You want to know what I think is one of the craziest bits of fanon in the Hetalia fandom?
The existence of the 2p! characters. Or rather what we did with them. Here's what I mean.
The 2p! characters started off as recolored drawings of the main characters by Himaruya, where he also created gender-bent designs of the main cast, along with alternate coloring. He allegedly joked and said that they looked like they could be part of an evil organization or something.
He also did some possible alternate sketches of some of the other characters but never finalized them. These characters started to be called 2p! characters, as in "second player", like in a video game.
But what's truly insane and all-around amazing is what the fandom did with this information. Because we didn't just sit down, look at the drawings, churn out a few fanarts, and go along our merry way.
Oh goodness no...
We took these sketches by Himaruya and ran with them.
Next thing you know, the fandom began creating their own versions of the 2p! characters, even taking the gender-bent recolors and swapping their genders back to better resemble the main cast, but not exactly. We even created personalities for each and every one of them. While there are common personality traits shared by many of them, they are also incredibly unique with their own personality traits and quirks.
And the personalities we've given to each character were done by the fandom largely agreeing on certain information. Some examples are...
2p!America is a vegan, animal-loving delinquent.
2p!France is a clinically depressed smoker and alcoholic who believes love is fake.
2p!Italy has the persona of a mafia boss and is lowkey a sadist.
2p!England is a happy-go-lucky baker who makes sweets that may or may not contain human remains.
And the list goes on and on. We've made our own designs and personalities that the fandom largely has agreed upon, and these alternate versions of the characters are so dang popular that they might as well have their own fandom. Which, to be honest, they do.
They're so popular that they even have their own fanarts, fanfictions, cosplays, etc.
The Hetalia fandom literally went off and created its own sub-fandom. And this isn't the only sub-fandom that's branched off of the main Hetalia fandom. There's plenty more out there. The reason the 2p! characters are so wild to me is because the fandom really did take a handful of official and unofficial drawings with no canonical ties and went off to the races with them.
I'll probably go over different parts of Hetalia fanon and the sub-fandoms that branched off of Hetalia, but I needed to talk about the 2p!s, because their existence is just wild to me.
And I love them.
