Slowly getting back into using social media again. Last year was...awful. If you're here for Star Wars things, I am so sorry I poofed. Hoping to get back into zines to at least boost them on the zine account.
If you're here for Hetalia- hi, I'm new-ish. To publicly posting it anyway, not the fandom itself.
I've got about 500+ drafts saved from the time I just did not have the energy to tag or note anything. I'm gonna be posting those at some point. So sorry in advance to anyone I'm mass reblogging from.
User used to be suits and tooka. This is a temp pinned post. Will be updated again...maybe...idk. Being social is tiring.
Europen nations arriving to their base camps in the US: Alfred, please. Its so hot...the humidity.... we don’t care that you don't care about the World Cup. Answer your phone and bring us water!
Alfred, in New York painted head to toe in orange and blue wearing all the Kicks gear he owns climbing up a post: The what cup?
I passed a flower shop next to a tattoo shop and at first I laughed because I thought it was ironic and then i freaked because IMAGINE YOUR OTP IN A FLORIST/TATTOO ARTIST AU
I cannot BELIEVE a post I made when I was 13 is circulating! And also apparently started this trope? I thought somebody had the idea separately and it blew up that way😭
like the betrayal’s always going to be worse if they cared about you and it didn’t matter. someone discards you because they didn’t give a shit, then you can be angry about that, you can feel vindicated in that, you can get over it. but if they can look you in the eyes and say “I love you. I would make the same choice again.” You will never sleep peacefully again, is all.
“I thought they cared about me, but they were lying this whole time.” <- tired. boring. removes all the nuance of this relationship to make it easier to move on from.
“I thought they cared about me, and I was right, and every minute they were there for me, every time they said they were proud, every laugh we shared leaning against each other bruised and breathless, all of it was real. and they still left me behind. They could put their love aside. I couldn’t.” <- insane. will never leave you alone. reminds you that even the worst people are still people and can still care about even the ones they hurt the most and that undoes neither the harm nor the love.
Something I find interesting when I see fans in this community theorize the personifications' relationship with their bosses is being weirdly insistent on assigning relations based off some kind of surface-level, vibes-based assumption of the nation rather than off of any actual historically-based consensus. Like, idk man, I think the decentralized, small-r republican nation with an infamous tendency towards low state capacity is probably going have a loose-to-non-existent leash compared the highly centralized, autocratic state with a centuries-old surveillance state apparatus.
baddies tell me what you’re getting on your tray at cookout bc I’m getting the chicken quesadilla with hush puppies and onion rings and jury is really out on the shake but by god if orange pushpop ain’t one of the greats. But you kinda gotta get something different every time till you’ve had them all.
Everytime someone mentions it and then reminds him that he's not in it, he's like ohh ok so you hate me and don't want to see me succeeding, I get it now.
“You don’t want to see me succeeding” is so crazy coming from him oh my god 😭
[looking at people younger than me] you have your whole life ahead of you [looking at people older than me] you have your whole life ahead of you [looking at myself] its over
Do you design a lot of characters living in not-modern eras and you’re tired of combing through google for the perfect outfit references? Well I got good news for you kiddo, this website has you covered! Originally @modmad made a post about it, but her link stopped working and I managed to fix it, so here’s a new post. Basically, this is a costume rental website for plays and stage shows and what not, they have outfits for several different decades from medieval to the 1980s. LOOK AT THIS SELECTION:
OPEN ANY CATEGORY AND OH LORDY–
There’s a lot of really specific stuff in here, I design a lot of 1930s characters for my ask blog and with more chapters on the way for the game it belongs to I’m gonna be designing more, and this website is going to be an invaluable reference. I hope this can be useful to my other fellow artists as well! :)
Did you find this helpful? If you’re able, maybe buy me a coffee please? :D
I feel like I'm constantly shilling for them but BehindTheName.com, the only baby name site that doesn't feel like it's run by mommy bloggers, includes census-based graphs for dozens of countries/regions (though not all of them go back very far yet)
And you can expand them to see rank, number of babies, and percentage of babies and add a second name to compare. (in 1973 four percent of babies were named Jennifer! 1 in 25!!!)
Those are the graphs for Samuel. They only have 1 year's data for Moldova right now, so that's why it's a straight line. Similarly, they only have 2 years for Mexico right now. The US goes back to 1880. I'm not sure how much of that is publicly available/translated records and how much of it is that it's like 1 or 2 guys maintaining a website of 27000 names and a finite amount of time to format and upload.
Here's the list of all of the countries/regions they have popularity statistics for if you want to nerd out on it!
You can't advertise BehindTheName for writers without mentioning the advanced search! You can search names based on cultural origin and usage, gender (including unisex), meaning, and even things like meter and number of syllables, or famous namesakes (you can also see a list of famous namesakes on every name's page, along with meaning, history, related names, alternate spellings in different languages, the above popularity graphs, and more).
