Medusa's choice and Venus's ritual

Medusa's choice and Venus's ritual The Medusa story in Absolute Wonder Woman's Annual and the ritual at the end of Goddess Inc are a pretty sharp comparison in how magic treats the person inside it. Diana offers Medusa Thysia and explains what it can do. She also explains what can go wrong. Fear and panic can interfere with the transformation, and she doesn't promise that the freedom she is offering will necessarily last forever. Medusa has to understand the risk and decide to try. Then Medusa asks the obvious uncomfortable question: what if she chooses to become something even more dangerous? Diana accepts that the choice belongs to her. Helping her doesn't mean Diana gets permanent ownership over what she becomes afterward. The result keeps that point intact. Medusa returns to her original winged form, and she can still petrify people. She has regained the choice of whether to do it. Diana hasn't made her harmless as a condition of helping her. She has helped her live without every look at another person becoming a threat. Venus's ritual in Goddess Inc #5 moves in the other direction. Captives are brought into the gathering. The participants, including prisoners, are drawn into the chanting. A mortal woman is prepared as the final sacrifice. Venus's ascent depends on other people being made part of her plan, whether or not they want any part of it. That woman is still alive when Zeus interrupts. After the battle she wakes confused, and Sage takes her home. Keeping her in the account matters. From Venus's perspective she is a necessary part of a divine event. From her own perspective, she is a person who has been abducted and almost killed. Both stories have a dramatic magical transformation, but the people around it are being treated very differently. Diana accepts uncertainty because Medusa's decision matters. Venus arranges people around the result she wants for herself. That is one of the strongest comparisons between the books for me. You can put enormous power into a ritual and still ask a very ordinary question about it: did the person whose life is being changed get a say?