On the (Mis)Use of Ancient Words in Fiction ~ Or ~ Patroclos is a Warrior, NOT a Healer!!!!!!

     So, part three in my series of textual rants about how people are abusing poor Patroclos in their fanfiction.  (Part one is here, part two is here, if anyone cares.  Though actually part one wasn't as much about Patroclos as about Ancient Greek naming schema...)

    One warning about this post:  I'll be talking about a lot of different works (albeit briefly) and will be changing spellings accordingly.  If I'm talking about a work in Greek or the character in general, I will use my standard spelling of Patroclos, but if I'm talking about a work in Latin or an English-language work that spells it thus, I'll be using the Romanized Patroclus.  (One exception is that there's one work I'm not sure how they spelled it, so I'm using my standard...'cause they might actually have used Patroklos, only I can't remember for certain...)  I apologize if this seems confusing.

    Over the millennia, there have been a lot of changes to Patroclos' role in the story of the Trojan War.  We don't know what the story was like before the Iliad was composed, but from the way the epic never bothers explaining who he is or why he's following Achilles around so devotedly, we can assume that prior to its composition, their relationship was well-established, and the audience would already know that they were friends, comrades-in-arms and lovers.  (Well, given the variations caused by oral tradition, it's actually safer to say that many held them to be lovers, rather than that all did.  But the way the intimacy of their relationship was treated, it was clear that the poet expected people to already be aware of it.)

    In late antiquity, two anti-heroic versions of the Trojan War story were floated about, purporting to be first-hand accounts by Dictys of Crete and Dares of Phrygia; in addition to changing the story to make everyone seem worse, these stories confused or conflated various figures who had similar names (e.g. Atreus and Catreus, Peleus and Pelias), making it clear that not all the changes to the tale were purposeful.  In these, Patroclos played almost no role, and in fact died almost immediately in one of them.  And he's not even mentioned in Vergil's Aeneid (which only makes sense, really).  And why do I bring this up?  Well, because eventually the ancient Greek language was pretty much lost in Europe, so throughout the Middle Ages and most of the Renaissance, these Latin versions of the Trojan War story (which did, admittedly, also include a highly-truncated version of the Iliad, about 1/16th the length of the real thing) became the only ones known.

    So for all the Medieval and Renaissance tales of the Trojan War--Bocaccio, Chaucer, etc.--Patroclos essentially doesn't exist.  Around Shakespeare's time, Ancient Greek was becoming known again, and there was even a translation of the Iliad into English, thus Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, while mostly based on the Medieval version adapted out of Dictys and Dares, was able to reintroduce Patroclus as a major player and Achilles' true love (despite much moaning and groaning about Polyxena).  But Shakespeare made other changes to the character.  His Patroclus was a teenage boy (probably played by the boy who usually played the female leads) and not only didn't fight (being too young) but didn't even want to fight.  (Though he still met his traditional end on Hector's blade, of course.)

    Shakespeare's version of Patroclus--despite that his Troilus and Cressida was ignored for centuries, only reemerging onto stages in the 20th century--at some point became viewed as the dominant version, being called upon by any hack writer who didn't want to deal with the real story as told in the Iliad.  (See, for example, that ghastly movie Troy.  Well, no, don't see it:  just look it up on Wikipedia or something.)

    The Patroclos in the Iliad is radically different from Shakespeare's timid boy:  he is older than Achilles, he's brave, he's kind, and when he's rampaging across the battlefield in Achilles' armor and cutting down Trojans left and right everyone knows exactly who he is and they are still terrified of him.  (In fact, when Apollo disguises himself as a regular Trojan and goes to fetch Hector to have him face Patroclos, he tells him that it's Patroclos who is running rampant, and Hector's reaction is basically "yes, only I can deal with this deadly foe" not any mockery of an insignificant opponent.)

    But what does any of this have to do with the misuse of ancient words in fiction?

    Well, I'm getting to that.

