Song of Achilles felt like an excellent example of a terrible slash story to me
OMG, you too? I was in the Achilles fandom back in college, so 2002-2005, which was right around when the Brad Pitt Troy movie came out, which meant there was a *lot* of slash fic, and I was reading everything I could get my hands on, fanfic and published fiction. Ten years later, I picked up Song of Achilles, said to myself, "Not only do I feel like I've read this fic before, I think I've *written* this fic," and put it down partway through. I still haven't finished it. The only reason I think about going back is that I can write Achilles and Patroclus any given day, so I could theoretically offer this for Yuletide...but I still haven't been able to bring myself to finish reading the book.
Agamemnon is vile
For some reason, this is always the case. I myself even set out to write a vile Agamemnon (he messed with my fave Achilles!), but once I started my Mycenaean archaeology-inspired fanfic (I took Mycenaean archaeology in grad school, and was obsessed with reading the scholarship on it for about a year after grad school), I discovered I was writing him sympathetically, dealing with a whole bunch of unsolvable military and political problems right before the Bronze Age Catastrophe.
Yes, my fave Achilles, not Briseis: just like with Fritz, fandom for me is an escapist place where I specifically go to get *away* from real-life morality and just enjoy mass killing. :P If Briseis kills lots of people, she can be my fave too.
Thersites (he's the one to make jokes about Achilles and Patroclus being lovers, which unless I'm misremembering Thersites does in Homer
I think you're misremembering not Thersites but Homer. It's been many years since I read either, but I remember Thersites cracking these jokes in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, and I remember obsessively researching the question of whether there was any evidence for Greek homoeroticism in Homer--twice. (I was emotionally invested in my ship, okay. :P) Once in college and once in grad school. And the second time, I came to the conclusion that there wasn't, that scholars who claimed there was had poor methodology, that homoeroticism of the Athenian et al. kind came about centuries later, and was projected by Aeschylus, Plato, and their successors up to the present day back onto Homer. I remember lecturing my students on this very point when I TAed Homer. I vaguely remember that you can watch homoerotic depictions appear on vases even before it makes it into the literature that is extant today.
So notwithstanding that I haven't read Homer in about ten years and have forgotten a great deal, I feel reasonably confident that you're thinking of Shakespeare, but right about Thersites.
It's been many years, so I don't remember whether it was Aphrodite or Apollo responsible in the Iliad.
This falls under the category of things I have 100% forgotten, and Wikipedia says it's both.
there are shady actions by Odysseus during the Trojan War that often get airbrushed out in modern versions (ask Ajax, or Pirithoos)
Philoctetes, or am I forgetting something?
(One day, we should tag-team teaching cahn Classics, but not until I've learned German and French!)
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Song of Achilles felt like an excellent example of a terrible slash story to me
OMG, you too? I was in the Achilles fandom back in college, so 2002-2005, which was right around when the Brad Pitt Troy movie came out, which meant there was a *lot* of slash fic, and I was reading everything I could get my hands on, fanfic and published fiction. Ten years later, I picked up Song of Achilles, said to myself, "Not only do I feel like I've read this fic before, I think I've *written* this fic," and put it down partway through. I still haven't finished it. The only reason I think about going back is that I can write Achilles and Patroclus any given day, so I could theoretically offer this for Yuletide...but I still haven't been able to bring myself to finish reading the book.
Agamemnon is vile
For some reason, this is always the case. I myself even set out to write a vile Agamemnon (he messed with my fave Achilles!), but once I started my Mycenaean archaeology-inspired fanfic (I took Mycenaean archaeology in grad school, and was obsessed with reading the scholarship on it for about a year after grad school), I discovered I was writing him sympathetically, dealing with a whole bunch of unsolvable military and political problems right before the Bronze Age Catastrophe.
Yes, my fave Achilles, not Briseis: just like with Fritz, fandom for me is an escapist place where I specifically go to get *away* from real-life morality and just enjoy mass killing. :P If Briseis kills lots of people, she can be my fave too.
Thersites (he's the one to make jokes about Achilles and Patroclus being lovers, which unless I'm misremembering Thersites does in Homer
I think you're misremembering not Thersites but Homer. It's been many years since I read either, but I remember Thersites cracking these jokes in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, and I remember obsessively researching the question of whether there was any evidence for Greek homoeroticism in Homer--twice. (I was emotionally invested in my ship, okay. :P) Once in college and once in grad school. And the second time, I came to the conclusion that there wasn't, that scholars who claimed there was had poor methodology, that homoeroticism of the Athenian et al. kind came about centuries later, and was projected by Aeschylus, Plato, and their successors up to the present day back onto Homer. I remember lecturing my students on this very point when I TAed Homer. I vaguely remember that you can watch homoerotic depictions appear on vases even before it makes it into the literature that is extant today.
So notwithstanding that I haven't read Homer in about ten years and have forgotten a great deal, I feel reasonably confident that you're thinking of Shakespeare, but right about Thersites.
It's been many years, so I don't remember whether it was Aphrodite or Apollo responsible in the Iliad.
This falls under the category of things I have 100% forgotten, and Wikipedia says it's both.
there are shady actions by Odysseus during the Trojan War that often get airbrushed out in modern versions (ask Ajax, or Pirithoos)
Philoctetes, or am I forgetting something?
(One day, we should tag-team teaching