#nervous to tag a book from 2019 ... meanwhile end of eternity is 68 years old lolllll

[knightotoc]

I just read This is How You Lose the Time War (with no idea what it was about, just because I saw a tweet recommending it), and once I realized it was a time travel romance I of course kept comparing it to The End of Eternity. This is an unhelpful comparison since they are so different, and I worry that this train of thought took me out of the story when I should have been appreciating it for what it was. Nevertheless that's what I did, and here's what I thought (mild spoiler alert + criticisms):

In general, Time War has a more convincing romance, and Eternity has more compelling world-building.

I didn't like Time War in the beginning, but I was crying and having a great time by the end. You're thrown into the middle of very alienating setting, and personally I had a hard time getting invested until I had a better idea of what was happening. Ironically, the characters care less and less about what is happening once they start to value the romance more than their jobs. So the characters and I were kind of criss-crossing each other.

I think the biggest difference from Eternity, and something I struggled with as a reader, is that Red and Blue are immortal and live many lives, and therefore do not really care about any of them. It makes sense that an immortal person would only find other immortal people interesting, and once they get bored enough, they'd only find their immortal enemies interesting. But it still makes me upset how callous these immortal women are with human lives. Even the Greek gods gave some fucks about us. Red and Blue seem to love plants more than humans, and violence more than plants... I don't get it. In Eternity, Andrew and the other Eternals' feelings about the rest of humanity are important to the story.

The two stories' gender dynamics are about as different as it's possible to be, and they are both frustrating in opposite ways. Eternity is all about a misogynist in a boys' club; most of the characters are men, and the only female character is objectified and treated badly until the end, when it all gets flipped on its head. The misogyny sucks, but it has a purpose, and the characters do literally overthrow the patriarchy. Time War is about two shapeshifting (?) women who fall in love, even though they are secret agents on opposite sides of a war. Both of their warleaders are also women, and as far as I can tell, they both live in all-women (?) futuristic societies, unlike anything we know now. So obviously Time War has a more progressive gender dynamic as its focus, but the genders do not technically matter to the story as they do in Eternity, and they also don't reflect reality. So basically I'm unhappy with both of them, lol

I'm wondering if I missed something, because if you look up fanart for this book, multiple people have drawn Red as a short-haired white lady and Blue as a long-haired Black lady. First of all, I didn't think they were literally red and blue; I thought those were just their secret code names, and they would if anything avoid those colors to conceal their identities. Second, I thought they were shape-shifters, though I'm not sure how the reincarnation system works. My best guess is that Blue's people are plantlike space aliens who possess different humans' bodies, and Red's people are cyborgs who evolved past humanity, and both peoples have a transhuman way to quickly hop between timelines. BUT, I am not at all confident in this.