I feel like this is self explanatory but if you’re gonna use, repost, or take my art for profile pictures or edits please credit me! Or atleast make sure my watermark is visible, that would be really sick.
I’m so greatful people enjoy my art enough that I’ve began seeing it in profile pictures and edits, but just be mindful please!
“The old me is still me, and maybe the real me, and I think she’s pretty”
Sometimes I wish I could go back in time and be the mother little me never had, or the father that was taken from her. She’s the strongest girl I know, and I’m so proud of her. I can only hope she’d be happy with how far i’ve made it.
Being a young dyke surrounded by big musicians is absolutely crazy because while my ex is talking shit about me I’m living the high life emailing a warp tour preformer to ask what movies my dad liked. Nothing anyone says can affect me, the drummer of the used knows me as lesbianjohnlennon
(Preface before I start: I know what I'm talking about. I was in the APH cesspool for three years when I was young and impressionable, and I'm so glad I had someone in my life to set me straight. Also I'm Korean so white people do not speak over me kthxbye ♡)
I genuinely do believe Hetalia/APH is more dangerous and effective in indoctrinating younger children into far-right ideologies than other prominent JP imperialist-romanticizing media like AOT/SNK because consumers are able to fall back onto a cushion of, "It's just satirical humor!"
Himaruya (the APH mangaka) does so much to feed into that defense: harmless stereotypes like "Americans eat burgers and believe in aliens" are displayed right alongside horribly racist statements like "S.Koreans lay unrightful claim onto Japanese territory,"* and "Chinese people have noticeable accents when speaking Japanese,"** among many, many others. These are all supposed to be viewed as equally hilarious and ridiculous.
By making his audience more tolerant and receptive to these subtle slights against the countries Japan has colonized and brutalized, Himaruya makes their minds open to further right views that align with the messages of Hetalia.
Criticizing these "small" offenses are how we nip a new generation of growing right-wingers and imperialist JP sympathizers in the bud. I want to believe pairing this with better historical education will lead to a brighter future where we don't forget and bury the past, but learn and grow from it.
Footnotes from the second paragraph and additional readings are in the cut below. (CW: imperialism, sinophobia, sexual assault, CSA, death)
*APH's portrayal of S.Korea regularly gropes Japan's chest as a running gag, and claims they are his property. In Hetalia, each country's body part corresponds to a real life location, and Japan's "breasts" are implied to be Dokdo (or Takeshima, if you will). Dokdo is a small island in Korean waters that Japan has attempted to claim for only the past 3 or so decades to increase their ocean proximity. The groping itself is an obvious attempt at historical revision of comfort women: during WWII, Japan kidnapped thousands of young women and children as young as 12 from Korea, China, the Philippines, and (primarily) other Asian countries to place them in sex slave camps where soldiers would regularly come in to "release their stress" and "find comfort" by raping these victims. The JP government has yet to apologize for their country's crimes almost 80 years later, and still maintain the stance that the comfort women were "paid prostitutes who had a right to consent." Here's my question to them: can you call it consent when the women feared death if they were to push their rapists away, retaliate, or say anything other than "Yes?"
**Characters of Chinese diaspora in Japanese media having "the Chinese accent" is nothing unique to Hetalia, and many other famous media such as Gintama also have characters known for it (hello, Kagura). But just because it's commonplace doesn't negate that it is still deeply problematic. When you see Japan's history of brutal violence against China (Nanjing Massacre) and compare it to how Japanese pop culture fetishizes and sexualizes traditional Chinese clothing (commonly in the form of qipaos with breast cutouts and impractically high leg slits or a miniskirt cut, or all three at once) while simultaneously portraying the Japanese spoken by Chinese people as unintelligent and mockable, you can clearly see the issue.
These footnotes are here to guide you, but I highly encourage you to research on your own. I'll give you some places to start:
Recently, a Harvard professor came under fire for alleging that Korean sex slaves had chosen to work as prostitutes. (Source: AP) Over many decades, the Japanese government has consistently attempted to minimize and eradicate any mentions of their crimes towards neighboring countries, even to the protest of their own citizens. (Source: BBC article written by a Japanese woman) Most recently, they lay unrightful claim to Dokdo again in nationwide textbook revisions scheduled for 2022. (Source: Korea JoongAng Daily)
If you made it until here, thank you for reading until the end. My final request is that when consulting reports about comfort women, please take care to check that the author clearly condemns the JP war crimes. It is unfortunate, but the JP government pays massive amounts of sponsorship money to major educational institutions and news outlets to speak favorably of them.
Offtopic from my Gorillaz content, but I had a thought that the reason Hetalia got so popular recently was anti-intellectualism, primarily around politics.
Politics have been crazy recently, and it would be stupid of me to just refer to recent events as politics. There have been genocides on mass, attacks on vulnerable populations that leave their land destroyed and irreparably ruined. We elect pedophiles and war mongers into office, just to act surprised when they commit their heinous acts. With this climate, many young teenagers (myself included admittedly) have began looking for sources of escapism, often landing ourselves on apps like TikTok. Here is where I and many others stumbled across Hetalia.
Hetalia, at its most basic, is a short-form skit based anime about the world’s countries turned into moe anime boys (and the occasional girl) who crack gay jokes. If it sounds weird to you, it should. It’s a weird show. The appeal of hetalia is how it takes these “wacky shenanigans” and smushes them down into bite sized social commentaries easy to digest. Plainly speaking, it white washes history, builds propaganda for America and its puppet states (Japan, Germany, and a thousand other countries Asian/northern African the mangaka rarely included due to his racism). It builds an easily digestible, non-controversial view of history where there’s a clear good and bad guy for young “woke” teenagers to basically black-pill them into conservatism, and these teenagers with nowhere else to go, a failing education system, and a need for constant stimulation, fall for it. I can speak from experience as someone who used to be in the fandom, I watched as one of my best friends at the time turned into someone I couldn’t recognize, someone who excused America’s actions in Hawaiʻi because he loved the character the mangaka created so dearly, someone who refused to do his own research because he earnestly believed what the show was promoting so much.
This show breeds republicans, centrists, whatever you’d like to call them. It takes young, scared, unknowing youth and spews out violent, hateful, distrustful puppets for government control. This is in no way the mangaka’s problem, at least not entirely, but it is something deeply upsetting considering the current state of our society. This is really just a shower thought, don’t take this with absolute certainty. I bet there’s more at play, but this is just my observations from my time in and around the fandom