How a 2019 sci-fi novel went viral, thanks to anime shitposting

The 2019 sci-fi novel by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone This is how you lose the time war unexpectedly became the sixth most popular book on Amazon last weekend, and it’s all thanks to “Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood.”

No, that’s not the name of a lesser-known cousin of Lord of the Rings’ Sindar Elven archer from the Woodland Realm. It’s the handle of a Twitter user who tweeted a short recommendation for the book on Sunday, May 7. Presumably buoyed by the sheer absurdity of a name like “Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood,” combined with such heartfelt endorsement of the novel, the tweet quickly went viral, boosting sales of the book.

For the unknown, This is how you lose the time war is an epistolary novel that follows two rival time-traveling saboteur agents, codenamed Red and Blue, who work against each other to change the timeline for their respective factions. Leaving each other taunting messages across time and space, the two agents begin to fall in love with the way you fall asleep; slowly at first, then all at once, forcing them to consider what the future holds for them after the so-called “Time War” has been won and lost.

In a blog post published on Tuesday, titled “I Tried to Title This Post for Twenty Minutes, But I Failed,” El-Mohtar explained her take on the situation and expressed her gratitude for Bigolas Dickolas’s recommendation. “As far as I know, someone named Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood runs a fan account for a 90s anime called Trigun who recently rebooted and tweeted about loving Time War with absolute gusto,” El Mohtar wrote. “And somehow that tweet went viral over the course of 24 hours with people saying how much, how passionately and how violently they love the book, and it exploded.”

For those who don’t get the joke, “Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood” is a pun on the name of Nicholas D. Wolfwood, a popular character from Yasuhiro Nightow’s sci-fi Western manga Trigun (as well as the 1998 and 2023 anime) known for carrying a huge Gatling pistol in the shape of a cross on his back. The sudden virality of the tweet is so widespread that Yoshihiro Watanabe, one of the producers of Trigun stampede, joined in the fun by tweeting on Thursday, “Did I buy the book? Yes.”

As a fan of both the El-Mohtar and Gladstone novel and the Trigun franchise, the sudden unexpected coming together of two stories I never thought I’d see in the same sentence warms my heart. Sometimes the internet is actually pretty cool.