    You see, not all modern authors are willing to work with Shakespeare's teenage boy version.  He'd have been sorely out of place in the video game that was a Canadian-made spin-off of Koei's Dynasty Warriors franchise.  (I think it was called, like, Warriors:  Legends of Troy or something like that.  I'm sure about the first word and the last, just not the ones in the middle... 😅)  I haven't played the game, but I did watch some footage of it years ago (when I was working on a paper on the changing portrayals of the Trojan War heroes over time), and its Patroclos was just as buff and dangerous as any other player character.  (Too buff, honestly; the characters were kind of grotesque, as I recall.  Like, they looked like they'd all overdosed on steroids.)  The version of Patroclus in the very recent game Hades is probably the best, most accurate version of the character I've ever encountered in a modern work.  (Yes, they changed his ethnicity, but there aren't actually any ancient descriptions of him that specify his ethnicity.  No reason his family a few generations back couldn't have moved to Greece from Africa.  I think it happened a lot more back then than people now expect.)

    Literature seems to have been less kind to Patroclos than video games, weirdly enough.  Most of the (unintended) abuse of the character I've encountered on AO3 has been entirely caused by fans of a single modern novel, Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles.

    And why do I call it abuse?

    Because it turned a warrior into a healer.

    Seriously, some of these fanfic works have claimed he never even went onto the battlefield, just waiting in the camp for Achilles to return.

    That is the most appalling nonsense!  (I can only hope that comes from the fic writer and not the novelist, but I fear the opposite is true.)  Every man in the Greek camp--with the possible exception of the priest Calchas--went out to battle.  Even the aged Nestor, who was too old to fight, still went onto the field for every battle!  Let's be real, here:  the Greek army was having too much trouble procuring food for it to have useless hangers-on in the camp who didn't fight.  (Uh...especially in light of all the women they had enslaved, who obviously didn't do any fighting, but still had to eat...and all the children those poor women were being forced to bear...)

    The closest to professional healers that the Greek army had were Machaon and Podaleirios, the sons of Asclepios.  But they still went out and fought.  (Machaon, in fact, died in battle, either to Penthesileia or to Eurypylos of Mysia, depending on the version you're looking at.)

    Now, yes, it's true that Patroclos had some knowledge of field medicine, and in the Iliad he helps a bit with some of the wounded before persuading Achilles to let him join the fight, but they've all been fighting for nine years at that point!  Every soldier would have needed to know a bit about field medicine just to ensure his own survival.  And all the more so for an attendant like Patroclos, who would need to be able to help his lord if the need arose.  (Okay, not so likely given Achilles' natural skills and supernatural armor (his first set of armor was also made by Hephaistos) but still!)  Furthermore, in pretty much all known traditions, Achilles was trained as a child by Cheiron, who was known for his knowledge of healing (he had, in fact, trained Asclepios himself), and who had surely taught the boy at least enough medicine to be able to deal with injuries on the battlefield.  Whether or not Patroclos was trained alongside Achilles (and there is ancient precedent for that being the case), Patroclos would have learned some of the techniques from Achilles if he hadn't learned them with Achilles, because Achilles is going to want to make sure his lover knows how to save his own life if necessary.

    So, where did Miller's healer-only version come from?

    Well, in that we get to the title of this post, and the misuse of ancient words.

    Because the word for Patroclos' position is θεράπων (therapon), a word often used in the fanfictions that have gotten me so worked up about this.  Obviously, someone (presumably Miller?) looked at that and said "well, it looks so much like therapy that it must be related!"

    And yeah, it probably is related, in the sense of it having come from the same root word as θεράπευσις, meaning "treatment, attention."

    But θεράπων does not mean anything related to healing!

    In the Homeric context, it has traditionally been translated as "squire," and its most standard definition is "comrade-in-arms, but of inferior rank."  Other definitions include "attendant," "servant" and even "worshipper."  But not one of its definitions has even the slightest thing to do with healing.  (You can check out the dictionary entries for θεράπων at the Perseus Project:  here, here and here.)

    This is not only just plain wrong, it was also purposefully wrong on Miller's part.  She had to have done enough research to have known that the word did not mean that, and she used it that way anyway.  In consequence, its misuse has been spread like a virus throughout the Trojan War-related fandoms on AO3.

    I cannot express emphatically enough just how much that pisses me off.

    I'm not even going to try (the fact that I've spent this long ranting about it is probably a good indicator of just how angry I am, obviously), as the whole point of this was to try and purge the anger from me, not to wallow in it.

