#anti Madeline miller

[dootznbootz]

Hi. I'm cyberbullying a long dead poet because of his shitty fanfic. Enjoy. I'd love it if you joined me.

(Before you get mad at me, yes, I know Eugammon of Cyrene is an important figure and all that. I'm sick with some sort of flu. Let me cyberbully an ancient dead fanfic writer in peace.)

[that-guy-in-the-chiton]

✨Circe✨ (and her dad Helios ☀️)

[bugwolfsstuff]

Am i wrong?

I have personal beef with Ovid (IF I HAVE TO GET INTO ONE MORE ARGUMENT ABOUT MEDUSA WITH SOMEONE IM SELLING SOMEONE TO ONE DIRECTION), every time I mention him picture me saying it with the exact expression and tone as this:

[memoryyong]

I am so anti Madeline Miller it is insane

(Sorry if it looks blurry, idk how to fix that)

[corvid-ghost]

If I had a nickel for every time Madeline Miller made a rapist into an sa victim in her books to make people like th character more I would have at least 2 nickels. Which isn't a lot but Jesus fuckin Christ stop doing that

[edwinspaynes]

Okay, I gotta do this for my own sanity because it's word vomit time. Song of Achilles rant. 0/5 stars to this one.

Okay. I am not a fan of war stories or of tragedies. This was both of those things. So I will admit that this was perhaps not my genre. THAT BEING SAID, I can usually point to a tragedy or a war story and go "that was objectively good/well-done, but not my thing." This was neither good nor well-done.

The main appeal of this book - its 'heart,' if you will - seems to be the ""love story"" between Patroclus and Achilles. Unfortunately, I'm leaving the book with 0 understanding of what they like about each other. Achilles was lowkey an enormously terrible person. Patroclus KNOWS THIS. He just is an idiot who continuously gives him the benefit of the doubt over and over again. Achilles sends girls off to be raped. He kills an enemy and drags his corpse around for ??? reasons besides he can. Patroclus is sitting there just going "O! His blond cascading waves! Wow!! He is everything to me my SOUL ahhh." Their emotional connection is deeply shallow in how it's written.

ANYWAY fine. Whatever. The narrative also deeply hates women. The only important female characters are a) Achilles's goddess mom who's continuously villified, and b) a slave girl (the only character I actually liked, RIP) who randomly dies at the end for no reason other than shock value. Women are sent off to be raped continuously; the narrative justifies this. I understand that in times of war back in this time period this actually happened, but I am baffled by the author's seemingly constant attempts to portray this POSITIVELY. Achilles himself is just like 'yeah, this girl's a bartering chip!" and Patroclus, while he's not cool with it and does go save the girl, totally rationalizes this and the author clearly thinks it's justified !!????

No.

And let's talk about that shitty ass pacing. Nothing happens!!! For half the book!!! And then they all go to war and the ONLY reason Patroclus is there is because he wants to follow Achilles. Because they share a 'so devoted the lines blur' Bond apparently, like Will/Jem or Charles/Edwin. News flash. They will NEVER HAVE A BOND ABOVE BONDS LIKE WILL/JEM OR CHARLES/EDWIN.

Anyway!!! Whenever Patroclus talks about Achilles, it's just like oH My gOd hE'S bEaUtIfUl. Okay bro!!! We get it!! Y'all have to have sex ALL THE TIME because this is Madeline Miller's shitty yaoi fanfic of Greek Myths!!! Greek myths are deeply gay which is great, but NOT LIKE THIS! It's giving a middle schooler who just finished Junjo Romantica and Percy Jackson and decided to write a crossover fic. And, yes, the prose is that bad. It's so fucking simplistic. I cannot even.

I hated this book. I hated this book painfully. And I cannot believe that I accidentally gave one of my favourite of my own fanfics a title from it. I like, want to go change the title. I just used it because I liked the quote. AUGH.

