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A legend everyone thinks they know becomes a story many of us needed. We take a fresh, unflinching look at Ayana Gray’s I Medusa and follow the arc from girl to survivor, from pawn to priestess, and from silence to a voice strong enough to call out gods and men alike. What happens when a culture trains a young woman to be ignorant—and then blames her for not knowing? That question drives our conversation through the book’s most searing themes: grooming disguised as romance, consent ignored when power feels threatened, and the way institutions will defend their image over their people.

We start with the home that failed Medusa—an abusive father, a checked-out mother, and immortal sisters who choose not to prepare their mortal sibling for the world. In Athens, trials set by Athena reveal a rare moral clarity: compassion as courage, justice as action, and service as strength. Yet when Poseidon exerts status and familiarity to breach Medusa’s boundaries, the reckoning lands where it always seems to—on the woman. We challenge Athena’s role as “wisdom” within a patriarchal order, unpack how victim-blaming survives by flattening nuance, and trace how Gray turns Perseus into a footnote to keep the spotlight on the woman, not the weapon.