Thank You Hetalia For Making Me A History Nerd

Thank you Hetalia for making me a history nerd <3

re: this anon

Frankly as someone from a country warcrimed by the axis powers, I'm sort of tired of the implication that liking Hetalia (and Hetalia in itself) is somehow making light of actual atrocities. There's certainly a lot of things in poor taste in Hetalia (the way SouKor was characterized, among other things) and the early series was definitely a product of its time. But there's a reason why the new series has shifted away from that to fun little strips about different cultures' quirks and historical incidents that aren't as recent as WW2, and retired distasteful characterizations. And even in the original series itself it's very explicitly shown that the nation characters don't always agree with their government and often do things under duress. Hell, Germany thinks Hitler is a fucking nutjob. IDK about you but that doesn't come across as glorifying nazism to me.

And maybe it's also me being jaded from the english-speaking fandom's own bad faith takes on the creator but man. Hetalia started as dumb little gag comic written by a homesick Japanese art student in New York fascinated by the diversity of the people he encountered. Can we not act like it's some special evil and that he set out to be racist? How is Hetalia comparable to like, SNK and its creator endorsing imperialism and other mangaka who have openly slipped anti-korean themes into their work? If Hetalia had actually addressed things like the Holocaust people would still complain (and really, why do you want a gag manga of all things to address the Holocaust?) If you really want something to be mad at, go be mad at Countryhumans because they DO very explicitly glorify historical atrocities and there are actual fascist racist nutjobs in that fandom.

Not to mention (and maybe I'm disgressing here but fuck it) I'm wary of this discourse because Americans often use us fans from countries who suffered under the axis powers as a reason to white knight. Too many times I've seen people getting angry over "racism" and it's just Americans getting mad over a trope that they personally dislike but isn't particularly offensive while us fans from that actual culture don't give a flying fuck at all. Meanwhile these same Americans fighting against "racism" in fandom will peddle anti-fujoshi rhetoric and dogpile nonwhite fans who correct their takes.

TL;DR: the low-budget country bishonens are not responsible for IRL war crimes and I'm tired of people acting like they did.

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