Would give this negative stars if I could. I do not think I've disliked a book this much since Queen of Air and Darkness, and at least Qoaad had, like, some funny moments and didn't hate women.

[encrucijada]

I love your blog and your hatred for TSOA. Besides the Thetis' dad name and the heroes-constellation thing (and the pressed olives spoof), are there other things she's gotten wrong? I'm new to mythology and want to be critical of what I read, but everywhere I visit it's just praises of her work

patroclus

just. his entire thing

patroclus is a soldier just like achilles. being older than achilles he had experience achilles did not and often counselled him in battle. he handled achilles divine horses and he participated in the war with troy. there is a reason achilles agrees to let him put on his armour and lead the myrmidons in his place: patroclus was good at war. he was a mortal man who managed to kill sarpedon son of zeus. he wasn't weak. he wasn't pathetic. he wasn't a healer. frankly i have no idea where madeline even got that from to include in her book. i tried looking up if there was any mythological info on patroclus as a healer and all i got was that, again, patroclus was a soldier. maybe it's because he was friendly with the camp physician??

also achilles. he loved both deidameia and briseis, or he at least he was attracted to them. madeline bending over backwards to make him gay gave us a blatant disrespect of deidameia which is the only part of the book that made me cry (out of frustration and anger). and turned them sleeping together into a rape scene???? orchestrated by thetis who is Also disrespected because all the women are in this fucking book.

madeline turned thetis into a homophobic mum who doesn't approve of her son's boyfriend, which... i don't think i have to say isn't what happens in the mythology. achilles liked women. he had sex with them. he liked having sex with them. this does not negate he had a romantic and possibly sexual relationship with patroclus.

thetis liked patroclus in the iliad. she offered to look after his corpse and keep it from decaying while achilles returned to battle. also: achilles was the one who asked her to make the achaeans lose because he was disrespected, not the other way around. i also feel the need to say the remaining conflict of shade!patroclus is so funny to me because there is an entire book in the iliad dedicated to his funeral games. the army liked him and gave him a proper burial lol

in regards to neoptolemus (achilles' son) from what i can see him being a heartless brutal killer seems to be a roman invention but this is only from a quick wikipedia read, i could be wrong. though i do remember him being portrayed as the compassionate one when i read philoctetes.

[random-krab]

I know you're not the biggest fan of Emily Wilson (Me neither) but I'm curious about what you think

Both the Odyssey and the Iliad would've been performed orally by court poets while playing an instrument. Most likely with a lot of pauses and dramatic flare as it's a performance.

Not only does Emily Wilson have extreme bias, she also translates it like it's meant to be READ.

The thing is, neither of these epics were originally meant to be read, always spoken. I think THAT'S part of the reason why it feels so "strange" when I read it alongside the fact that yeah, she's got clear bias. Taking away a lot of the "dramatic flare" to make it simpler to read takes a lot AWAY from these poems!

You Anon are correct, She writes it almost as if it is a novel or a story meant to be read to oneself. I think that's something many modern writers need to correct while translating Epic Poems in general. If it wasn’t for her cherry-picking, biased perspective I do believe that maybe I wouldn’t be so harsh but with the novel-like writing and her choosing to gloss over or paint certain characters (Like Agamenmon or Calypso) in a certain light feels wrong. I’ve mentioned before how much I don’t like her glossing over/minimizing Odysseus’s assault several times but It should be mentioned what she does to Agamemnon while also common is so very incorrect and upsetting. Do not get me wrong Agamemnon is a frustrating character but it’s not fair to write him as some sort of villain. There is truly no villain in the iliad other than the circumstances of war itself. If you look through the Iliad you can find at least one line that makes almost every single character and hero a frustrating and or horrible person. Agamemnon is a confusing, interesting, complex hero, is he the antagonist of Achilles at various points? Yes. But so are Diomedes, Odysseus, Ajax, and practically the entire Greek army. At the highest point of Agamemnon and Achilles' rivalry, Achilles turns his back on everyone by not helping during the war. But yet Emily’s translation makes it seem like Agamemnon is some antagonistic villain who hurts his people, From as far as I know there is no point in which it is mentioned that Agamenom is a bad king to his people in other translations. She wants to build emotion and drama but creating drama but villainizing a character is no way to do so.

