With the caveat I only browsed through SoA, decided I disliked it and haven't touched it since, i.e. it was years ago on a book fair, and thus I read never more than here a bit and there a bit:
1) Everything disagreeable about Achilles to the modern reader? His mother's fault!
2) Patroclos and Achilles run a women's shelter in the Greek camp, they definitely are not slave owners
3) To complete the bad fanfic clichés, any woman whom some previous canon has paired up with one half of the OTP is either bad news (Achilles' wife), or doesn't have sex with him at all and is only assumed to (see above: re: women's shelter).
But I think it was bad mother Thetis who put me off the most. I mean, I get the gods, by and large, are an amoral selfish bunch in the Millerverse (valid take, though the first half of Circe had them more like mean girls in a high school movie - I did like the second half, though), but Thetis is a rarely sympathetic divine parent in the myths. She didn't want to marry a mortal in the first place and was forced into it, but once Achilles was there, she did everything she could to protect him, and once he'd chosen to be a warrior anyway, tried her best to support him there as well. Making her evil to justify Achilles' killing rage and glory thirst is just - ugh.
no subject
1) Everything disagreeable about Achilles to the modern reader? His mother's fault!
2) Patroclos and Achilles run a women's shelter in the Greek camp, they definitely are not slave owners
3) To complete the bad fanfic clichés, any woman whom some previous canon has paired up with one half of the OTP is either bad news (Achilles' wife), or doesn't have sex with him at all and is only assumed to (see above: re: women's shelter).
But I think it was bad mother Thetis who put me off the most. I mean, I get the gods, by and large, are an amoral selfish bunch in the Millerverse (valid take, though the first half of Circe had them more like mean girls in a high school movie - I did like the second half, though), but Thetis is a rarely sympathetic divine parent in the myths. She didn't want to marry a mortal in the first place and was forced into it, but once Achilles was there, she did everything she could to protect him, and once he'd chosen to be a warrior anyway, tried her best to support him there as well. Making her evil to justify Achilles' killing rage and glory thirst is just - ugh.