This Is How You Lose the Time War

Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 2019

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-10

Chapters 11-15

Chapters 16-20

Chapters 21-25

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Character Analysis

Blue

Blue is one of the protagonists and even briefly serves as an antagonist to Red. She works as an agent for Garden, a nature based collective society, and slowly weaves braids of time to influence her side to win. Through her dialogue and actions, Blue shows that she is fierce, cunning, funny, playful, loving, and tough. She is not afraid to cut her teeth or be killed. She loves and embeds herself in the lives she lives, but she always keeps everyone at arm’s length, until Red who fascinates her as an equal opponent and eventually a lover. Red helps change Blue, as “Blue has never laid plans, not really. Not her own, ever. …but she plans, now” (143). Blue learns to let people in and shares her past, present, and future with Red.

Chapter 24 reveals that Blue has also been physically affected and altered as a small child by Red in an effort to make Blue resistant to the poison she ingests in Chapter 20. This potentially explains why Blue and Red have such a deep connection and why Blue tends to be slightly rebellious when it comes to the collective nature of Garden. This element of Blue’s past brings up tangled questions of causality when considering the timeline of her romance with Red.

Red

Red is also a protagonist, and because readers are introduced to her first and she completes the final actions leading to the resolution of the novel, she may be seen as the protagonist. She, too, however, serves as an antagonist to Blue at first. Red works for the Agency, a technological society, and has a deep, literal sense of duty. She is logical, verbose, technical, intelligent, and awkward. When writing a letter to Blue, she consults Mrs. Levitt’s Guide to learn how to properly construct a letter, which shows that she’s humorously stiff but also desperately yearning to be human despite being something post-human. She, too, changes as a result of Blue, learning that blind faith in her cause is not the best or only way to be. She loses her black-and-white sense of the world the more she falls in love with Blue and ultimately turns her back on the Agency, which demonstrates her growth and autonomy.