YMMV / Medea

• Alternate Character Interpretation: People have been arguing over whether Medea was justified or not for over two thousand years, and it doesn't look like it's gonna end anytime soon.
• Fair for Its Day: The many references and stereotypes of Medea as the Hysterical Woman are enough to make the modern reader cringe, but remember Medea is one of the few instances in Ancient Greece of a woman being the protagonist in a play (and a rather active one at that) with her name on the title and sympathetic character flaws and motivations. It also gets some mileage out of her being a savage, Asiatic foreigner... while still actively attempting to underscore her common humanity with the Greek characters and the injustice of her plight and the prejudice she's being subjected to.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Medea, past her Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds phase.
  • Jason is an unapologetic Jerkass for most of the play, but it's hard not to feel sorry for him after he discovers that Medea killed their children and desperately begs her to let him give them a proper burial.
• Moral Event Horizon: Which of the two principal characters is more justified — and whether one or both cross this line — has been a point of contention for too long to remember.
  • Jason: by abandoning and betraying Medea after she sacrificed everything to be with him, effectively condemning her two children to a bleak future and possible enslavement.
  • Medea: by killing her two children, after she kills his new bride by lighting her on fire with magic poison. Her motivation was a combination of Mercy Kill and hurting Jason. In mythological canon, Medea committed numerous other atrocities before the play even begins — although these were not all part of her story until after Euripides wrote the play. They include: a) chopping up her younger brother and tossed the pieces into the ocean so that her father would have to delay his pursuit to gather the pieces for a proper burial (this was so awful that Jason's intervention was the only thing keeping the rest of the Argonauts from tossing her overboard too), and b) convincing two kids to cut up their father and put the pieces in boiling water, under the pretense that it will make him younger.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The scene where Medea kills her own sons! Yes, it is done off-stage, but that doesn't make it any less chilling.
  • The messenger describes Glauce's and Creon's deaths in horrifying detail.
• Rooting for the Empire: Admit it, you have some point rooting for Medea to succeed in her revenge because of how horrible Jason and everyone else treats her. That is until she kills her children... Played straight for adaptations that mention this is the only way for them to not become slaves.
• Tear Jerker: Medea’s entire situation. She is typically interpreted as a victim of a man's world. As a foreign-born woman, she has no rights whatsoever, and to make matters worse, her husband deserts her for a Corinthian princess, and his prospective father-in-law wants to send her (Medea) into exile. This, of course, could leave her children vulnerable to slavery. Medea didn't need to get revenge on Jason, what she needed was his support. But since Jason not only broke his marriage vows, but broke his vows to the gods, it's no wonder things turn out the way they do.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Medea would be a Villain Protagonist to us, if an extremely sympathetic one, but to Euripides and the chorus, she's just tragic. In both cases, her acts (particularly the murder of her children, born of a foreigner or not) would have been unconscionable. This also applies to Jason.
  • The fact that Medea kills her children not merely to spite Jason but to protect them from slavery, because she is a foreigner, tends to get lost with the modern audience if not mentioned in adaptations.
• Values Resonance:
  • The fact that one of Medea's struggle is being a woman in a male-dominated world that treats her unfairly is still extremely sympathetic and relatable to a female audience is what revives the play with the feminist movement.
  • As noted under Values Dissonance, the fact that Medea and her children are threatened with slavery because they are not Corinthian citizens can resonate with immigrant families and people of foreign origin. For reference, the modern adaptation Medealand by Swedish writer Sara Stridsberg emphasizes this aspect.
• Vindicated by History: Medea was a part of a theatrical competition in classical Athens and came in last in the Dionysia festival when it premiered, losing to a play by Sophocles and a play by the son of Aeschylus. Guess which of the three is best known today... (Although downplayed somewhat, as being selected for the competition was a big achievement in and of itself.) This was not uncommon for Euripides, who was controversial in his own time.

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