I have been browsing their art since you linked me :3 I'm amused because Argentina is like the loud proud guy of South America, so anything about that makes me giggle. And Brasil is cool and interesting, and I'm learning Portuguese right now :3
Oh man, Hetalia is what got me into fandom in the first place. I might not be super active any more but I love America and Germany to pieces. They're so great? And the world itself is just neat! The history of Japan video is doubly amusing for me when I picture the hetalia characters involved, not gonna lie.
I once told my friends France and England wanted to hatefuck each other.... they looked at me weird so I stopped talking about it.
Ahh, I got WAY INTO IT between, like, 2007 and 201o. Was hardcore into character analysis and historical details and geopolitics and the metaphysics of what Nations are, etc. I was a big fan of stuff to do with scoundrel!England and America and Canada being chill brothers who have each others' backs. And the East Asia family having intrigues. And the crazy nonsense Europe got up to in the Middle Ages. And diplomatic sexcapades of all types... When Funimation got the rights and started making a dub and the fandom imploded my favorite writers moved on to different things (including the all_he_ever folks) and in the end I lost touch with the community. If anyone's still doing the type of deep dive fic that comes with footnotes at the end, I'd love to hear about it.
*quietly links my Ao3* Anyone want to read some Hetalia AU longfics? Amor Fati is a fantasy AU, Sanctuary is a sci fi AU. Both are labeled USUK, but I'm terrible at following through with romance sooooo. you can read them either pale or flushed. Also a bit of Fem!Prussia/Fem!Canada smut. Heads up on the fantasy, I wrote the beginning in my last year of high school (5 years ago) and it has the ocassional weird internalized mysogeny. All of that is being fixed in the rewrite though. http://archiveofourown.org/users/Kittenly/works ETA specific links, as my AO3 is full of Dragon Age and Mass Effect trash: Amor Fati, fantasy AU Sanctuary, Sci-fi/Horror AU No Place like Home, Smut (Maybe one day I'll return to this verse. It's so much fun and dorky)
I used to have really extensive headcanons about certain characters, idek where to start. I like to think about nations' relationships with their governments. Kiku has been kept close to the Japanese imperial family for a very long time, at least as far back as the Heian period, when his family name was not Honda but Fujiwara. As far as most humans were concerned, he was a minor noble from one of the Imperial branch families. He was very good at going along with the cloistered life of melancholy poetry, fine foods and quiet politicking inside the imperial compound and ignoring the permanent gnawing hunger in his belly as vast numbers of his people lived in poverty outside. Alfred is more or less allowed to go where he pleases, but he makes sure to privately introduce himself to the President every time he gets a new one. It's easy for him to blend in with the crowds of business casual-clad aides and lobbyists and consultants and office workers moving around and through Washington, DC at any given time. Just a few times, though, there's been a new President who already knew on some level before being told. That's always a good sign. If there's one thing a President ought to know, it's who his Nation is. I can probably go on with these- if it's a historical period or other topic I happen to know stuff about, I can almost certainly drop more headcanons. Share yours too, if you've got 'em!
Considering the general tone of the show, I tend to picture imperial times in Hetaliaverse as less "rape harem" as the fandom tends to do and more "congratulations, you are now in charge of a bunch of semi-invulnerable teenagers who have just as much military training and cunning as you do and have good reason to hate your guts, have fun!" Someone needs to do something with that.
Yeah, that's about how young America is portrayed, I don't see why we can't do the same with other colonized/conquered peoples.
Considering what Korea is like in the manga at the best of times, I get the feeling Japan would have been begging the emperor for permission to give him back.
Spoiler: headcanon yelling got long wow sorry It's been a while since I played with it, but when I was regularly writing Russia I worked with a headcanon (initially attempting to find some sort of justification for the... {Interesting} canon mood-swings) that becoming a "new" country over the same land resets their memories/development a little-- he's been the Grand Duchy, he's been the Empire, he's been the RSFSR (and arguably the USSR as a whole, in the way that England is also sometimes shorthand for the UK as a whole), and now he's the Federation too. All the other new countries we see-- America is the first that comes to mind-- get a chance to be a kid, to grow into their responsibilities and powers, but outside some flashbacks to the Empire vs Poland and Lithuania, Russia... doesn't seem to have that chance even though his population and culture undergo some pretty damn dramatic changes. When he acts childish, either as RSFSR or in any more modern situations as the Russian Federation, it's because some part of whatever magic that keeps them attuned to their physical country still is a dang child, even though Russia-the-personification still appears adult. The USSR was somewhere between 17 and 20 when it joined WWII depending on what you count as its official creation, and the Russian Federation itself is only turning 28 this year; putting a decade or two against the centuries countries normally last, that isn't a whole lot of time to "mature".
Korea's one of the characters where I decided I just didn't like canon and so in my head he's more complex and balanced, less obnoxious. He's still goofy and outgoing and can be self-aggrandizing, but he's got more sides to him than that. Smaller example: Hungary is Erszebet, not Elizaveta, because Elizaveta is not a goddamn Hungarian name
Definitely. (I must say, I get complaints about him being stupid, but honestly my reaction to the complaints about him being a pervert was "as opposed to almost everyone else in the cast?" We are talking about a comic that played attempted child molestation for comedy.) I do like to think he does it deliberately around Japan just to annoy him. It's what younger siblings do, even around older siblings who didn't possibly try to kill them. (Wiping out the Korean culture, as Imperial Japan attempted to do, would presumably have made the nation stop existing.) I think Hungary's name was partly a case of poor Romanisation. I tend to do that too, though I struggle to change Toris to Taurys or Tolys, which are both better names; Toris tends to be used for dogs. Though there is a potential creepy headcanon there about Russia's treatment of him... Also, Tino is a Finnish name, albeit much rarer than Timo, but "Vainamoinen" is roughly the equivalent of having a dude named John Beowulf (which is fucking awesome though).
Speaking of, my response to infamous gorefic Debt really shouldn't have been "why aren't their limbs just growing back?" That's not even canon, it's just usual fanon extrapolated from the fact that the nations recover from spinal injuries and headshots within one jump-cut.