I wouldn't even call BehindTheName a baby name site. They have a surname sister site and a random name generator with tons of variables to set that is very clearly intended to be used for fictional characters (iirc it can even generate a cause of death? I haven't looked at it in many years so it might have changed but these things predate generative AI so unless it's been forcefully enshittified it shouldn't be slop). Like, you can use it for baby names, but the website isn't explicitly intended for that purpose. This website caters to us.
ok theres been enough of a split opinion on this since i posted about it this morning that i need solid answers. if you reblog put in the tags your answer and where you lived
Okay, so this isn't really an unpopular opinion about Alfred so much as it is me trying to explain my perspective on the personifications and the kay fabe of hetalia in general. This is a very long post, so I'm putting most of it under the cut 😭
The thing about hetalia to me, is that it's being used to explain post-facto how certain historical developments worked, even though any premise that really wants to engage with the idea of the national-embodiment "should" probably contain a lot more deviations from our history than is evident, because fundamentally, how could you not change your course of action if you had a direct through-line to the LITERAL vox populi? At its most base level, as a premise taken seriously, historical hetalia imo requires a lot of agency be stripped from the personification, regardless of their morality or personal opinion, or even in the strictest literalist "they are the country" sense as individuals embodying a larger construct.
For our world to exist in its present form in a universe with personifications, they must never have placed their finger on the scale in a meaningful way. Even by accident! You can get away with a certain amount of "but this was just the will of the people at the time"/"but the personification was on board with this decision from the king" but…it really doesn't work in many cases in my opinion, just because a lot of historical evidence regarding the popular opinion indicates that it was really a decision made by a small group of people that the majority were either ambivalent or mildly unhappy about. (To be fair, please remember I'm working at this from a medieval European perspective rather than thinking about the 19th-21st centuries, and the emergent nationalism/nation-state as political philosophy hadn't come into play yet. That very much changed a lot of things, and is one of the reasons hetalia...kind of breaks when you try and apply it too far back. I have thoughts on this but they're not entirely relevant.)
Anyway, I find it very difficult to, for example, imagine that personifications were not meaningfully aware of the potential for widespread revolts and rebellions in ways that would have either allowed for the rebellions to be quashed more easily, or even intensified the rebellion after a failed attempt to quash it. In the Middle Ages, communications took such a long time, and you're telling me that somehow everything played out exactly the same when a king could have at his right hand a literal barometer for the overall health and integrity of his holdings? That being able to know almost immediately when your lands were under attack would not have shifted history in major ways?
So for history to play out exactly as it has in the real world, I think it requires an implicit amount of neglect and passivity of the government/ruling bodies when it comes to their personifications. And thus I, at least, will always have more to write about when considering how history affected them, not the other way around. (Though I think taking this idea seriously and exploring the alternate timelines that it would open up is a very cool idea!) Again, as I've said in the past, hetalia is an inherently teleological enterprise. It's concerned with creating justifications that fit historical fact into a mold where personifications exist, rather than exploring the reality where the very mold has been altered by the inclusion of personifications.
So in the face of that passivity and neglect, I find myself being less interested in the 100% representation alignment of personification and country.
Instead I'm very much interested in the understanding of how Hetalia creates witnesses - how the ultimate burden of the personification is to watch, to understand, and to carry with them the weight of their country. To me, the point of the personification, as they can't really affect how history plays out, is more about a metaphysical connection between the social construct and reality. That's what's interesting about them - the line between what it means to be a discrete, singular individual and being tied to a greater collective whole. Do Nations understand themselves like ants, like bees? The tool of the greater hive? Can an individual ant love another ant? Even from another anthill? They have a single body, a single set of experiences and memories that go along with that body - that would inherently create a sense of "self" (I think) - but there's more experiences and something "more" out there that has a direct impact on that discrete individual. That's interesting! I want to explore that!
A human being is shaped by their experiences, and that the singularity of the human body constrains the variety and types of experiences that can be had, and that shapes the self. How do you even begin to reconcile that with the multitude of persons in a nation, or the intangible expanse of a nation's identity? Is a nation made up of individuals, or is it all that ephemeral idea defined by the perception of the aggregate? Does that aggregate include the people of other countries?
How much "persona" is allowed in a personification?
Now, for the Alfred part of this whole ask - I think this plays out very specifically for Alfred, in part because of how vital individualism is to the American psyche. One of the things I find most fascinating about America in the 18th century is how cohesive and well-oiled the process of creating a national identity becomes. When you look at the sources (whether it be early legal material, pro-independence propaganda, etc) and how those sources continue to be reinterpreted and meshed back into American society (everything from Hamilton to National Treasure!) the load bearing individualism cannot be meaningfully removed.
Which is to say that I think "Alfred" has a uniquely…fraught relationship with "America" than is usual for a personification. My interpretation of him and his relationship with the Constitution at least skew away from originalism and towards judicial pragmatism/living instrument for sure, which I think contributes to my perception of him - he feels that he is designed for change.
To me, Alfred deliberately constructs the America that most aligns with him as an individual and tries to live in that space, despite the fact that he is still the personification of all of America. He can't help but value his personal experiences the most, because frankly, that's one of the core tenants of his people.
and to the children in the notes saying we need this fucking baby talk to get around censorship online; there's been no credible evidence that any site other that YouTube (which will only demonetize your video, ftr) will actually censor or hide content that include words like rape, pedophile, gun, terrorist, etc. etc. and even if we take as a given they were (which, again, they are not), do not fucking comply in advance, you absolute fucking coward. and ESPECIALLY do not comply by altering your real life fucking vocabulary. don't let the technocrats dictate what words you say holy fucking shit dude!!!!!!!!!!!!