I hope that answers your question(?) and I’m sorry for that whole tirade lmao 

[linddzz]

Think you should write a full on rant about Madeline Miller 😆. You clearly have lots of strong opinions and shouldn’t be scared of upsetting people who love what you hate.

I think it's less scared and more that I've accidentally made friends who like things feel bad when I rant about them, and I don't like making people feel bad!Also snarking on MM is a salt topic I circle back to on my own every so often, so a lot of it is rehashing for me at this point. I can fully understand the desire to see people roasting the thing you dislike though, so I have these links to get you started!

A rant from my Dionysian side blog. This one is mostly aimed at Saints' Ariadne novel, but the rant covers what I hate about the "feminist" retelling trend that I blame Miller for

Here are actual Greek people venting about MM and her style of retellings.

A Review of TSoA that makes my heart happy

[hozieroftroy]

more people (goodreads-wise) have read circe than have read the odyssey...

[dootznbootz]

"Girlbosses" 🙃

Understand that I like all these "girlbosses". these are silly

Template down below for friends who wish to add to the collection ｡.ﾟ+ ⟵(｡･ω･)

[that-guy-in-the-chiton]

When Circe (Homer) Meets Circe (Miller):

[garrettwrites]

Warning: discussions of homophobia; extremely negative rant over a popular lgbt book.

Post context: I waited a decade to read a certain retelling book that focuses on the development of an lgbt couple, one which has been discussed over the centuries. I'm doing my best to censor its title and characters, so this post doesn't show up in the tags for people who genuinely love this story. The title, one I now view as overrated, is something along the lines of a song about a certain popular greek hero with long blond hair and a particularly fragile heel. I wanted to read the original, the Iliad, first. I was so excited... and finally, I read the Iliad and other classical texts, I studied ancient history, and I was finally in the mood to start, paired with good knowledge of the characters that would feature in it AND the historical context... Only to find out I shouldn't have waited. 14/15 year old me would have loved this. Current me cannot. I find most reviewers must have either been high while reading, or have taken this book as teenagers, because there is no way an adult over the age of 25 with some degree of reading experience would have not seen the glaring problems with this book.

Disclaimer, if you care - I have no problem with story alterations. I can be critical of them, sure. But even that won't stop me from enjoying something. I think Percy Jackson should have followed a more greek setup, and I don't particularly fancy some of the worldbuilding choices, but those books were and still are among my favourite fantasy stories. Even though they're for children. Even though I've read Tolkien. I'm no elitist, nor do I believe shit can't be changed to make a compelling story. What I do have a problem with is how you present information, and how you distort it.

For instance, if you wanted to write a story about Ariadne and her godly husband set in the year of 1850 for some reason, and make opium play a role? I think that's a fucking weird setting. But it could work, if you stuck true to what characterises them, their relationship, and had a story with a beggining middle and end that tries to show something.

Going back to the retelling that inspired this "rant review". I'll let others more qualified than me to talk about the sexism. What shocked me here was the gay lovestory that reads so homophobic in how cliché it is that it hurts.

This story reads as "when you're so progressive you gotta turn a gay couple made up of two masculine, warrior like, war drowned men into "the hot warrior and his healer who hates fighting" so it fits into (the already sexist/misogynistic) heterosexual couple role".

Because god forbid you have a gay couple where you actually need to deconstruct masculinity without villainizing it. God forbid you actually need to write men into a gay story. God forbid these men are not good, and you need to get into their complexity. God forbid the pov character, who is written as a love struck maiden, has a life outside his strong warrior that helps contextualise his love for him.

