The Pendulum Wars
Before Emergence Day cracked the world open from underneath, the people of Sera were already living inside a different kind of catastrophe, one they built themselves and then kept feeding for generations.
The Pendulum Wars were not a single campaign or a clean “us versus them” legend. They were seventy-nine years of resource panic turned into doctrine, into identity, into a nervous system.
Imulsion, that glowing petroleum of the Gears universe, made energy feel like destiny.
The nations that controlled it controlled the future. Everyone else learned the language of hunger. And when governments get hungry, borders start to look like suggestions.
The spark: Imulsion and the politics of survival
The Pendulum Wars ignite because Imulsion changes the meaning of power. It is not just fuel; it is industrial acceleration, military advantage, and the promise of modern life on a planet that has always been rough around the edges. The Coalition of Ordered Governments grows into a dominant force partly because it has the infrastructure and the access to protect and exploit the richest deposits. That power concentrates quickly.
The Union of Independent Republics, a patchwork of states that refuses COG control, sees an energy empire forming in real time, and concludes the quiet part out loud: if they cannot share in the supply, they will be priced out of relevance.
That is the first ethical fracture of the setting. The COG sells itself as stability and order. The UIR frames itself as independence and resistance. Each side can sound righteous depending on which city you were born in, and that is why the war lasts so long. It is not only about barrels of fuel; it is about who gets to define the rules of the world. Once the first blood is spilled, Imulsion becomes both the cause and the justification, a resource you must protect because you are already killing for it.
What the wars did to society: A planet trained to accept command
Seventy-nine years is long enough for war to stop feeling like an event and start feeling like weather. The Pendulum Wars reshape Sera into a civilization that expects sirens. Economies pivot into permanent production. Schools and families raise kids with the understanding that enlistment is not a possibility, it is a horizon. Propaganda becomes décor.
Cities adapt to rationing, curfews, travel restrictions, and the slow tightening of state control that always arrives with “national security” stitched on the label.
The critical point is that the Pendulum Wars build the reflexes that define the Locust era. When the Locust eventually hit, the COG’s authoritarian posture does not appear out of nowhere. It has already been rehearsed for decades. When a government survives a generational conflict, it tends to keep the tools it used to survive.
That is how “order” becomes a habit, and how a population learns to trade freedom for the promise of protection, even when protection is never guaranteed.
The COG in the Pendulum era: Doctrine as glue and weapon
The COG’s public story is simple: unity saves lives. In practice, the COG becomes a machine that can mobilize enormous resources, coordinate large-scale operations, and impose discipline across a sprawling society. Its doctrine, politics, and military culture reinforce each other.
It is a system designed to keep moving even when it should stop and ask whether the destination is worth it.
That momentum is why the Pendulum Wars feel like the series’ moral prologue. They show how a civilization can become so accustomed to conflict that it no longer knows how to demobilize its imagination. Even peace becomes a brief administrative pause.
The war ends on paper, but the culture of war continues in posture and policy, and it leaves Sera emotionally unprepared for anything except more violence.
A brief timeline of the Pendulum Wars
| Phase | What happens | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-war buildup | Imulsion extraction accelerates industrial power, deepens inequality, and locks nations into energy competition. | Resource imbalance becomes existential. Politics harden into blocs, and compromise starts to look like surrender. |
| War ignites | The UIR challenges COG dominance, and conflict spreads across multiple theaters as both sides pursue energy security. | The war’s logic becomes cyclical. Every action creates retaliation. The pendulum starts swinging. |
| Middle decades | Offensives and counteroffensives drag on for years, with attrition as the true strategy and civilians paying the bill. | Sera becomes normalized to war. Entire generations grow up with militarism as routine, not exception. |
| Defining campaigns | Major battles harden the identities of soldiers and nations, creating legends, grudges, and lifelong bonds. | This is where the series’ core relationships are forged in the expanded lore, friendships built under fire that survive into the Locust era. |
| Endgame | A decisive strategic advantage emerges, and the COG forces a conclusion through overwhelming military leverage. | The war ends, but it normalizes extreme solutions, a mindset that echoes later when survival pressures return in worse form. |
| Fragile peace | A ceasefire begins, but societies remain armed, traumatized, and politically brittle. | The planet has no real recovery window. The system pauses. It does not heal. |
The war’s most important product: The people who survive it
The Pendulum Wars are where the series’ iconic soldiers become inevitable. Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago come out of this era shaped by training, loss, and the kind of loyalty that forms when the world keeps trying to kill you and one person keeps showing up anyway.
The expanded fiction leans into this, making it clear that their bond is not the warm memory of better days. It is a survival mechanism, built in a time when optimism was already rationed.
Adam Fenix belongs to the Pendulum Wars too, because long wars devour scientists as easily as they devour soldiers. Genius becomes a military asset. Ethics become negotiable. Inventions become strategic bargaining chips.
The later tragedies of the setting, including the temptation to see catastrophic weapons as clean solutions, have their roots in this era’s desperation. The Pendulum Wars teach Sera that it can always build something bigger. They do not teach it when to stop building.
The bleak punchline: The war ends and the world breaks again
The Pendulum Wars end, but the planet that emerges on the other side is not restored, it is primed. It is armed. It is exhausted. It is culturally fluent in sacrifice and command. That is why the timing of Emergence Day is so vicious. Six weeks after the ceasefire, just as the first thin hope of normal life tries to stand up on shaking legs, the Locust arrive.
The tragedy is not only that Sera is attacked. It is that Sera has spent seventy-nine years becoming the kind of world that can survive an invasion, while also becoming the kind of world that cannot recognize how much of itself it has already lost.
Note: This article keeps the focus tight on the Pendulum Wars as the setting’s foundational conflict, the long prelude that explains why the COG responds to later disasters with such ruthless speed, and why characters forged in this era carry a sense of duty that feels like both armor and trap.
