Some family headcanons I've wanted to share since forever
//reposted from discord.
Also for reference:
Sergio (Mexico)
Alon (Philippines)
For one I think: since the nations aren’t born like we are, and being long-lived and humanoid personifications of abstract concepts, I don’t see them viewing ‘family’ and ‘kin groups’ the same way we do. For them, it’s not a permanent, static or stable designation. I really don’t like the idea of them only having one set of parents, because with Mexico and the Philippines that would leave out an extraordinary amount of peoples that have played a role in the creation of the respective countries.
For the nations I feel as if ‘family’ is a highly politicized and sensitive topic that isn’t something that they view lightly.
However, that being said, I do feel that human influence and understanding of family ties and historical relationships has greatly impacted the way that they view it themselves, and at least for Mexico and the Philippines, being relatively ‘young’ countries, they do tend to gravitate towards viewing the dominant influences as parents and leaving the rest as the less immediate family label of their choice like aunt/uncle, cousin, etc.
With Sergio this tends to cause friction with those he views as his aunt’s or uncles since although in his pov he’s respecting them by giving them seniority over him, in their pov for most, it comes off as him viewing them as less important and not seeing them as his parents which hurts them. For the most part they don't see each other very often, or rather Sergio doesn't visit them that often but when they do the visits are pleasant enough but I feel it’s mostly a formality, mainly because Sergio really doesn’t visit often enough to get to know them as people better. In Sergio’s mind it’s simply too weird complicated an idea to have more than one set of parents to even entertain the thought. AndalsoitkindagoesagainstthenationbuildingmythofrahhAZTECANCESTORS!!!...andspaintooig.
All in all, It's a super weird dynamic given the popularity of indigenismo and the supposed "celebration" of indigenous culture which is a complicated and controversial topic for another day.
With Alon it’s sort of similar in that he tends to view those distant to him with a less immediate family label, but I have a headcanon that at the other persona’s insistence he call them his siblings so that they’re all equal to him, and nobody could claim to be the 'parent(s)'.
This sounds good in theory, but it doesn’t really change the dynamic besides the label. In his mind there’s still a clear parent, aunt/uncle, sibling, cousin sorting going on. I feel as if he’d be a lot closer to the Tagalog personification(s) than anyone else and I can see that being a bit of a sore point for the others ^^; aside from that he gets along with the other members of his family when they visit each other for the most part but there are still some snags that cause tension sometimes quietly simmering in the background.
