Man, I really wish a lot of Hetalia LJ fic had migrated to Ao3... it would be nice to bookmark it. I feel like LJ had the best Hetalia fic, all that historical shit crammed in. I miss it.
You can bookmark eternal EXTERNAL works through the Archive. It's kinda a pain in the butt cause you gotta tag it yourself but I've done it before.
I kinda posted about this on Tumblr already but like how did I not catch the bottom joke there "That's what you call upright" omg
god i saw a post the other day about how hetalia aided the alt right movement or w.e and its like.... as a kid, hetalia actually helped me a lot. i wasn't super open to other cultures when, as a baby teen i got into hetalia and its really international fanbase. never before had i heard and cared so much about places i didn't know, and learned so much about cultures i had no idea about before. it gave me a starting point. fond feelings.
Hetalia encouraged me to think of Nazis as people. Which, yknow, always raises people's hackles, but on the other hand actually made me more strongly anti-fascist, not less? Because if they're human then they have a choice in becoming fascist and/or going along with that ideology, and you can talk to them about that and dismantle it. You can prove it wrong. And that's hopeful to me, because instead of staring down an unflinching monster of darkness you're staring down someone just as human as you. Idk. Rambling a bit. But jesus christ Hetalia specifically and deliberately does not promote any fascist or Nazi talking points, saying it helped the alt right is almost an ass pull.
Problems with Hetalia & assorted fandom Lack of awareness of the gravity of Nazi symbols Himaruya's own racial bias is brodcasted very strongly when dealing with Korea, China, and their foreign relations Not problems with Hetalia Fandom is not aware of the dark underbelly of international relations I mean have you read any fic at all ever For fuck's sake I wrote a fic where one half of one of my favorite ships locks the other half in the basement and tears his heart out of his chest to keep in a jar like a fucking psychopath and my favorite topic in this fandom is war-related drabbles because it inspires me to write similar surreal horror wtf are you on
@autopsyblue Yeah I'd definitely agree about Himaruya there and his issues with China and Korea. Like those are way bigger issues in his work than promoting nazis (bc he avoids that topic pretty clearly, and only ever even mentions hitler in the earliest comics he drew, and it's not in a positive sense). I think the anime dub went 'more offensive' and made people more likely to call it out but tbqh I didn't watch any of it. I've seen some of Himaruya's older older work on a comic he did before Hetalia about a korean girl and a japanese guy who dated and it had some pretty awful biases about korean people so, I think that's his biggest issue in general... He slowly gets better and improves, but it's a clear big bias. and I'd agree it's important to consider nazis as people in the sense of - just because they're people doesn't mean they won't do bad things. Yeah I think when people see it as an evil monster... well, there's something hopeful about combating it, I'd never thought about it in the perspective you did which is positive and probably a helpful perspective to look at it from. For me, it's dangerous for people to view it as a monster - and view it as mythical. Idk, when you are aware of WWII and its history involving people, you become aware that if you're not careful history can repeat itself. It's not a distant monster, it's something close to home that has to be combated. I think your positive thoughts on it are as right as my fears about people thinking of it as mythical though, since talking to people can have an effect. Forgetting where nazis and fascism really stem from creates multiple issues.
Yyyyeeah. Every time Korea shows up it's like all the nuance that goes into all the other characters just flat-out disappears. I have no idea what Korea the character cares about or fears... Also I was thinking about that comic where America sneezes & so does Japan so China gives America medicine/money specifically so that Japan can get better like boi... that's not how it works, China doesn't take advantage of America cause they care about Japan that much they do it because it's leverage to use with what is still one of the most powerful countries in the world if not the most. Japan was an imperialist power that fucked China up and China has not forgotten that. Your entire view of this relationship is really skewed. And yeah, I agree. I think that comes from the fact that Germany is definitely not exclusively shown as Nazi Germany, it's Germany in all its ups and downs, including the Weimar Republic that immediately proceeded Nazi Germany and was incredibly liberal for its time. Been thinking about that recently. I wanna write a fic.
I feel super old as far as Hetalia goes bc I was reading it before the adaptation came out. I felt like after the anime adaptation was made it became harder to find good fic because there was so much of a swamp of fanfic even though of course, the more there is the more high quality fic there is too. There were so many novel length amazing fanfic on LJ but LJ has such a shitty organization system it gives me a headache trying to think about going back to look for stuff. Btw, does anyone remember this weird historical surreal doujin that got translated a few years back that featured a baby england? Gen, no pairs. I've tried to find it but can't. Blood was involved.
