Aha - yes, I can see that. I’d actually sort of forgotten about awful Thetis (I dropped it after reading about the first third).

I just couldn’t buy the central relationship. The story completely failed to sell me on what was pulling these two men towards each other, other than ‘because the plot demands it’. I remember thinking that I’ve read absolute bucketloads of m/m fic over the years which had done a fantastically better job at showing the reader why two characters are attracted to each other, and for me SoA just completely failed in that regard.