Listen. Feminine men are amazing. Gay feminine men are too. I have plenty of original characters that fit within these labels. What I do not do is turn two ancient greek warriors into an early 2000s seme uke yaoi dynamic where one of them is a fragile maiden war tent housewife and the other a very hot but detached strong soldier god man. This is not the story to do that. And even if you play with gender roles and have a man take a more "womanly" role, it's not enough to just genderswap - a character is still badly written regardless of wether they're male or female.

If the housewife character here was a woman, I guarantee everyone who praises this book would be losing their marbles. A woman with no personality outside her lover? Afraid of fighting, of standing up, of speaking up, and this never changes? Who becomes a healer not because she studies it, but because her fragile soul has no other option? Who is passive as all hell in the story until the author remembers she has to die in an impactful manner to trigger her male love interest? That is two dimensional and no way to write a girl, and it's not suddenly okay just because this girl has a dick and is a him.

Yet cause it's gay it's okay to write such an insipid character. Praised even. Which is made even worse, because the original version was a man who yes - indeed - was kind to others yet an absolute beast on the battlefield. Who had opinions and gave counsel. This is not even an original character - I wouldn't criticise an original character as harshly, but this author changed a fighter with incredible skill, who killed a son of a god and was a hero in his own right, into this. A character who yes, was kind and beloved. But touched by war regardless. A character who was loved by those around him, but in this book is ridiculed by these very same people.

Why do you think that is.

And no, trying to make the story more anti war is not an answer. The Iliad is anti war. The Iliad literally comments on how war corrupts what it touches, how it fucked up the lives of everyone involved. This is not a modern take on an old story, because the old story in question already talks about it.

But what can I expect, here. I could call this a work that doesn't know how to write gay men without adhering to (already dated even for straight people) gender roles... but truth is? Author doesn't know how to write women either. The moment you unironically think Helen of Troy is just a vain little hot chick you should not be allowed to write an Iliad retelling, me thinks.

Oh, and let's not get into the fact both main characters are meant to be gay. They're not bisexual. Yet this book - a GAY ROMANCE - is not shy about shoving straight sex scenes onto you. Sex scenes with really no purpose, for they're never brought up again later, and have no story impact.

I am not kidding. Character A gets D pregnant, Character P barely reacts to it, and when D gets upset at P for whatever reason THE TWO OF THEM HAVE SEX TOO. NOTHING AS GAY AS FUCKING THE WOMAN IMPREGNATED BY YOUR BOYFRIEND, UH?! And it's never brought up again! Nobody forces Character P into this yet he willingly goes? Excuse me, if you wanted these characters to have sex with women so casually, why not just make them bisexual and open to banging outside their relationship?

It reads as so disgusting, to have an author clearly lean into a soulmate trope, then just pull some of the most uncomfortable to read sex scenes ever outside that soulmate couple (I love purple prose. Purple prose is probably the only reason I didn't hate this book - the writing was beautiful. But the way the sex with Character D goes... good lord it's written in such a puke inducing way). I'm not against poly in books, what I am against is leaning into monogamous tropes for a gay couple, where you write neither of them as bisexual (which, btw, bi-erasure of the original characters) but then have them bang outside their relationship EVEN when nobody is forcing them to. Never have I read a gay book where straight sex is pushed forward so much. And it's not just even weird for the gay couple, it's also written in a really odd way for the women involved.

"Oh you just don't get the theme! It was out of pity! It was-" turn this into a straight romance and tell me, with a straight face, that this story is well written. Bad character development, bad usage of tropes, terrible pacing, and the use of sex outside the main romance purely for reader self insertion (for it contributes with nothing but shoddy erotica, in a book supposedly about AxP) should not be excused just because a book is gay.

Honestly. "Let people enjoy things" well I propose let me be a hater. I went above and beyond to block the book and character names, let's hope it's enough. But I'm against not criticising things just because they're diverse. It's 2024. There's plenty of authors writing good stories with marginalised people.

