Submitted by my-nips-hurt t3_zwlfq6 in books
Bridalhat t1_j1y3met wrote
Reply to comment by planet_vagabond in Joining the “The Song of Achilles” Appreciation Club by my-nips-hurt
Most of my problems with TSOA revolve around the fact that Patroclus is such a flat character, and conflict needs to come from a bunch of other quarters (mostly women who themselves are victimized in myth) because otherwise the self-insert and his jock boyfriend are just too…boring, I guess.
Ive gone into this before, but Patroclus is a fascinating character in the Iliad. He has epithets like “god-born” and “known-to-god” (god here being Zeus, who was his ancestor, maybe his grandfather depending on who you think his mother is), and is said to be a “mortal like a god,” and has by far the highest kill count in the Iliad. He kills the second greatest fighter on the Trojan side, and has quite a few epithets, which is a decent metric for how heroic a character should be (Paris has one, lol). Like Achilles his father was on board the Argo, and his grandmother rather than mother was a sea nymph.
He is capable of ending the Trojan War but is not allowed to. A god has to swoop in and stop him. He has the pedigree of a minor or mid hero, but he has to live in Achilles shadow, and might even be an Achilles figure because the plot of the Iliad demands that Achilles sits it out so you need some heroing.
Anyway, I don’t think characters have to match myth completely, but you need some kind of manikin to hang the rest of the outfit on, and there is nothing in myth to justify this pacifist version of Patroclus. The character in TSOA is not interesting, and there are so many aspects of the mythic character you could use to explore fate and heroism and sex and Miller just…doesn’t, at least in any way more profound than “I guess I died where is Achilles I miss him.”
And it kills me that the bit at the end-the bit with the small part of the Trojan war that occurs during the Iliad—is so jarringly different than the rest of the book. That’s the source material!
my-nips-hurt OP t1_j1y8dab wrote
I wonder for how many people, the book works because they don’t know much about these characters otherwise. I imagine that Patroclus was more interesting, as anyone with a name in Iliad usually is, but other than a reading of the odyssey and some other I can’t remember, I’m not well versed in the Iliad. So I get a blank slate to start with, and can take these characters as kind of a fan fiction almost, honestly. I’ve referred as “a retelling” in some other comments, but I didn’t read it with that idea in my head. I assumed it would be far different from The Iliad, and I think the disconnect, and ignoring some other things (I also thought Patroclus was a flat—he gets more interesting in the end when he starts to become his own person and interact with people and gets out of Achilles shadow—and has a conflict with and major contrast to Achilles), is the reason I still enjoyed it. Sometimes I just want a good story and I’ll ignore everything else, to be honest, so I can understand the reasons to dislike it, I think.
EmpRupus t1_j1ydj7f wrote
> Patroclus is such a flat character
Agree. Patroclus felt very much like a "self-insert / reader-insert" character very similar to Bella from Twilight, where she keeps going on and on about how she is plain, simple and clumsy, and how she doesn't get why someone as handsome as Edward is into her. And I got the same vibe between Patroclus and Achilies.
Props to the book for exploring the romantic nature of the relationship which other modern retellings avoided / simply said they were "cousins / best friends" etc. So good for lgbt+ representation.
My overall experience of the book is positive. Loved the sea-goddess mother giving fierce MIL vibes. Loved the realism of war, loved the vivid description of palaces, islands and the seas, etc.
But the main character-dynamic between Achilles and Patrocles, where one person is clearly more important, and the other person's whole existence is just being a devoted supporter and having little value beyond that, personally, just did not jibe with me. The relationship felt highly unequal.
I would have preferred if Patrocles was more empowered and heroic in his own way.
Bridalhat t1_j1zx7i0 wrote
I also hated Thetis in TSOA. I get the vibes, but she decides that the Myrmidons aren’t crying hard enough at Patroclus’s funeral in the Iliad and leads them to sob harder. She also took care of Hephaestus after Hera threw him off of Mt Olympus for being too ugly. She seems like a nice lady! But Patroclus was such a flat character Miller had to find a villain or an obstacle somewhere and landed on the few female characters.
ETA: I want to emphasize that I am ok with novel interpretations, but the women bore the worst of it in TSOA, and I think a more interesting story without Thetis as an outright villain the whole time could have been told. Like, at the end of the day, I just think it was kind of boring and the scope was extremely limited. Like, Patroclus’s funeral was a big deal in the Iliad, and Menelaus and Ajax risked their lives to get his body back, and many more men died for it. But I guess we just get a line about Patroclus helping Menelaus with his headaches?
Otoh the characters in the Iliad, after nearly dying to get the body back, would not have backed down when Pyrrhus says Patroclus’s name won’t be on the tomb. Whatever.
my-nips-hurt OP t1_j250wr9 wrote
This is really good to know. A lot of people have offered other suggestions or ones closer to the original epic, so I'm looking forward to seeing these characters and how they actually are.
Nice to know Thetis wasn't so bad and it is unfortunate she was painted this way. Also, even in Miller's interpretation, with how much Patroclus helped, I would have expected him to get more. Nice to know he did get the credit he deserved.
SuspiciousReference9 t1_j20jejd wrote
I totally agree with this.
TSOA felt like the epitome of queer romance written for straight people. Everything about their relationship was made heteronormative. Polygamy? Gone. Bisexuality? Gone. Shared status as soldiers? Gone. Instead, we get a prototypical passive protagonist with no personality, agency, or goals beside lusting after the masculine demigod whose feet smell like honey. And everybody praised it instead of treating it like Twilight.
The fact that this is still the face of gay male literature irks me to no end. People fall over themselves lauding straight authors for writing comfortable, familiar queer stories, but they leave incredible literature by so many queer authors unread.
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