I am starting to think Medusa is way more complicated a character than most people think

the story involving her once being beautiful, then being punished for being raped; comes ftom an author well known for writing propaganda in the service of extreme misogyny: Ovid

@bri_seven i feel like it's important to note that the story of Perseus slaying Medusa had been around for centuries before Ovid. Ovid was a Roman (not Greek!) who lived during the reign of Augustus and not very long after Athens had rebelled and supported Mithridates against Rome during the Mithridatic wars. The changes he made to the myths in the Metamorphoses are almost universally in the direction of "the gods are awful", which served to sublty insult and delegitimise Roman authority (by comparing them to the gods, and then portraying the gods as evil assholes) and to frame Athens as morally bankrupt and their patron goddess as a vindictive bitch. In every Greek version of the myth, she was born a Gorgon, her relationship with Poseidon was consensual (they "laid together in a field of wildflowers" in the Theogony), and there's no implication that she had been cursed. If anything, Medusa (the Greek mythological figure) is a far less complex character than most people think. Even the backstory added by Ovid is a brief aside at the end of Book IV and that her encounter with Neptune was nonconsensual is never explicitly stated. Modern interpretations of the story and the themes can be interesting and I'm not saying they're bad but I think a lot of people have a tendency to treat antiquity as if it all happened over a brief period of time. The Metamorphoses is a great work but it's a much later interpretation of these myths, in a different language, by someone from a different culture than the one that originated them.

_{If you think about it, She's The Man and 10 Things I Hate About You are ~200 years closer to Shakespeare and in his language by his cultural successors.}

@haematophage @bri_seven this explains a lot