Gilbert Beilschmidt! Is Valid!

The neighbours' personification:

I CHALLENGE THE HETALIA FANDOM!

I challenge you all to pick an Hetalia' character and find the sósia/copycat/double (in another fandom)

Portugal, I choose you! And his "sosia/copycat/double" Ookurikara from Touken Ranbu.

@oryero you do want to give it a try?

Because if it comes to personality, I choose France and

1. The premise of the show is incredibly ignorant, and when you think of it, the idea of the show is terrible. History is fucking sad, and horrifying. Especially in WW2 era, by not acknowledging that these horrible things have happened you are essentially siding with the people saying that these massacres don’t exist. (Is anyone going to mention Nanking? Does it just not exist in Hetalia?) and in Hetalia dub versions the only time they mention the Holocaust is to make fun of it, which already doesn’t look good since they pretty much scrubbed out anything that had to do with all the atrocities most countries did in WW2.

2. Okay so this admittedly was the fandom and only the fandoms fault but Nazi Germany and Prussia fanarts?? The Nazi uniforms were created by Hugo Boss in order to make them appealing, “cool” and intimidating. I just find it disturbing that the original purpose of the uniforms found its original sentiments again and worked its magic in the Hetalia fandom.

3. Hetalia Germany in WW2 is almost no different than any other time period, i found myself not knowing that It was WW2 in the anime, until I heard the tell tale word “Blitzkrieg.” Not that it needed to be explicit, but I’d like to know what exactly I’m laughing at and I just found it odd. Which begs the question; would the Axis powers and Soviet Union be remorseful about what they’ve done in WW2 if this anime had delved deeper emotionally into the war?

4. The anime is offensive (duh) it’s supposed to be, however the only way I found it sort of offensive was the asian accents. Not even the stereotypes were that bad. And I find it weird how they tried to incorporate offensive material while simultaneously scrubbing away and censoring anything about the shit that went down in WW2. Personally? I’d make a joke about Italy’s boss just hanging in Milan, something offensive about WW2, anything to acknowledge that these things actually happened!

5.Hima is pretty much a cryptid and I have no clue what his personal politics are, that’s not a bad thing but it isn’t a good thing either. He could be pro-imperialist or anti, and no one would have a clue because he’s so damn elusive!

About the premise, it’s about portraying history in a comedic way by satirizing political relations between countries. I can get how bad that can be, especially because they started off with... word war fucking two. World war two was chosen because there’s so many political relations to talk about, but it wasn’t a good choice at all and some parts were handled really poorly. They didn’t want to make fun of dark things, so they just... didn’t mention them, and stuck to talking about what battles were where and who won and what political deals and whatnot went down, along with various trivia facts. This obviously has a lot of problems, which I’ll go into detail in a later post. Hetalia has since moved on from WWII and has been for years, at least. 

I’ll just briefly touch on this here: you bring up countries and remorse in 3., and that’s somewhat been answered. Germany is shown to dislike the war and being a part of it even while it’s going on, and in the present is extremely sensitive to any references to his past, heavily implied to be caused by guilt. I don’t remember anything about Russia, so I’ll go back through the comics soon ^^ I’m pretty sure they also say outright that it’s WWII, but the country’s personalities remain nearly unchanging through time, they’re not that affected by government in canon.

The East Asian accents were pretty overblown in the dub, but to be fair, literally everyone’s accents were overblown. (I can literally hardly stand N Italy’s voice sometimes fhfsjhfjs.) There were plenty of edgy jokes about WWII, just more about the leaders, weapons, battles, etc and not about the ethnic genocide. They didn’t want to make any references to the Holocaust because that would be too jarring for the tone of the manga and they didn’t want to portray it lightly. However, you’re right about the premise being flawed, that’s the exact problem. They can’t bring up the actual horrible shit, so they just don’t talk about it at all, which doesn’t really work either.