cannot believe i am writing a page like this in the year of 2024 HAHAHHA. but! hetalia was basically my first media interest (well, besides like my little pony and other shows id have watched as a kid, but first one i fandomized i guess) when i was 9-11. really young i know. as a kid, my special interest was languages, geography & history, so when i found out there was an anime of the countries of the world??? i was SOLD
well after years of avoiding it like the plague, and panicedly explaining to friends "yes i was a hetalia fan but also i was 10", i decided to rewatch it. the year prior i had gotten back into homestuck and eddsworld, two of my other interests from 10-13, and it was like fuck man i need to return to the real OG! these characters influenced my taste forever - most notably iceland & norway set the standard for the type of personalities id like in media Forever. safe to say, i missed my little guys ^_^
rewatching has been really fun - i have a lot of Opinions. firstly, when i was a kid i disliked so many characters for no reason. id get super fixated on a random, usually side, character and sit bored during the rest. this time however i really enjoyed the entire cast - characters i despised the first time like england or china grew on me a lot. secondly, i dont think this show deserves as bad of a reputation as it has. im a pretty critical person now, and ill post my critiques in a later section, but i dont think the source material is as controversial as people act like it is. there are very few offensive elements in the way the characters are characterized, and it never takes itself seriously.
first, ill critique the show itself since its easier. the episodes are so cheap, maybe the cheapest ive ever seen in an anime Ever. the animation is VERY minimal, and lots of shots are cut short by using chibi versions, white bodies, or floating heads to get the point across. theres also so much screen that is just text. this is kinda crazy because the episodes are only five minutes long. they also reuse clips a LOT. its the worst in the first 2 seasons, where some exact clips without any changes are used in 5-6 episodes. sometimes they reuse clips and replay a scenario but if someone said something different, and i find it amusing, but its ultimately just a way to save animation lol. the editing is also very bizarre in some parts. they have a very limited soundtrack selection and reuse songs a lot. the one i noticed the most was EVERYTIME austria was shown playing the piano, he was playing the same! damn! song!
okay now to the content! making entire countries into one character is insensitive at best and straight-up racist at worst. i think hetalia did a good job of it. the characters are built on harmless stereotypes (ie: many characters are associated with a food/animal), facts (ie: if a country has an abnormal trait like slow internet, excess cats in its borders, or something silly like that), and general personality stereotypes (ie: germans are stone cold and serious, while spaniards are laid back). its very inoffensive, it doesnt choose stuff like the chinese eat dogs or africans are stupid or anything like that. nothing is taken too seriously for Any country, its all fair game.
that all sounds pretty alright, so whats the issue? well, i think hetalia is more harmful in what it /doesnt/ show than what it does. the main setting of the show is ww2, yet it takes 41 episodes in to mention the Concept of a nazi (and then, it was a passing line about germany executing jews). in those previous 41 episodes and all the episodes after, you just see germany italy and japan being silly guys getting into shenanigans together. im not saying they had to talk about this stuff every single second, but why even choose ww2 as your setting if you're not going to talk about the bulk of ww2? they sometimes have bits of other historical times, like they could've went in more on those bits.
additionally, some of the roles characters take are definitely pretty apologetic to the wars. like, italy is portrayed as this stupid dude who cant even tie his shoes, which is a pretty common holocaust opinion that excuses their role in the war. italy was not useless during the war, and sent their soldiers to help in the genocide & they attempted to colonize as well. some other characters like france get poked fun at for being bad at war or waving the white flag a lot, but they're not treated as if they're totally harmless and i wish italy was like that too. its also just, kind of annoying, italy is really fucking annoying caus hes a grownass hundreds of year old guy who writes in chicken scrawl.
of course also, theres very little focus on non-european countries. this gets corrected later in the series, but even the asian part of ww2 is totally overlooked. china is seen the least out of the axis & allied powers, so really japan is the only non-european country in the spotlight. who would've guessed lol. i also remember from my fandom days that the creater, hidekaz himaruya, is pretty fucking racist to koreans. rather than this being in the series, korea is just sorta ignored altogether, but still not something you want the author of a history-based series to be thinking! some of the characters of color are whitewashed in parts of the anime. seychelles for example was shown in season 4 with pale white skin - this got corrected in season 5 when she was made darker. however, it was WAY lighter than 99% of seychellians (?) and she still had straight hair, which is crazy for an african nation. the only other african country has actual curly hair, but its clear the creator is not invested in non-white/non-asian countries or their accuracy of portrayal. recently some non-east asian countries like indie, philippines, malaysia & indonesia have been getting the spotlight, but there r no signs of african or latin america anywheereee. seriously not even mexico even tho the US & Canada REFER TO THE COUNTRY MULTIPLE TIMES!!!
i have a LOT of world building questions. First, how human are they...? In the series, sickness seems to be used as a metaphor for issues within the country (ie: England gets sick when his colonies start becoming independent), but the characters still talk about it as if its transmissable. I guess that could be interpreted as "don't ally with England right now, he's not stable and can't have yr back), but then Whyyy do they treat it like physical illness. they give him medicine and food gifts as if that'd do anything if the sickness is deep within his body bc his country is failing? They avoid seeing him in person so they don't get sick too. I don't get it.
Then you get to death in general. No country is ever shown to die on screen in battle, but they are CONSTANTLY saying "Dont die in battle" to each other. NO ONE EVER DIES IN BATTLE!!!!!! Even when they're enemies, no one ever shoots eachother. If they DID shoot eachother, what would even happen.. Like, its clear in the story that these personifications exist because the country does, and the personification doesn't create the country. So if a personification got killed in battle, the country would still exist. Do they revive, does a new person come along? You would also probably get hella assassinations if anyone could kill the country. Additionally, the line between ancient and current nations is so weird. Greece wasn't alive during ancient greece, he had an ancestor, but Japan has just always been Japan. Some countries it makes sense to have an ancestor bc the cultures and ethnic divides have changed a lot, but I feel like Greece has always had a very defined identity as Greece.
NEXT, the way countries relate to eachother can also be confusing with a lot of contradictions. The sibling/family relations are really weird. England just decided to become America's dad, Switzerland did something similar to becoming Lichtenstein's brother. Some countries are descendants of others, like Italy & Romano both descend from the Roman Empire so they're brothers. That makes sense! But then you look at the nordic countries and its like, why in the world are none of them related Except norway and iceland. like out of anywhere that seems like the region that makes the most sense to be related lol.