Here is the post in which I finally get all critical and philosophical about Hetalia.
This week's APH episode really made me want to write Russia/China. But it'll never happen, because I don't think I'm capable of writing that pairing. I feel very comfortable writing some characters; I feel like I really easily grasped England and Romano, and that after I wrote them for a little while I got pretty good with America and Spain as well as maybe Japan and Germany and a couple others. I feel like I could get to know countries like Italy and Sweden and Finland if I wrote them a little more. But China I find difficult and don't really know where to begin, and Russia I just don't think I'll ever write.
I think the problem with Russia is that he's, well... insane. He's dark in a not-dark way, and I don't know how to write that in a romantic context. I think the not-dark is critical; I think that the entire reason Hetalia works hinges on it
not being dark. It's taken me a while to really figure out
why Hetalia is okay. Because I take history seriously; I've realized recently just how
cynical history has made me. So I couldn't figure out why I like Hetalia. It wasn't that I was trying to rationalize it - I didn't have to. Hetalia doesn't give me bad vibes; it doesn't feel like a guilty pleasure. I just didn't know why it didn't, because how it could not? History is full of ugly things, and the reason history is full of ugly things is because people are awful to one another.
The thing is, I knew this about the characters: they are
all fundamentally sympathetic, and they are not
bad. That's where I think Hetalia's reality and my cynical view of the world differ - I
don't see people as fundamentally good. In Hetalia, I don't think any of the nations really hold any ill intent. I don't think any of them, at any point, are evil.
I think they're self-absorbed, and I don't mean that as a negative. I think they're self-absorbed as in even when they get involved in the bigger picture, because of course they have to do as their bosses say, they're not
really involved in the bigger picture. I don't think they quite understand their own histories; I don't think they really
see the bad things that are going on around them. I think they primarily interact with each other, and sometimes they do as they're told but they rarely ever understand
why they're doing what they're told. Look at America going to Japan and making friends with a whale. And it's not because America's a little thick even for a nation - look at Germany trying to find Italy in WWI, not even knowing why they're meant to be fighting. Germany's got his comedic foibles, but stupidity isn't one of them. And look at the very rare instances when Hetalia even
mentions a historical atrocity - when Japan attacks China, it is
massively out of character to the point of being shocking, and Japan comes across as almost
possessed.
But Hetalia very rarely deals with the really dark side of history. Even when the nations don't get along, the rivalries aren't exactly horrid, bloody affairs, and they'll either put up with each other or patch things up later. Even when they're afraid of each other, it's in a slapstick sort of way. And of course things like war crimes - things like the Holocaust - aren't mentioned. Let's run with that for a second. Germany's part in WWII seems to involve a lot of sitting at desks doing paperwork and wrangling international relations -
directly with other nations - at the behest of his boss. Even his relationship with an occupied nation like France doesn't particularly seem like one of occupier so much as general antagonist, and not even an enthusiastic or driven antagonist, much less a cruel one - he's just a methodical one. Germany's part in the war all involves the other nations, not humans. Does Germany even
know what's going on within the Third Reich? Is he aware of the human tragedy unfolding in Europe because of his boss? It seems unlikely. From what we see, the war to him is just another war. It's his job, even if it's a job he finds frustrating. I think it's unfair to consider Germany a Nazi any more than we consider Italy a fascist; if one is, the other one should be, but in Italy's case this is obviously not so. I don't think this is because Italy is too dumb to understand anything; based on the behavior of all the nations as a whole, I think this is because that's just not the way the nations function. The closest thing we see to this is reference to communism, but it's totally unclear whether the nations are even very aware of the intricacies of that sort of thing. That they are seems rather unlikely.
And another important thing to note is that
none of the other nations seem to notice human tragedy either, even in instances where they're
at war and presumably they'd call each other out on it if they firstly knew about it and secondly held each other to be responsible. Obviously these criteria are not met. All of them are, on many levels, completely oblivious.
