“There are two wolves inside every person, I hear. I think one is like a wolf that eats garbage and has no pride, and the other was brought inside a suburban home by a well-meaning dope who thought the wolf was a dog.
Boys Weekend has like 5 wolves in it:
1. A spin on an 80âs boner comedy where one of âthe boysâ is trans and the transphobic jokes ainât so funny.
2. A lovecraftian horror.
3. A most dangerous game where a trans person hunts their genetic clone, which is a twisted mirror that they try and shoot.
4. A story of friendships that have withered being refreshed and renewed as people grow and change and become new people.
5. A story of friendships that have drifted.
The problem for me isnât these wolves, itâs that we donât spend any time with any of them, really, and instead we spend most of the time with the boys acting as straw menâ¦straw boys, saying super insensitive things about trans people and the main character, who is a trans person. So what we get is a lot of scenes of party boys doing party boy stuff and our MC pouting (justifiably), and itâs like the reader is at a party where those are the two options: Do you want to hang out with tech bros who are probably going to try and sell you something thatâs a really stupid word followed by â-coin,â or do you try and hang out with the one person at the party who is way too cool for everything going on at the party?
The correct answer is that you want to stay home and read comics, but TWIST, you read Boys Weekend and were presented with these very options!
It just felt to me like we were on one of those bus tours of Chicago, the double decker, and we go past this museum and that aquarium, this interesting story and that interesting story, but we never really go inside any of them. We just see that theyâre options and move on.
Maybe the thing I didn’t like is that this is one of those 90/10 books: 90% of what happens occurs in the last 10% of the pages.
This has worked for me exactly one time: The movie Waxwork. Kinda boring, but the last 10 minutes is bonkers in the best possible way and does probably justify giving the movie a watch. But once you’ve seen it, honestly, you can watch the last 10 minutes and see 90% of the movie. Any mathematicians want to write this paper with me? Pete’s Unified Theory of Waxwork?”