This is How You Lose the Time War

 Here is my review for this is how you lose the time war. god. I wish I didn't feel tired all the time. Then I could read and write reviews of what I read. Then I could write. But anyway. I wrote this a long time ago, almost two years ago. I still think my analysis checks out. it used to be that I fueled myself entirely on anxiety and shame. I realize these are destructive fuel sources, not efficient, won't take you where you want to go. So in my adulthood I appear to be under achieving because I never properly learned how to work. I don't know if any of this makes sense. I just don't want to be depressed. It's hard for me to imagine a time when I wasn't depressed. I forget what that feels like. And I understand that's a function of depression, to make you forget all the good times. 

I'll just go at my own pace. I must start with what I have, accept that's good enough. in addition to this book review I also made a interest board inspired by red and blue. I had a whole movie planned out. it was going to be brilliant. Anyway. I did enjoy this book a lot, don't get the wrong impression. It's just that, when I love something, I also believe in critiquing it. I believe this is a function of love. 

Book review: 

The authors have framed this as a lesbian love story, mostly because of the pronouns of the protagonist. There isn’t any connection to lesbian history, and the way they use gender feels like two straight people writing a love story. I think (as a straight person) this is a common and pretty terrible mistake we make when interpreting, presenting and engaging with sapphic romance in general. You can't just take two female characters and supplant them into the conventions of straight courting. While lesbian and bisexual women have a long history of creating their own dating conventions along patterns, such as butch/femme or stud/femme, with a proclivity for ever shifting gender definitions, these dynamics do not mirror heterosexual parings. 

Red clearly presents within masculine stereotypes, and I would argue hetero masculinity in particular. While there is overlap between butch, stud, and hetero masculine social norms, there are critical differences especially when we include class and race axis, as well as approaches to intimacy in sexual relationships. Red must learn emotions and be humanized through Blue, literally becoming human in the process of falling in love with her. This nearly hyperbolizes the social narrative we present cishet men with for navigating partnership. 

On the other hand, Blue is both gendered feminine and racialized as Not White. I think it is obvious how blue is seen as feminine in comparison to Red, she is literally mother earth. She is also human, and so more mortal/defenseless in comparison to red. Her black hair and dark skin are made reference to, and we never receive these visual descriptors for Red. This functions to “other” blue from whatever red is. This racialization might not stand out so glaringly if she was not also portrayed as a villain in comparison to Red. while both engage in their own share of murder, the audience is introduced first to the inner thoughts of Red, who we learn cannot adapt to the pain of killing humans, despite her genius for it. We are not given access to Blue’s thoughts in the same way so as to humanize her - scenes at the temple show her slight callousness in this area. Additionally, red describes Blue’s face as having a sinister smile to it. Red’s commandment refers to saving humanity, whereas garden (blue’s side) never does, and seems mostly motivated by the destruction of their enemy.  

The scene that really got me was when blue said, she realized her hunger (desire for life/sex) was to submit to red. While there are several passages that function as sexual euphemisms, as these are love letters, this one is critical because Blue has come to a realization about her hunger she formerly did not know. This coincides with her decision to sacrifice herself for red. We will take this submission as both sexual and literal plot progression. While dom/sub roles are a part of kink communities for any orientation, I would argue that the dynamics of domination/submission are more fitting for heterosexual relationships than for sapphic ones. top/bottom, butch/femme, do not translate to these categories of dom/sub as the authors have assumed - again, I think this is a pervasive interpretation of sapphic relationships on the part of heterosexual people. While these categories are complicated, and represent identity in ways that don’t apply to cishetero relationships or dating rituals, at a base level it is better to describe these sexual dynamics as giving/receiving, where the top often gives sexual pleasure to a bottom. Sometimes this top identity also coincides with a butch identity, but this again is an oversimplification.  If hetero couples have this dynamic, it is often more transactional and without the depth of social identity layered in. Again, these dynamics are frequently reversed and it is an oversimplification to describe it in these terms. But this is a clear mismatch between the dynamics between Blue and Red and anything lesbian communities have practiced.