Ya know, something's always nagged me about Medusa. The whole petrifying trick, was it something she could induce at will or was just seeing you = rock hard?
Astrojensen said: According to greek legend, you got petrified because Medusa was horrifyingly ugly and the mere sight of this was enough to turn you into stone.
Going by that logic looking into this Medusa's eyes wouldn't turn you into stone as she's fairly attractive.
I thought it was more of a punishment for her vanity, as she was beautiful.The curse was that one would become petrified to look at her, thus regardless of whether she was beautiful or not, victims who looked at her met their end.
While ancient Greek vase-painters and relief carvers imagined Medusa and her sisters as beings born of monstrous form, sculptors and vase-painters of the fifth century began to envisage her as being beautiful as well as terrifying. In an ode written in 490 BC Pindar already speaks of "fair-cheeked Medusa".[5]
In a late version of the Medusa myth, related by the Roman poet Ovid (Metamorphoses 4.770), Medusa was originally a ravishingly beautiful maiden, "the jealous aspiration of many suitors," priestess in Athena's temple, but when she and the "Lord of the Sea" Poseidon lay together in Athena's temple, the enraged Athena transformed Medusa's beautiful hair to serpents and made her face so terrible to behold that the mere sight of it would turn onlookers to stone (in some accounts Poseidon raped/ravished her). In Ovid's telling, Perseus describes Medusa's punishment by Athena as just and well-deserved.
Depends which retelling you're talking about, she changed.
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