    The worst part is that--whether this comes from Miller's novel or from the people writing derivative works on AO3--by making him a passive healer, they've imposed an artificial heteronormative dynamic on a homosexual relationship:  the Patroclus of those fanfiction works is forced into a feminized position, allowing those writers to essentially write a straight relationship despite that they're writing about two men.  Now, yes, not all of them do that, even when they embrace the "sitting passively in camp" aspect.  (My sample size is small, since I quickly got too fed up to read any more of them, so I can't guess at percentages either way.)  But the fact that any of them do it is already cause for alarm as well as fury.  And yes, Shakespeare's Patroclus was a relatively passive character in a submissive role in the relationship, but he was not so much feminized as not-yet-masculinized, as man/boy relationships were not uncommon in Shakespeare's day.  (Shakespeare himself wrote more than one love sonnet addressed to a boy, which if they were in his own voice (rather than works written on commission for someone else) indicate that he was likely bisexual, but due to the culture in which he lived, that bisexuality would have found expression only with boys, not adult men.)

    Hopefully, this has concluded my series of rants about the ghastly things people are doing to my poor favorite on AO3.  (Aside from my overwhelming fury that they keep putting their fics that are 100% contrary to the Iliad in the Iliad fandom!  Anything that lists Miller's novel as its fandom is automatically not compliant with the Iliad, and therefore shouldn't list it!)

    *ahem*

    Yes, so, as I was saying, hopefully I'm done with this ranting, and will post more positive, interesting things in the future.  (I always have lots of things to say about Greek mythology, after all...)

    In closing, though, I just want to encourage everyone to actually read the Iliad if they're interested in the Trojan War.  Some of the battles can get a bit gruesome (though tame by modern standards, I suppose) and the catalog of ships is pretty dull unless you're into ancient power structures and/or geography, but the characters are fascinating, the dialog is often very entertaining (the snipes at Alexander/Paris esp.), and the pathos of loss is genuinely heart-wrenching.  And Patroclos is just 💓.

IWSG - **coughing**

 

    It's hard to think of anything to say.  My allergies have been kicking the crap out of me for like two months now.

    I'm still managing to write--albeit more slowly than usual--and I actually came up with some good new material in the rewrite I'm working on.  A little leery of my next project because it's a bit out of my comfort zone in terms of setting, but I've been doing research (um...if streaming TV shows in that genre counts as research...) and my collaborator is familiar with the setting, so hopefully it'll turn out at least well enough for a rough draft that they can then hand off to someone else who'll do a better job on a second draft. 😓

    It seems to be something of a passion project for them, so I'm afraid of doing a crappy job and letting them down, you know?  And I don't exactly have confidence in anything I write, even when I'm in my "home turf" in terms of setting, so....yeah, it's nerve-wracking.  At best.  But I don't want to let them down; they seem to have a lot of people flake on them, and I'd rather not be one of those people, though I guess at the moment I kind of seem like I'm being one, since my rewrite has taken a lot longer than I was expecting it to!  (But at this point I've added most of the new material it needed, and there's only 12k left of the original to rework, so the end is definitely in sight!)

    So...that's pretty much where I am, for whatever it's worth.

IWSG - Slow going

    I'm having trouble getting writing done lately.  Some days I just open the file, look at what I'm supposed to be writing, and just sort of go "meh" and close it again.  Maybe after re-reading some of what I've already written, and maybe not.

    Part of me wants to say "creative overwork" but it's like...I haven't done that much writing lately.  I did a whole mess of coding over February and March, but not much writing.  Maybe that's actually the problem, like my writing muscles have grown flabby from disuse?

    It's frustrating on a lot of different levels, no matter the reason.

    The programmer I worked with on an earlier game asked me to co-write a game they want to make, and I agreed, but on the condition that I finish the next draft of book 3 of my semi-YA series.  And the draft is going at a snail's pace.  Even though it's rewriting rather than writing.  It's annoying that I'm making someone else wait on their project because I can't get my butt in gear on my own.  But I worry about what will happen to the draft if I abandon it midway through to work on something else.  (Especially since my novel is Greek Heroic Age, and the game is Ancient China.  The gears that have to be shifted there are massive.  Esp. since I still have to do a lot more research before I can start working on the game.)  I feel like I'm letting them down by taking so long, and yet putting more pressure on getting the draft finished is only going to make it worse, surely.

    Or maybe not?  I usually did a pretty bang-up job of getting NaNoWriMo finished and overachieved...