And let's talk about LGBT+ worldbuilding, shall we? In the beggining of this book - set in Ancient Greece by the way - it's stated men could take male lovers on the side. Then it's not brought up again, until later a woman tells P many married men take lovers on the side. This girl was originally a sex slave by the way, and here she gets Stockholm Syndrome and falls for P. But then another character tells P he's too old to be into men? So, which is it? It's not even a thing about ancient greek men having that thing where it was accepted for an older man to be sexually involved with a young boy, because here the problem brought up is P being too old, not his lover being too old too.

Oh, and the love interest's (A's) mother. She hates their relationship. We are told she hates their relationship because P is mortal and she doesn't want a mortal to be with her son. Yet later on she arranges a marriage between her son and a MORTAL woman. So is the problem really mortality, or homosexuality?

Why is there modern day homophobia in a story that many praise for historical accuracy?

I honestly hate how people care about representation at the cost of quality. It is mind boggling to me that a woman in this century wrote a book more homophobic and misogynistic than greeks almost 3 thousand years ago did.

[hussyknee]

Song of Achilles did make me cry and there are some beautiful, extremely quotable turns of prose. But honestly? Even without being a classicist or a Greek mythology enthusiast— it really kind of sucks. There's no substance or complexity to it, the characters are one-dimensional and it's painfully YA. It's written for a Booktok audience who doesn't give a fuck about Homer's poems or Greek myths as a genre. I mean I'm also largely disinterested but I hate books that loses everything that defines a genre in order to appeal to people who don't care for it.

Idk if you want an incredible reimagining of the Trojan war for an audience who doesn't care much about the Illiad, read The Troy Trilogy by David Gemmell. It makes no pretence of being faithful to the Illiad and takes out all mention of gods and magic, and sadly doesn't have a lot of gay in it, despite the protagonist being one of the most badass bisexual women in fantasy fiction (Andromache in the Old Guard can't hold a candle to this Andromache). But for all that, it has very complex and vivid characters, cinematic battle scenes and is an emotional rollercoaster that makes you blow through all three books in one sitting. It's very much about how war and pride and honour can make people you like and believe in do horrific things, how morality is informed by culture and era, how you can feel pity for even the worst characters, and how desolation lives hand in glove with glory. Once you read that you'll realise how hollow Madeline Miller's work is.

[corvid-ghost]

I am Eugammon of Cyrene, Ovid and Madeline Miller's biggest haters

[edwinspaynes]

can you tell me some authors that you will never read and avoid? i'm curious!

Umm, I don't want to say never, but there are a few I don't like!

If there's an author on this list that you like, no shade to you. Personal opinion and all that.

There are some authors I'll never pick up, too, but I have only read one book from each of them and will never pick up another. These authors are primarily Jennifer L Armentrout (SJM wannabe), Rebecca Yarros (sorry but Fourth Wing was unreadable to me, though I do see the appeal of dragons), Madeline Miller (SoA was a nope from me), and Chloe Gong (I have deep beef with These Violent Delights).

I strongly dislike Sarah J Maas, both as a person and as a writer. I don't think she's a good person and I think her books are genuinely awful. But I have read a lot of her books to Experience The Trainwreck, which is why I actually feel qualified to speak on her. Her characters are (with two exceptions I'll talk about in a second) two-dimensional archetypes, and her world-building (especially in Throne of Glass) is inconsistent. All it does is serve as a backdrop for porn between abusive ships that are horribly, horribly romanticized. I can respect a dark romance! But she acts like Rhys and Rowan are these Great Dudes. There are few things that annoy me so much as douchey male characters that the author clearly wants me to swoon over. However, I will probably at some point read the Nesta book solely because Nesta is one of the only two characters I've ever liked of hers (the other was Nehemia, who died violently, as all of her characters of colour do.)