Every publisher needs to have this Trigun Twitter user, who has a very specific handle, on their side.
A Trigun fan account with the username “bigolas dickolas wolfwood” with a much more tame Twitter handle of @maskofbun showered praise on Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s 2019 novella This Is How You Lose the Time War on May 6, encouraging their followers and anyone else on Twitter to read the book. “DO NOT look up anything about it,” the fan wrote. “do it right now i’m very extremely serious.” As of this article’s publication, the tweet received 7.4 million views, over 110,000 likes and 12,000 retweets. Two days later, Bigolas Dickolas posted an update where El-Mohtar wrote a newsletter on her website titled “I tried to title this post for twenty minutes and failed,” where she posted how she was “incomprehensibly grateful to bigolas dickolas.”
“To say this doesn’t usually happen is to invent a new category for understatement,” El-Mohtar wrote. Her partner had shown her the Tweet, leading her to wonder about the identity of this Twitter account with such an unusual username and ponder how this single Tweet led to so many people buying Time War. Absolutely floored and stunned at seeing the sudden resurgence of popularity, she wrote, since Bigolas Dickolas’s viral Tweet, This Is How You Lose the Time War appeared on #21 in Books on Amazon, and has since risen up to #7 as of this article’s writing. El-Mohtar also cheekily asked if she should return the favor, simply stating “maybe I should get into Trigun?!)”
Bigolas Dickolas’s passionate edict upon the masses has proven effective. One Twitter commenter replied to the post, “I saw this book in the store i went right after seeing your tweet lol.” Another Twitter user with a Trigun Stampede profile picture simply wrote, “You got my attention.” Bigolas Dickolas and another Trigun fan started an intensely loud conversation, quoting various lines from the book. Other users flooded the comments, reminiscing on how much they enjoyed reading This Is How You Lose the Time War the first time they read it. Even Simon and Schuster’s corporate marketing team wanted to take a leaf out of Bigolas Dickolas’s book.
Published in 2019, the sci-fi epistolary novel This Is How You Lose the Time War follows two agents simply known as Red and Blue who travel through time on behalf of their respective nations to win the titular conflict. They leave behind secret messages to each other that initially begin as taunts and boasts before growing into something neither of them expected: love. However, the discovery of their secret relationship will result in their deaths and only one side can win the war. This Is How You Lose the Time War also has a four-hour audiobook, narrated by Emily Woo Zeller as Blue and Cynthia Farrell as Red.
Trigun, created by Yasuhiro Nightow, was serialized from April 1995 to January 1997 and received an anime adaptation in 1999. The show has been listed as one of the best of all time with many praising the writing and strong character development. Trigun received a reboot in 2023, called Trigun Stampede, with the first part broadcasting in January.
This Is How You Lose the Time War is available for purchase on Amazon.com at half-price at the time of this article’s publication. Trigun and Trigun Stampede are both available on Crunchyroll and Hulu.
Source: Twitter, Amal El-Mohtar
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