On Exiles and Princes

     Well, my attempt to blog daily died a very quick and miserable death, but I am still going to try to purge in (web)print my deep-seated frustrations at the way people on AO3 frequently treat certain subjects in Greek mythology.

    And today my topic is specifically in reaction to the hideous trend (which seems at this point to be present in almost all AO3 works dealing with the character) of claiming that Patroclos was a prince before being exiled for murder as a child.

    This is wrong in every way, except the part about him being exiled.

    Patroclos' father was never a king.  Making him a king reveals multiple very deep errors.

    Firstly, it means mistaking the kingdoms of the Late Bronze Age for the city-states of the Iron Age, in that at some point someone said "Well, gee, we don't know who the king of Opus was, so why not make it Patroclus' father?"  Well, guess what?  There was no king of Opus!  You know why?  Because Opus was the palatial center of Locris.  (There is, in fact, no city named Locris.  It is the name of the region/kingdom only.  Thus making a character into the king of Opus is rather like making someone into the President of Washington DC or the Prime Minister of London.)  The king there was Oileus.  He is a very well established mythic character, and his son, the lesser Aias, was such an important character in the Trojan War that he caused the deaths of more of the Greek army than all the Trojans combined did.

    Second, it misunderstands the role and nature of royalty in the culture.  Exiled princes in the Greek Heroic Age did not become nobodies, mere attendants, as Patroclos did.  Exiled princes typically ended up marrying a daughter of their host and then inheriting his kingdom (or at least part of it).  This is how Peleus, Telamon, Teukros and many others came to their thrones, and how Jason would have become king of Corinth if the city hadn't been burned down, taking his prospective bride and her father along with it.  Royal titles were not simply titles:  royalty were believed to be naturally different and superior to the rest of the population.  An exiled prince remained a prince.  (And if you honestly think people have changed in this regard, look at how people react to the British royal family these days.  I can't remember the last time I went to the grocery store and didn't see at least one article on the magazines at the checkout line about the royal family, esp. Prince Harry.  And this country rejected the monarchy almost 250 years ago!)  To have an exiled prince become nobody special means you don't understand the culture you're using as the setting of your story.  (And if you doubt that Patroclos was considered a nobody among the nobility at the Trojan War, let me remind you that he did not have his own hut.  He had to share with Achilles.  Or rather, Achilles let him stay with him in his hut.  If he had been important--as an exiled prince was by definition--he would have had his own hut.  Teukros had his own hut, even though he was not only the son of an enslaved concubine, but the concubine in question was Trojan!  (In fact, in all post-Homeric sources, she is specified to be King Priam's sister Hesione.))

    The third point is more an assumption on my part regarding why people want to make him a prince, and I'm not sure if it comes from the fanfic authors or their solitary source for this mutant version.  Because even without having read it, I know where they're getting this "Prince of Opus" malarkey from.  They're getting it from Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles, which I once contemplated reading and now I'm very, very glad I didn't, because I can see it would have driven me completely mad very quickly.  (For more reasons than I'll get into in today's post...)  So, I'm not sure if it was Miller or if it's the fanfic authors, but I get the feeling someone at some point is/was thinking "well, he's a better match for Achilles if they're both princes!"  Like that's somehow an improvement.

    It's not.  It weakens their relationship.

    Like, by a lot.  Making a prince--a prince who is all but irresistible, according to some authors, and could therefore have just about anyone he wanted, no matter how high their rank--fall in love with another prince is bland.  It's "safe."  But making him fall in love with a man below his station?  An older man, therefore putting him in a position that is--culturally speaking--subordinate to someone who should be far below him?  That is a sign of a truly powerful love, breaking through the boundaries of what is accepted in his society, and one for which he is risking the one thing he normally protects above everything else:  his reputation.  Making him love an equal is so weak that it's pitiful by comparison.

    Admittedly, the ancient Greeks wanted to make them closer to being equals, so that Achilles wasn't "lowering" himself by loving and being loved by someone so much lesser in status.  That was why many ancient authors (dating all the way back to the Hesiodic Catalog of Women) made Menoitios (Patroclos' father) into a brother of Peleus.  (At least one other ancient author made Menoitios the half-brother of Aiakos, making Patroclos into Peleus' first cousin, which is completely insane, because Patroclos kicks way too much butt to be an old man.  Plus his shade literally has a line to Achilles about how they grew up together, so obviously they can't be more than a few years apart in age.)  But they never went so far as to deny the text of the Iliad, which said very bluntly and directly that Achilles was more important than Patroclos, which would not be the case if Patroclos was also a prince.

