Title Goes Here

Right now i’m revisting that strange place called “i don’t think that guanyin is a religious composite to mary, i think she’s a religious composite to jesus.” I know the commonly held belief is to make buddha the religious composite to jesus. But i don’t think that’s quite right. The buddha is portrayed as faulty and human in a way that guanyin quite frankly never is. The buddha has two fates, either he goes on to conquer the world OR or he becomes the buddha. Now, the first fate was false, we know it was false. That’s theologically true. But it nevertheless exists in the minds of his parents as a possibility. And it’s presented as one. He lives as a spoiled child in an ivory tower who chooses to leave because he’s a fundamentally compassionate human being.

But guanyin? Oh guanyin gives everything up for the people who hate her. The buddha turns the other cheek, but guanyin offers it up before you’ve even slapped the first! She gives everything to her father who doesn’t love her, only to be scorned and even executed by him. She’s a consumed god. She’s the sin-eater! Jesus i think is best as a metaphor for sin eaters. But the buddha is, and never has been, a sin-eater. It’s not within his role. Guanyin only ever is the sin eater. She’s compassionate to arguably a fault. It’s heart breaking how kind she is. It’s why we like her the best.

like should america chavez be a specific kind of latino? yeah. she should. it's weird she wasn't. but the choice to do that by specifically choosing to get rid of brown and black lesbian dimension created by a gay romani guy to "actually america's parents were morally fucked scientists who experimented on children at the behest and with the help of a white billionaire who murdered both of them" is bad.

i can think up so many better options than that. options that don't require this explicit narrative where at the end of it we don't end up with 3 dead women, 2 of whom are lesbians, and a fourth so traumatized she makes up an entire parallel dimension and apparently hallucinates an old woman.

like here are just a few:

ONE make it so that her grandparents are actually from earth and accidentally made a pocket dimension.

this is the easiest one. retcon her grandma so that she was a puerto rican scientist who accidentally made a utopian dimension that she ended up moving to due to the issues on earth and opened it up to other folks across various earths who could find it and were gay

TWO everything else about the utopian parallel is the same except now one or both of america's moms are from earth

just literally they end up in this dimension somehow, and either one or both of them is from earth and puerto rico.

THREE keep it all the same and don't kill her damn parents or sister at the end.

this is the one i like the least, but it's worth saying that in this version of her back story a white billionaire hasn't killed off 2 black and brown lesbians.

THREE.FIVE something where america's parents aren't morally bankrupt scientists experimenting on children on the behalf of a white billionaire

i don't know, make it so they were normal scientists and america accidentally stumbled into one of their projects and shit happened then. make it so that because there's only one of her in the universe she grew up and was born a thousand different ways, she grew up on earth, she grew up in space, all these things, and then something happened and she's trying to find her moms again. make it so that she was experimented on by the white billionaire but it wasn't her moms doing it. again. i cannot stress enough how terrible this specific configuration of her backstory is.