#hetadumb

So, it’s happening again. What’s happening again? The whole attack on the Hetalia fandom. All over places like discord and tumblr, there are people spamming tags, harassing users, and worse for liking Hetalia or posting things about Hetalia because “it’s problematic”. Now, I already made a post discussing the nazi content in Hetalia, to which there barely is any and Himaruya actually goes out of his way to avoid it. But it seems that most of the hate is calming down and there are more posts on combating hate than those causing hate. But I will continue to monitor it in the future. But I’m going to try to go over what’s happening and summarize it the best that I can and address some of the arguments that are coming up. 

So, how did this all start? 

UPDATE: The bottom part only fueled the fire. The real reason why it started is here: https://hetafacts.tumblr.com/post/186974434986/so-whats-going-on-with-the-hetalia-fandom

ALLEGEDLY (not for sure), I heard that all this started when someone found American Civil War fanart involving a slave. And yeah. It was pretty bad. The person who posted this had legitimate concerns as this art is indeed...no. This isn’t okay. Nor is it okay that the person is being harassed for calling out something that was not appropriate. I do think this user is the most civil of the group of haters and actually has some legitimate concerns. If you were one of the people who harassed them, that was incredibly crappy and you owe this person an apology. None of these people should be harassed. That’s just what they want. This fanart is really bad, but after doing some research, I saw that this art was made back in 2010. While yes, this art is very problematic, it is not representative of the current Hetalia fandom. 

See, the Hetalia fandom today is not what it used to be. Back then, it was a totally different beast. It was an AWFUL fandom and I have called it out numerous times and it was a prime example of an awful fandom. People were getting harassed over ships left and right, people were doing Nazi salutes in cosplay, there was this hate campaign on all the female characters, there were really racist and insensitive are and fanfics everywhere–like this one, and the fandom was 10x bigger than it is now. Therefore, it was a crazy dumpsterfire infested with weeaboos. It still is infested with weeaboos, but it’s not the trash hole it was back in the day. 

The series was worse too. shitty animation budgets whitewashed a lot of characters. But the new animation fixes this. The dub had nothing to do with the original and had a lot of iffy jokes, which again, was fixed in World Twinkle. Korea and Poland have been toned down. Korea hardly even shows up anymore. The creator took a step back and thought “damn. I messed up.” I also hear the “It’s called Axis Powers Hetalia so it’s automatically racist” argument too, so I’m going to clarify: That’s the name of the first season (or two seasons if you’re going off the anime) ONLY. It’s because it follows Italy in WWII and Italy was, of course, part of the Axis. The following series are called World Series, The Beautiful World, World Twinkle, and the most recent, World Stars. And before you come at me with that “Hetalia is Nazi propaganda” stuff, I already did a post addressing that. 

Yes, the fandom was awful. HOWEVER, over the years, the Hetalia fandom kind of died, if you haven’t noticed. A bunch of people left the series–which is more often than not, one of their first anime series ever–to go to series like danganronpa, or more commonly Homestuck, hence the Homestuck fandom picking up a lot of weebs from it. After Homestuck ended, it lost fewer people, but since 2015, it has been pretty empty and only recently made a comeback. Currently, the fandom is half young weeaboos and half former fans who came back for nostalgia reasons. With a lot more senpais in the fandom, the fandom is a lot tamer and not nearly as problematic as it was before because there are actually older people to keep the fandom in check. Of course, a few problematic fanworks slip through here and there, but it’s met with reprimand instead of “awww. So kawaii des”. Fanart like this is bad history now and the fandom is much smaller and has fewer garbage people. I’ve been monitoring the fandom for a while now because like many people still in it, I don’t want it to go back to its previous state. 

Yes, we have a lot of weeaboos, but that’s because Hetalia is often a lot of people’s first animes. A lot of the people in the fandom are still young and cringy. At least they will grow up and grow out of it. These people will look back at themselves in 3-4 years and say “Holy shit I was a cringelord”. Unlike the people in the Steven Universe fandom who still think it’s okay to harass people to the point of suicide over fanart. They will most likely remain assholes for a while since they are grown adults in their 20s-30s who seem to have no remorse for their actions. If we are judging all series to condemnation by their fandoms, we would need to boycott Steven Universe and Undertale too. You can’t pick on a fandom like Hetalia and ignore the fandoms you happen to be in just because you like the series. 

Call me a racist or whatever all you want, but at least I’m being civil. You don’t have to like the series. You can still believe it’s a racist piece of garbage show for all I care. All I want is for people to stop spamming the tags, stop the harassment, and just put an end to this crusade. I am more than happy to have a civil discussion with you about it if you still have more concerns.