    Of course, it also said (in a couple different places) that Patroclos' father moved to Phthia with him when he was exiled, a fact which all those modern authors are steadfastly ignoring, and/or ignorant of.  Because the poet of the Iliad understood the purpose of exiling a murderer, and none of those modern people seem to get it, or if they do, they're ignoring it.

    Exile was not the "punishment" for murder.

    Murderers were exiled for the protection of the community.

    Not because they were expected to kill again (though I'm sure that also played a role in it in many cases!) but because killing someone off the field of battle left the killer polluted.  It was a stain that was actually dangerous to those around him/her.  A murderer was ejected from the community so that they could be purified of that pollution, in order to prevent a plague or other disaster from striking.

    Don't believe me?  Take a look at the first of Sophocles' Oedipus trilogy sometime.  In it, Thebes is suffering from a terrible plague.  Seers are consulted, and it's learned that the reason for the plague is because of an unpurified murderer in the town!  (Worse still, the murderer of their previous king!)  And what does Oedipus promise to do about the murderer?  To banish him from Thebes, of course.

    Because that's what you did with murderers to protect everyone else.

    Then some other king could purify them, and--unless the banishment was specified to be permanent--they could return home and everything would be just fine.  (Y'know, except for the dead person and their family and friends...)  There are a lot of examples of this in surviving myths.  Peleus and Telamon, for example, you know why they were exiled from Aegina?  Because they had murdered their half-brother.  Jason was exiled from Iolcos because of his role in the murder of Pelias.  In Euripides' surviving Hippolytus (he wrote another play about the same subject, which has been lost), the play starts with Theseus in the midst of a one year exile, due to having killed someone.  Queen Penthesileia of the Amazons arrived in Troy in the final year of the war because she had accidentally killed her sister, and was thus in exile to be purified of the death, but she would have gone home again at the end of the war if Achilles hadn't killed her.  Achilles himself, in fact, was briefly exiled from the Achaian camp due to having killed Thersites when the wretch mocked him for mourning the fallen Amazon queen.  (Of course, that was a very carefully arranged exile, as Odysseus accompanied him to the nearest convenient still-standing city to purify him, so they were probably only gone two or three days, tops.  Normally, it wouldn't be quite so heavily planned in advance.)

    So, in other words, there was nothing cruel or unusual about the young Patroclos being exiled from Opus after he accidentally killed a friend in a quarrel.  It was standard procedure, and far from being a heartless father sending his young son out alone in the world, his father uprooted his entire life to accompany the boy.  (Presumably this also meant uprooting the boy's mother and any siblings he might have had, but the subject did not come up in the Iliad.)  The fact that they never returned to Opus likely had nothing to do with being forbidden to do so, but rather to having found a much better situation at Peleus' court than whatever Menoitios' situation was in Opus.  (All known ancient lists of the Argonauts include both Peleus and Menoitios, so even in the versions where they're not brothers, they would at the least be old comrades, so being welcomed with open arms makes complete sense.)

    What bothers me most about the modern authors deciding to turn a devoted father into a cruel one is that I feel like someone (whether Miller or someone in the fanfic community) decided that it was "necessary" in order to give Patroclos' situation more "drama."

    I'm sorry, but if you think his situation needs more drama than it already has, there's something wrong with you.  He's just a child, and he accidentally killed one of his friends.  If you need more drama than that, I suggest you seek therapy.

The most persistent robo-scam?

     I went to my brother's place this afternoon to watch a movie.  It took longer than expected to get ready, so I was there most of the afternoon.

    I got home and found messages waiting on my landline.  (Yes, I still have a landline.  I like having it.  It's easier to talk on a landline phone than a cell phone.)  Nine of them.

    Not that they were actually different messages.  They were all the same recording, claiming to be "Apple security advisor".

    They must have filled my answering machine's capacity, because there were 13 missed calls on the caller ID, all from different numbers with the same first three digits as mine.  (Not the area code, the next part.  Y'know, the part they replace with 555 when giving phone numbers in movies.)

