Thank you for giving me the opportunity to address this, because this has been gnawing at me for a while now.
I strongly dislike this comic and the way in which I had portrayed things, and think it is in bad taste. The reason why I haven’t yet deleted it is because it lives on in reblogs and I considered waiting to see if tumblr ever lets us delete those too, so I don’t lose control of the post beforehand.
Why I made it was because in my stupid little mind, I knew what my thoughts were, my intentions, my feelings on all of this, I had all this context to how I interpreted my own work and so believed that I hadn’t done anything wrong. And it doesn’t ultimately matter, because once it’s drawn and out there, all of that is lost: I know Germany is just garbage, but because of how I portrayed things it looks like he’s simply being unfairly mistreated while America is a big meanie. And this is pretty damn shitty of me! I didn’t take anything properly into consideration. I didn’t think about how other people don’t have the perspective on it that I have and even more so, that once it’s reblogged it will be stripped of contexts anyway, even if I had provided any of that on my blog (which I likely didn’t in art form, given that I posted things like this, and I think my followers don’t read my text posts nearly as much). I didn’t think about who would see it and how it would impact people. I really thought that surely everyone already has the exact view on this that I do, feels the way that I do, etc., especially with comics I used to just SKIP???? certain parts of conversation because they weren’t necessary in my eyes like what??? To me this was about the weirdly ambivalent approach America had to Germany at the time, but like this it’s really just about poor Germany being bullied for being a Nazi, which he was and sort of still is here because 1950s Germany was far from “denazified”. I lacked the skill, nuance and insight to approach this subject properly, which I didn’t want to see at the time.
I do like to think that I’ve grown in the time since I’ve made this, but I think this is a very big problem in a lot of my older works, and even with stuff from last year I can see now how I failed to provide adequate context and education in the work itself. Because the work itself needs to reflect intent, it doesn’t really matter what you’ve cooked up in your mind that somehow seemed to justify the existence of a work like this out there. And really, for this subject matter I’ve come to realize that the visual medium is inadequate anyway, at least for someone of my skill level. This also ties in with a general problem I’ve voiced about having with Hetalia’s premise, because it can foster that sympathy towards unfeeling, unreal things such as nations, and then people will often project that sympathy backwards even onto a country’s worst parts of history.
So long story short, I’ve been reflecting a lot on older work of mine, and this comment helped me finally articulate some of that regret and frustration I feel over how I did things. To my followers, be careful about the things you put out there and if you stray into sensitive topics, for God’s sake, show it to someone outside your bubble to check if it really conveys what you’ve got in mind. Or just don’t post it at all if you’re unsure about the impact it’ll have, you don’t HAVE to post things. The damage is done as far as my work goes, I’ve already fed into a harmful narrative even if I do ever get the option to delete bad posts along with reblogs, but you don’t have to make the same bad decisions. I might comment on this again in the future in a separate post to take accountability for the shit I’ve put out there over the years.
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