This Is How You Lose the Time War

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.