On the one hand, obviously the nations function in the human world. They interact with humans in various little ways; they get orders from them, they work alongside them, they walk down the street and converse with them. But they don't really
live with them. I don't think they
understand them; to a large extent, they only really live with and understand each other. There's the human world and there's the nation world, and the two apparently exist alongside one another but
are not the same thing. The nations apparently once in a while fritter away their time working in restaurants or something silly like that, but Italy is also capable of running across all of Switzerland like the entire country is merely the nation's front lawn. This is not considered unusual; it's their modus operandi. I don't think they realize it's unusual at all; I think they don't see the way the "real world" works in the same way that they don't see the things that humans are doing around them.
I find it very telling that though they are all in the military, none of them holds a significant amount of rank, and they're treated almost as respected bystanders, receiving updates but not concerning themselves with actual military function - at least not on an operational, much less tactical, level. This ties into the particular nature of the nations as
people. If the nations were really purely anthropomorphized versions of countries, responsible for the actions of the countries they represent (actions which are, in reality, the responsibility of
governments and
militaries), they would have no real consistent character. Germany would go from a sadistic power-hungry
lunatic in the 30s and 40s to a slightly uptight pacifist now. In 2008, America would've gone from a self-centered, belligerent, and intellectually stunted asshole to a considerate and widely-respected advocate of reasoned diplomacy - the kind that receives the Nobel Peace Prize. They would not be people at all, but the nations in Hetalia
are very much their own people. Their personal interactions oftentimes coincide with historical events and diplomacy, but equally as often they do not. France asked England to marry him because of outside events. Germany asked Italy to marry him because he
wanted to, and well after the time when the German-Italian alliance was having its heyday. Spain and Romano have carried on as each other's closest companions well after their real world ties have cooled.
And I think that there's an important distinction to be made here: the key to Hetalia is the difference between the nations and their governments and militaries, and the strange relationship between them. The nations are largely unchanging, except in very broad ways. England settles down as he grows older, but he's still the same England. Russia has a mental breakdown from extreme stress, one that has not yet healed and that maybe never will. But all in all, the nations do not change; it's their
governments that change, and they do so with frequency. And the nations have very little in common with their governments at any given time; what the nations' personalities are based off of is their
people. And think about the place of the
people in a country's history, and the difference between what the
people do and what the
government does.
Even then, the nations are
not their people. Any one nation's people are so very diverse that it would be impossible to bundle them all up into one neat little anthropomorphization. And tragedies perpetrated by the people are no more demonstrated to be of concern to the nations than tragedies perpetrated by the government. The nations really are their own particular sort of entity governed by their own particular set of rules and inhabiting their own particular little half-detached world. The purpose of this half-detached world isn't to say something profound, or to excuse everyone from every horrible thing that ever happened in history (because seriously, if Hetalia is some kind of apologia, it's an apologia for everything bad every country did ever, since all of the nations are pretty much portrayed as equally good... except maybe for Russia, but that's only because he's been driven crazy, and even
then he's innocent in his own strange way). The reason the reality of Hetalia is the way it is is because Hetalis is supposed to be funny, and if it were any other way it would lose all ability to be funny, and moreover the characters would lose all ability to be likeable. Pretty much rendering Hetalia totally useless to everyone involved.
That, I think, is a big part of the reason I like Hetalia so much. For what it's worth, I love the history. Even if the history the countries experience is superficial and incomplete, it's okay. I like historical humor no matter what. And moreover, I love the world created in which the various nations get along on this sort of frivolous, innocent level that people and governments never do. It gives me warm fuzzy feelings. It's totally unrealistic, and it makes me ridiculously happy. Because I spend all day every day buried in history, and real history almost
never makes me happy.
Aaaand that's why I can't write an in-depth Russia fic. I don't know how to write his crazy and keep it as
his crazy. A lot of people like to write dark Hetalia fic about the ugly side of history, but I can't read it and I just can't see it working because I just
don't see it making sense with what we see in canon of how the nations are and how they function. It just doesn't feel right.
And really, that's all I have to say about that. *shrug*
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nym_aulth is the most fantastic France in the world. We met her at the con and made her take photos with us, and holy shit they're ten times better with her in them. Love it. <3
