Matching Mixed Media - 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim & This is How You You Lose the Time War
January's Pairing
Welcome to a new end of month featurette. The following is an actually an idea I had back in June 2022 and something I had pitched to one of my editors. It wasn’t quite the right match, so it ended up sitting in a slide deck, and well. Now that I have a dedicated space for all the weird ideas that I get on a whim, it’s time to fulfill an ancient pact with myself (you know from 2.5 years ago).
So welcome to Matching Mixed Media, where I’m going to discuss two pieces of media that I love dearly and how I have managed to conflate them in my head.
Let’s begin.
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim developed by Vanillaware is 2019 video game that is part visual novel, part real time strategy game, and part extensive encyclopedia that complex mutli-layered narrative over different regions and time periods as various characters with each other trying to save the world with mechs from kaiju.
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is a 2019 Hugo-Award winning epistolary novel that focuses on two different time travelers with two diametrically opposed goals and end up falling in love. Shenanigans ensure.
On a base level, it’s super easy to see why these stories naturally coalesce. Two stories about time travel that came out in 2019 that leverage multiple perspectives to provide context on a greater conflict. And then as you tease the text and game apart, you’ll find that the exact mechanisms that they use to tell these stories are super different, but still manage to maintain a lovely conversation between them.
Here (They May) Be Spoilers
Of course, in order to explain any of this, I fear I may need to spoil two six year old properties and while I’ll try to keep things to bare bone reveals, I’d encourage you to seek out at least one of these stories before diving which I get is terrible for readership, but I’m doing this for my own amusement primarily.
The Medium Informs The Structure
The vast majority of media is experienced linearly. Even with stories that are quote unquote non-linear, typically, the person reading or watching experiences the same sequence of events at the same time with the same context. This is true of most books, most movies, plays, podcasts, you get the gist. Truly, one of the few mediums that allows a person to experience a story non-linearly is that of a video game, and the video game has to be structured in such a way that it can be explored non-linearly. Most conventional games follow the standard structure of beginning/middle/end.
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is not a conventional game. The game requires you to bounce back and forth between its Remembrance mode, a multi-threaded visual novel with 13 different protagonists, its Destruction mode, the aforementioned real time strategy game where you command mechs (the titular Sentinels as it were) against Kaiju hordes, and Analysis mode, which is just a unlockable codex that contextualizes the events that happen above. While there are gates and limiters that conform the experience slightly, the neat thing about 13 Sentinels if you get one hundred people to play the game, you’ll get one hundred different experiences. No play through will be identical, and that’s fascinating in its own right.
Contrast with This Is How You Lose the Time War, where everyone’s experience reading is going to be roughly approximate. Deviations will happen, but even with all the time travel involve, the plot itself is linear. Even as Red and Blue go upthread and downthread, we are following their individual travels, reading their correspondence, seeing their actions play out in the same way every time.
And yet as different as the structure is, there are shared mechanisms and thematics.
Multi-points of View
This is How You Lose the Time War opens with a third person perspective of Red. We get snippets of the world, the events that happened, and after a few pages, we pivot to a letter from Blue. The cadence of the rest of the novel can be inferred pretty easily. El-Mohtar and Gladstone alternate between the two protagonists and two primary modes of perspective, with either scene or letter. We get to see them interact with the world in… not a neutral perspective, but a more observatory stance. When they interact with each other via letter, it is deeply personal and intimate and reiterates at several points that this is a love story about all else.
In contrast, 13 Sentinels mostly lets us view our characters from this outside perspective. While we get glimpses into their thoughts and feelings, the same level of depth doesn’t exist. Of course, 13 Sentinels has nearly seven times the number of principle characters and exists in a much more complex structure, but the fact remains that even with the relatively fixed narrative distance, there is also a “objective” narrative distance that exists with the Analysis mode simply providing a straight timeline and encyclopedia of a variety of things.
Connection As The Truest Form of Resilience
While both works are centered around a war, the exact nature of the overarching conflict in the background are fundamentally different. Red and Blue in the beginning of This Is How You Lose the Time War are trying to manifest their society’s version/vision of the perfect future which are fundamentally opposed. The teenagers in 13 Sentinels are initially dealing with Kaiju invasions before eventually discovering that they are really dealing with the hubris of humanity manifesting into a mega-corporation that develops a nanomachine virus that nearly wipes out humanity due to some AI shenanigans.
Now that I’ve typed that all out, both stories fundamentally feature the same conflict of the imposition of world views and how in either story, the protagonists band together to oppose this imposition and provide hope for a fresh start. Which given that I’m writing this in January 2025 on inauguration day… maybe, that’s just the universe having a good sense of timing.
Matching Mixed Media Will Return Next Month
So a glimpse into the future, I have four other pairings at the ready and I have a scattering of properties that I desperately want to pair, so we’re going to figure that. But I hope you enjoyed this new installation in this substack. I thrive off just enough of structure to help keep me things on the rail, but don’t worry. Most of this “newsletter” will be assorted musing that time capsule whatever I’m feeling that week.