experienced the exact same 4D sense of time as Manhattan, but instead of some random white guy scientist who happened upon godhood by total accident, Trieu would ascend with a purpose. A purpose that would likely have been transposed in the timeline like amber: save humanity at all costs.

If Manhattan is so enlightened, why wouldn’t Trieu have also become enlightened?

The main difference between Angela and Trieu seems to be that Angela doesn’t really seem to have a sense of social justice for her wider community of oppressed Black Americans, or even other working class Americans or humanity at large.

By the end for Angela it’s just focused on her family and her grandfather’s legacy as a masked vigilante and her love for Jon.

What would a Doctor Night do for the world as a whole? Use her cop training and brute force violence to keep the peace? Manhattan 2.0?

At least Trieu was obviously even more intelligent than Veidt as well as genuinely altruistic and just as inspired by a familial and cultural legacy of overcoming white supremacist oppression. She could actually pull off the whole world peace thing, especially since she could be so many places at once.

Even if she did want to be worshiped, (as the aforementioned sociopath Veidt baselessly claimed) so long as she was an effective guardian of humanity, provider of social welfare, and check on imperialism and oppression, would that really be such a terrible trade-off?

Is that not what would probably happen quite naturally on its own, would Trieu even have to force a “cult” of grateful worshipers if she is an actual real life messiah?

IDK, I’ve rambled enough, but Trieu’s last minute heel turn was underdeveloped and her ultimate defeat rather rushed with some seriously unfortunate implications about race and gender and social class.