Medusa may have felt justified in turning people to stone after being wronged by both Poseidon and Athena. Did that make her justified or simply cruel? Where would you place her—victim or monster? Likewise, as interpreters, we have the chance to address the past's oversimplifications, but are we sometimes recreating the same issues? Where are our new, modern framings still reducing complex people and situations to “good” or “bad” for simplicity’s sake?

It’s time to replace the heroes and villains in our stories with portrayals of those same people in their messy, nuanced, complexity.