Gay werewolf story
Bored Gay Werewolf
This was great!
I really like those main characters who are just so normal and realistically flawed. Not perfectly imperfect in beautiful ways, but believably humanly flawed… even if they’re actually a werewolf. Even though I didn’t relate to Brian’s specific situations, I could still relate to just struggling sometimes, because animation is hard! Especially when a problem gets dropped into your lap and changes your life, and you’re not given a manual or any support, you’re just supposed to figure it out. He also had a enjoyable sort of sarcastic perception of humor. And he had a lot of the same thoughts that I was having in response to all the weird and/or problematic stuff happening around him.
Speaking of which, this was such a great queer perspective book. Toxic masculinity, having to sort of tone down his queerness in order to be palatable for straight men, the entitlement of people thinking it’s ok to question personal questions. Those topics and other little things were included so naturally, just part of the book and the character.
But it wasn’t too stern of a book. It neve
Brian, an aimless slacker in his twenties, works double shifts at his waiter job, never cleans his apartment and gets black-out drunk with his restaurant comrades, Nik and Darby. He's been struggling to direct his transition to adulthood almost as much as his monthly transitions to a werewolf. Really, he is not great at the whole werewolf thing, and his recent murderous slip-ups possess caught the attention of Tyler, a Millennial were-entrepreneur determined to explore exponential growth strategies in the mythological wellness market.
Tyler has got a design and he wants Brian to be part of it, and weirdly his brand of self-help punditry actually encourages Brian to shape up and to stop accidently marking out bad tippers at the restaurant as potential monthly victims. But as Brian gets closer to Tyler's pack and drifts further away from Nik and Darby, he realises that Tyler's expansion plans are much more nefarious than a short-lived lupine enlightenment...
Big-hearted, goofy, anarchic and funny, Bored Male lover Werewolf is a smart take on the doomsday logic of late capitalism and the complicated meeting point of masculinity and sexuality. More than that, though, and appreciate Scooby Doo with Grin
As far as I can inform, Marie de France wrote the first gay werewolf story in history. Little is known about the 12th century, Normandy-born English writer, but she did feather a series of 12 concise romantic lais, Anglo-Norman romance tales with fantastical elements. Among stories about cheating kings, horny knights, slutty beauties, polygamist noblewomen, sex and murder is the tale of Bisclavret, the lycanthropic admire of the king.
The lais starts with a happily married Breton knight. He and his wife love each other, but she worries when he disappears into the woods for days at a time, returning “happy and gay.” What double life does he lead? Does he possess another lover?
She prods and pries, and the nobleman fears how she’ll react if he tells her, before he finally relents. The nobleman explains that he is “bisclavret”— the writer compares this term to the Norman lore of the “garwolf,” a savage beast that, “eats men, wreaks havoc, does no fine / Living and roaming in the deep wood.”
A man confused to his primal urges, forsaking his wife and disappearing into the woods, you say? The erotic connotations are palpable . . .
No doub