Niya asked Rick Riordan:

Do you think that you would ever write a book where a commonly thought "monster" would be good and help the characters? Circe, Medea, and Medusa are seen as villains in the series, and I understand why this is, but I was just curious if someone else could be helpful. I would love to see Clytemnestra, Aggamendon's wife, in the series. She is "evil" for killing him after he killed her daughter. Thank you.

Rick Riordan It's a fair question and a valid point about those characters in the Percy books. You're right, from Percy's POV, especially in the first series, these women from mythology are a series of challenges he has to overcome, like other monsters or villains who stand in the way of the quest, which isn't very balanced or nuanced and doesn't consider the mythological woman's POV. That's one reason I welcomed doing our TV show, because it allowed us to rethink and update some of those depictions -- like Medusa in season one and Circe coming up in season two -- to give a more multisided sympathetic view of those characters. While keeping the narrative pretty much the same, we are able to get outside Percy's POV because of the nature of television, and give different sides of the story from different POVs. I hope that makes the show more multilayered and interesting, while also giving these women more of a voice and more credit for how they became who they are, even if, ultimately, they are still antagonists to Percy. For more extensive re-tellings of the myths from the female perspective, there are so, so many excellent writers working in that space with fantastic books. Just off the top of my head, I'd recommend Lore by Alexandra Bracken, Circe by Madeleine Miller, the Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, and A Drop of Venom by Sajni Patel.

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