-crashes into this thread- SO ABOUT HETALIA owo this is tbh one of the fandoms I'll revisit the most, even though I'm not active anymore. I still reach to my volume 1 manga whenever i really need a pick me up tbh. And it's still the fandom I think I read the most fanfic in.. like. All its ship potential was amazing and the potential to explore history in a different and super interesting way? A+ would fall in love with this weird anime again
Hee yeah. I got into it specifically because it made light of really terrible moments in history and it was.. hilarious? I kinda still want to write several different fics for this fandom even though I've long since given up keeping track of canon because it's just so fucking interesting damnit! There's heaps upon heaps of things to explore and play with and *sigh*
world building with literal tons of pre-existing world and bullshit, half of which nobody talks about. That's what's caught me. The canon is cute and silly, but the template it gives is the most delightful part. There's a face to put to the bloodshed and usually crazy ass shit that humans do to each other. Spoiler: whoops also, i got into hetalia when i'd been living in nothern italy for a while and as weird as it sounds and as much as the countries can be sterotypes.. most of the people we encountered matched the personalities from the show?? we were able to guess accurately if someone was from southern italy. when we traveled through austria and into germany for my medical specialists, they were also matchy-matchy in public spaces. it was terrible and amusing and way funnier than it sounds, because oh lord. It wasn't THIS IS LITERALLY EXACTLY RIGHT it was more of the.. how to put it. Flavor? General feel of public spaces? I can't explain, it's the same way it feels when I look around here now and go "yep, 'Murica."
Some people were offended when America showed up (yes I'm that old of a fan) but I just watched him chowing down hamburgers in the middle of his speech to the Allies about how much of a hero he is and laughed my ass off because I have not seen a more accurate portrayal of America before or since. I was hooked then, I think. There's also the fact that Hetalia was really popular right around when I was learning European History from the end of the middle ages through modern day which turned out to be a lot more useful than you might think! Some of my (own, completely private) study guides were comics with Hetalia characters.
yeah, I got into it while doing geography class, and it so helped me with a lot of memorization. I definitely made up hetalia characters to help me memorize traits of old civilizations, too. Also some of the talk on messed up hetalia ships just drudged up all the /feelings/ i had about Belarus after rping her for a few years, and i'm gonna rant about that now Spoiler: Spoiler for using current events as part of hetalia shipping, if that bothers people So Belarus is sort of a boring character to rp unless you dig a bit deeper. She's a 1-joke character in the actual show, she just tries to marry russia creepily, not much else. which is super fun when you're rping with a russia, but when a canada jumps on by you're sorta hard pressed to come up with anything to talk about. So I did a fair amount of research on the history of Belarus and its current events to characterize her, and boy.. So one of the things I always found super interesting in hetalia nations is the relationship with their boss/leader vs their population, the general concensus being that their feelings follow the people but they generally act according to what their boss says is SO COOL to me in a lot of ways, and well. Belarus has an awful leader right now. He's buddy buddy with Putin, and that says plenty. The Belarusian language is slowly dying and getting the opposite of support from its government, and like. protesting is illegal. Gathering in a public space silently has become illegal because people were doing silent protests. It's bad. Which for hetalia brought a ton to Belarus' character, because the people generally want to be their own state while the government wants stronger ties to Russia, which meant I could play her relationship to Russia being much more complicated, and a lot more tragic on both sides and just. Ahh. Belarus and Russia's relationship is so complicated in my brain and I love it and literally no one else has thought this hard about it before probably XD
I was never really into Hetalia but I had friends who were and one of my dearest friends was one of the writers for All He Ever Wanted and it just made me so fucking mad that people were so mean to her over her fic.
Hetalia is what cemented me as total shipping trash, tbh. My mom recently traveled to Vienna and Budapest and got upset-confused at how I could anticipate and commen all the cool cultural/historic stuff she saw because.... I was a huge Austria/Hungary shipper and read about the countries a lot. My friends and I were btt rpers, though I was probably the shittiest France in existence because it was around the time I was peak social phobia. I haven't talked to them in a while, but as far as I know they were still active in that social group. I sorta miss it!! We were all about our ocs, too. We had one for basically every South America country and I even made my own pissbaby of a failed separatist revolt character, who was still complaining about the price of beef jerky almost 200 years after its failed separatist revolt, after the Revolta dos Farrapos in my homestate.
I'm not into Hetalia anymore, but it and its fandom get props for teaching me about history things way before I ever heard about them in school, if at all (Bloody Sunday, the Weimar Republic, etc). There was some great world building.
Latin Hetalia is my jaaaam. I learned a whole lot about South American history through Spanish class and I love that little group. I still follow an artist who posts Latin Hetalia stuff somewhat regularly.
I unfortunately exited the fandom right around that time. I never really got it and I still kind of don't.
Same. I'm interested in it but never really got around to looking into it, I'd exited the fandom around that time .3.
So I'm cleaning my room and I came across a description I wrote up for a Sim family I was thinking of making with Arthur and Francis as the two fathers of Alfred and Matthew respectively by the same woman and... the first line of Arthur's description made me laugh out loud. Guess who's who.
i liked the 2p characters' designs but i never found anything that really fleshed out their characters well. they basically all had opposite personalities to their counterparts and the only one i really enjoyed for their character instead of just the design was 2p!england because he'd make really pretty baked goods that tasted great and generally had a very sweet disposition, but hated everyone and frequently put poison in his treats (well, sort of hated? more like he just liked poisoning people, or something). he was basically the yandere to england's tsundere. plus, just look at him! totally adorabloodthirsty:
Here u go lol. Apparently some of the designs are outdated because the creator (I can never remember how to spell his name) kept making countries and actually did some South American ones... I still kinda prefer the Latin Hetalia designs.
