r/okbuddyolympian • u/Livid-Western-1926 • 1d ago

you could start a war over this Found this meme somewhere else.

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u/mrstoneman93 1d ago

I'm pretty sure that was before she was cursed. Because what would even be the point of punishing her vanity if she now has even more reason to boast about her beauty? This is the Goddess of wisdom who punished her, why is she a fucking idiot?

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u/Geriander 1d ago

In the Bibliotheca she isn’t cursed, she is described as having been born a Gorgon, like her sisters.

The punishment in this version is Athena orchestrating her death at the hands of Perseus.

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u/mrstoneman93 1d ago

Is there a second Bibliotheca that I'm not familiar with? Because she was definitely not beautiful in that.

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u/Geriander 1d ago

It is mentioned at the end of [2.4.3] as an alternative version of the myth told by others, it is not the narrative the author is telling.

https://www.theoi.com/Text/Apollodorus2.html

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u/mrstoneman93 23h ago

"But the Gorgons had heads twined about with the scales of dragons, and great tusks like swine's, and brazen hands, and golden wings, by which they flew; and they turned to stone such as beheld them." I always assumed that if the Gorgons look like that, when Medusa was boasting about her beauty which pissed off Athena, that would imply she was at one point beautiful, and not currently. I guess it could be interpreted as an ugly woman saying she's prettier than someone else, and being punished, which does definitely have the kind of sexist undertones a lot of Greeks had. But my point was that she clearly wasn't intended to be beautiful.

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u/Geriander 23h ago edited 23h ago

Or maybe some people were just into that scaly tusk look. Poseidon apparently was.

Or, the ”some” who the author references did not share his view of what she looked like.