    It's called back three more times since I got home.

    I seriously want it to stop, but I have no idea how to force it to do that.  I mean, maybe if I answered it and played along and got talking to one of the scammers on the other end and played stupid for a while until I then claimed to have been recording them for the FBI, then maybe they'd go away for good.  I ran a quick search after I got home and found someone's account where they had done just that.  But I'm not good with confrontation, you know?  I feel like I'd mess up.

    Which is a pity, actually, because I think it would be fun to really screw with them, like pretend to be a senile old lady who not only hasn't got an iPhone, but hasn't even got a computer, because what would they do with the scam from there?  (Back before I had caller ID, I used to get calls claiming to be from "the Windows," and sometimes I was able to successfully mess with them and be like "No, I just had my windows cleaned, thanks," or another time (possibly one where they said they were from "the Microsoft") where I was like "stop harassing me, I'll never switch from Linux!")

    OMG, it just called back again.

    That makes seventeen times today!

    These last two times, they actually managed to spoof numbers that are in use, so it gave a name ("Commercial Deve"-something the first time, and an individual's name this most recent time) instead of just putting the number on both lines.

    This is really maddening, and I have no idea what to do about it.

    In the olden days, I could have left the phone off the hook overnight to see if it would stop (or at least to make sure I'd be able to get some sleep tonight), but my current landline is only wireless handsets; it's impossible to leave it off the hook. :<  Yet another reason to miss the way telephones worked in the old days.  (I wonder if maybe I can unhook the main base from the line, though.  That should work, as long as I remember to plug it back in when I get up in the morning.  But maybe the scam calls will stop long before bedtime.  They don't usually call past seven or eight at night, so hopefully?)

A deep sense of malaise?

     I'm feeling very down today, so I'm not going to continue the rant-series I started yesterday, because focusing on that kind of negative sentiment will only make me feel worse.  (That may be the case no matter how I'm feeling, but...)

    I kind of feel like my whole life is collapsing on my head.

    I know it's not, but it feels that way.  (Even though I know for a fact that I have a lot of options on how to get out of every single one of my problems.)

    My car is currently non-functional, again, because...well, the mechanics at the dealership the last time claimed it was just the battery and it was solely because I don't drive it enough, but the AAA people who jumped it for me said it wasn't just the battery.  And I'm inclined to believe the people from the AAA, because a) they're not reaping any benefit from me continually having to get my car fixed while the people at the dealership are, b) if cars needed to be jumpstarted every time they weren't driven for two weeks, then every airport's long-term parking lot would have to have a dedicated automotive triage center, and c) the people at the dealership's repair department have always had this attitude around me like "you're just a dumb female so we can milk you for all the money we want," and I see no reason to think this attitude has changed just because there's something more serious wrong with my car now.  Since I would likely get the same treatment at most other places I could take the car to get it repaired--not to mention that obviously I get very little use from having it since losing my job--I've been thinking I should just sell it and be done with it.  Of course, that has its own drawbacks, in that suddenly I would be dependent on my brother to take me to the grocery store (admittedly, we usually do end up going together, because we hang out a lot and there's a grocery store directly in between our houses) or have to have my groceries delivered.  (In the right weather I could walk, in theory, but I'm so out of shape right now that I don't know how successful I would be at having the strength to walk all the way there, do my shopping, and then carry it all back again.)  Not to mention that if I want to go somewhere fun by myself (like an antique mall) then I'd either be out of luck or would have to call a taxi/uber, and that sounds like a tremendous waste of money, not to mention would require human contact that I'm not entirely comfortable with at the moment.  I've told myself I could rent a car for periods when I know my brother won't be able to give me a ride, etc., but I wonder if I really could?  Do car rental places require a credit check?  My credit is so bad that I literally couldn't get a cell phone account from a regular place and had to go to a cheapie carrier that doesn't check credit.  (It's not even my fault; I've been good about my bills for years now, but I don't have a credit card, and that paying credit card bills seems to be the only thing that makes it go up.  But I am just not doing that, not again.)

