'world history' is not europe and sometimes china

The woes of a Hungarian…./sigh/

Anyway, this wasn’t meant to blame anyone, it’s just a simple request from a person who is constantly bothered by the fact that while the names of other countries are used correctly most of the time, Hungary is still in the “Elizabeta” pit. It has been 10 years or so, can we start calling her on an actual Hungarian name people here in the country would recognize?

Erzsébet is not that hard to pronounce either.

“zs” stands for a sound similar to the “j” in the french word “je”.

Hetalia © Himuraya Hidekaz

No smokes for you, kid –

Hello all, how are you? A new season of Hetalia has been announced. I might have been a pretty prominent blog for hetalia back in the day, and I’m turning 22 in a few months. I’ve wandered back here.

It’s also 2020. Political, racial, and social tastes and sensibilities have changed a lot since the last anime in 2015.

I wrote a long twitter thread about Hetalia’s return. You can read it here. It’s not comprehensive, and I made some mistakes, so if you’re on twitter you can feel free to correct me or add on.

I will be continuing with World Stars, and I will be watching the anime. I see nothing wrong with the concept of Hetalia itself. What I do have an issue with is how it’s been adapted and used by American companies and certain fans, which is not only disrespectful to the source material, but to cultures and minorities. Hetalia will always have problems. They just need to be acknowledged and not preached as truth.

I will update this blog as my place to react and talk about the series, since we are about to get a load more content, hopefully back to the level of the World Stars/World Twinkle days. This is the only appropriate place I can talk about it…so far that is.

Finally, I am making a change to my blog’s policy: I will no longer be using the ‘aph’ tag for original post or in front of tags of characters. 

Hetalia hasn’t used the “Axis Powers” subtitle in years. As I have moved on, this subtitle is disrespectful to certain groups, especially Jewish people. I am an English major these days, and one of my concentrations is Jewish literature, where I study Jewish creative works, especially about antisemitism and the Holocaust. If I am to practice what I preach, I need to drop that subtitle.

The franchise has as many subtitles as seasons. World Stars on the other hand, is not just a subtitle, but it represents a soft reboot of Hetalia. It’s a maturation from what it used to be and it needs to be embraced and normalized as the new standard.

Therefore, I will be using ‘HWS’ (Hetalia: World Stars) as the personal abbreviation for my own tags. This means, you will see ‘hws america’ and not ‘aph america’ on my blog.