    And I just paid my taxes, which came to an appalling sum, about a quarter of the money I have to live on for the year.  (This makes the "selling my car" option particularly appealing, since according to whatever website it was I looked it up on last week, the blue book value for my car, even in crappy condition, is nearly as much as I paid in taxes, because it's a hybrid, and those are hot right now.  Also then I wouldn't have to be paying an exorbitant amount in auto insurance.  I'd say it would also mean a savings in gas, but honestly, between the hybrid and not driving it much, I don't even remember the last time I bought gas.  It was probably last year.)

    My mother is constantly getting on my case to replace my roof, my house is a sty, and I think my refrigerator is dying, but I don't think there's any way I can replace it because of the aforementioned styness of the house.

    On top of all this, I released book two in my quasi-YA series, and absolutely no one has looked at it.

    Okay, not absolutely no one, but...something like five browser plays (I released it on itch.io as something to be "played" online), and as the novel is over a hundred thousand words long, there is no conceivable way that someone could read it in one sitting, so...either five people started it and said "yuck" and went away again, or one person read it in five sittings, or something in between.  I think it's the former, though.  I've also been posting it to AO3 in chapters, and there have been a total of 4 views.  Three of them were accrued after the first posting, which had the prologue and first chapter, the fourth was there after the second chapter went up, and no one bothered to read the third chapter.

    So...yeah, evidently it sucks even harder than the previous book.

    Which is weird; I thought that people would like it better, since it gets into the interesting stuff right away.  (I mean, by the second chapter they're having to make their way past Scylla and Charybdis!  The second chapter of the first book is mostly just the two girls walking from Pedasos to the ruins of the Achaian camp outside Troy.)

    ...and this is turning out to be even more negativity than the other would have been, so I'm going to stop here before I make it even worse.

Patronymics are not the same as last names!

     Okay, I've decided to take the plunge and start ranting posting about certain things that people do in Greek mythology works on AO3 (specifically in the ones focusing on the romance between Patroclos and Achilles) which drive me completely up the wall because they are so very, very wrong.  And yes, I do know that these are amateur works posted by fans (indeed, the bulk of my work available online is on AO3, so who could know better than I?), but that does not stop me from being annoyed by it.  (And, indeed, it should not stop the authors from taking the time to do a little research before they actually post what they've written.  A really good fanfic author makes sure to get things right first, whether that means double-checking the canon work or learning a bit about the culture in which their work is set.)

    Some of these things I know come from a specific, highly-publicized, highly-lauded novel (which I personally have not read, so I'm not sure how many of the others also came from it), but I probably won't get to those things until the second post (trying to keep it to a few things per post, all revolving around a specific theme), so I won't mention the novel in question until I get there.

    Today's primary beef is the way so many of the authors use patronymics as direct equivalents of modern last names.  And I don't mean in introductions, as that's one of the only places it might be used in an equivalent  manner.  No, I mean using both their name and their patronymic for emphasis.  As in, a modern mother might yell at her son "John Smith, you get back here this instant!" to really hammer home how angry she is at him.

    No one would ever do that with a patronymic in Ancient Greece.

    The two do not serve the same function.  And, more importantly, that whole thing of adding the last name for emphasis is a cultural thing.  It's something people in the US do, yes.  Probably in the other English-speaking countries as well.  (I'm drawing a blank on whether or not I've seen anyone do that in any of the British TV and movies I've watched over the years...ooh, no, I just recalled Gandalf doing that with both Sam and Pippin in Fellowship of the Ring (don't remember offhand if the either line was in the book, though) so...yeah, probably there in all English-speaking countries.)  I find it highly improbable that people do that in every non-Anglophone country in the modern world, however.  The more different the language, the more different the culture, the higher chance that it doesn't happen, it seems to me.  And that's despite that there is a growing world subculture low-key blending everyone's reactions and behaviors.  (If I was only close to someone from modern Greece, I'd ask if people even do that last-name-for-emphasis thing there now, because I feel like the answer would probably be "no."  Unfortunately, I'm not.  I do know of one person in a few game dev Discord servers who's from Greece, but I don't know him well enough to ask such a weird and random question.  Don't really know him at all, in fact.)

    And if not everyone now does that, is there any reason to think people three thousand years ago did it?

    Answer:  no, there absolutely is not.

    More importantly, the last name and the patronymic serve radically different functions.  The last name is something passed down from generation to generation, identifying the larger group to which you belong.  The closest ancient equivalent would be the gens name in ancient Rome, but the behavior regarding the gens name is radically different:  unless you were really close to someone, you spoke to or about them using their gens name, possibly adding their praenomen on the front if there was any concern that someone might be confused as to which member of the family you were talking about, or using their cognomen if they have one.  (Roman names are very complicated.  I would have to give them a full post of their own to explain them, but I'm sure the information is already posted online in many places, all of them better than any explanation I could provide.)

    As to the patronymic, it's not passed down from generation to generation.  (With the occasional oddity, like Achilles sometimes being referred to as Aiakides in the Iliad, which means "son of Aiakos," and is technically his father's patronymic.  Aiakides, therefore, could function like a modern last name, since it's more referring to the founder of his line of descent from Zeus.)  It specifically identifies the father of the person in question.  The patronymic is specifically designed to be used both to identify the father and the son, thus its primary use in epic is actually in place of the character's name.  Atreides, "son of Atreus," is probably the most famous and commonly used (outside of the Iliad), and could be applied to both Agamemnon and Menelaos, though I think it was mostly just used for Agamemnon.  It sets the tone of expectations for a person:  by identifying Agamemnon as Atreides, the poet could signify in a single word that he had a dark and bloody past and would have a dark and bloody future (Atreus was murdered by a tag-team of his brother and his brother's son/grandson (product of father-daughter rape), Agamemnon murdered the uncle in question and would later be himself murdered by the cousin in question), by identifying Achilles as Aiakides, the poet could instantly remind the listener/reader of his glorious ancestor who went on to be one of the judges of the underworld and thus signal Achilles' glorious present and his future as a minor god of the dead (though actually I'm not sure if he'd been deified yet when the Iliad was composed), and by identifying Patroclos as Menoitiades the poet could signal that he was from dependable heroic stock who never actually achieved any great or lasting fame (though really his name kind of already signals that, as only the most arrogant or the most insignificant would ever name their son "glory of the father," depending on whether they meant "product of my own glory" or "son who is my only chance of ever getting any glory").

    Now, there are cases where it's reasonable to put the patronymic directly after the name, as if it was a normal last name.  For example, in my books, I have Eurysakes frequently identify himself as "son of Aias Telamoniades."  This is for the very sensible reason that there were two men named Aias who were of great note in the Trojan War:  one was the bulwark of the Achaians and the original tank character, while the other was a mean-spirited little man who literally got most of the Greek army killed on the way home from Troy.  As the son of the former, Eurysakes does not want to risk anyone thinking he's the son of the latter!

    That's not the purpose of these people just sticking a patronymic on at the back of the character's name, though.  They're going for the "I just can't believe you, John Smith, you rogue!" thing.

    And. That. Is. Not. Right.

    It drives me insane.

    And, in a deeply-related note, considering the character who's been the butt of that behavior...

    ACHILLES' PATRONYMIC IS NOT PELIDES!!!!!!!!!!!

    Sorry to shout, but....AARRRGGGGHHHH!!!!!!

    I mean, what do they think his father's name is?

    Pelos?  Peles?

    Because that's what "Pelides" would mean.  Son of Pelos or son of Peles.

    Neither of which, to the best of my knowledge, was ever an ancient Greek name.

    Achilles' patronymic is Peleides.  Or sometimes Peleades, depending on the metrical needs of the line in question.  But that second "e" is deeply important, because his father's name is Peleus, not Peles or Pelos.

    I mean, really, what do these people think the patronymic for "son of Pelias" would be?  Or rather, if they think that "son of Peleus" is "Pelides" then how do they think anyone would tell "son of Peleus" from "son of Pelias," since by their logic they would both be the same thing?

    Is it that they just don't think?  Are they so ignorant of Greek mythology that they've never heard of Pelias?  Have the only encountered patronymics in one novel that got them so drastically wrong that a) they misspelled Achilles' patronymic and b) used it like a last name and c) didn't even use any others?  Do they just not care that they're 100% wrong?

    .

    ..

    ...

    Yeah.

    Sorry.

    That just really freaking bothers me.  Especially since every time I've run into the first problem, it's been a double-whammy with the second one.

    Sometimes makes me want to bash my head into a wall.

    (Needless to say, I actually gave up on trying to read Patroclos/Achilles fics on AO3 a long time ago, but the frustration has been lingering and festering ever since, so I'm trying to purge it.)