I am once again thinking about my weird Frankenstein sort of au where nations have to physically reattach fingers or arms or whatever and if they cannot find the original they have to find a replacement through other means (gravedigging) and their bodies won’t accept the new part unless it came from a person from their nation. And they’re sorta undead in a way where losing an arm wouldn’t kill them. Ok anyway lore established
I am now thinking about the possibility of lost body parts being treated almost as holy relics (I suppose nations must be public in this situation) so imagine you lose your fingers in a sword fight and goddamnit can’t find my fingers gotta go get some new fingers off some poor sod I hope they match well. And then 500 years later you see a buzzfeed article TOP TEN NATION RELICS YOU MUST SEE and there your fingers are at a cathedral in a glass box that people pay £5 to see
poc here tips my hat, since i was like 13 i had the idea of "black america" being a separate entity from Alfred F. Jones, simply as like, a consequence of the segregation that happened up until pretty recently (the 60's!) and since then ive been thinking about it and properly developing this oc. Ive decided that she is a girl! Ive decided that she has the most love/hate relationship with alfred ever! she has a lot of the same character flaws he does except she doesnt really have a history of those flaws being as rewarded/tolerated. Ive decided that shes technically a sibling but Alfred feels weird about claiming her as that because he sees her as a fractured part of himself. Bonus! I made it so instead of the confederacy splitting off during the civil war, this girlie was born/got a growth spurt/something along those lines. Im using this as an opportunity to genuinely do a deep study of black history and its been fun. angering sometimes, but fun! it gives alfred the opportunity to have an even more complicated and strained familial relationship than the ones he already has!
WAAAIAIIIITTTT THIS IS SO COOL YOU ARE SOOOOOO COOL I LOVE THAT. i wonder if you decide that she was born during the war, if it would be related to emancipation? or you could very well have her be born before that point as a result maybe of the first generations of enslaved people being born on the continent and creating their own merged culture, and the growth spurt as you said later on. both are interesting you could go either way!! i love and agree with everything you said here and honestly? it is much more interesting to have the someone like your oc be born of the war rather than some evil version of alfred to put all the blame on so that he can seem cleaner. those stories can be interesting to me but theyre almost a little reductive at times. idk idk maybe im crazy. let alfred be problematic sometimes people. so i really like your idea as an alternative to that sort of narrative that explores the very complicated relationship between america and the "freed" black population after the war. as we all know it wasn't immediately sunshine and rainbows for them after that and there are still struggles to this day but thats not something americans often learn about? at least as a white person in the school system after emancipation we go straight to the civil rights movement concerning the history of african americans. we all know thats not true and the american school system fails us, blah blah blah, so its been really cool to grow up and research these things on my own especially as someone who lives in an area sometimes considered to be the deep south. UGH I LOVE THIS IDEA. kissing you. hope i didn't say anything weird because that is never my intention.
idk its close to my heart. ive never seen this idea before its so fresh and interesting. please come back any time to tell us more :)
I hope you don't mind my unsolicited thoughts on foods Alfred should feed Medieval Arthur, but I treated myself to a scroll through tumblr after the devastating Habs loss tonight and couldn't help it. So here are a few thoughts about it for your inbox (highly compressed and tldr-ed, but I'm happy to dig up my sources if anyone is interested in further reading) 🤲🎁
So grains in medieval Europe were highly associated with class and thus wealth - serfs and peasants wound up eating coarser heartier things like oats, barley, etc, to hit their nutritional needs, while the creme de la creme (royalty) ate primarily wheat in the form of flour/white bread. If I remember correctly, it's something about the whiteness->purity, and you should seek out good pure foods to put into your body. The labor requirement for wheat and thus white bread also was much higher and thus again, natural restriction to the upper classes.
Further, while medieval Europe definitely had sweet things, there was no sugar. The closest you could get was honey (and they did a lot of beekeeping! there's lots of very sweet illuminations of bees and beehives in various manuscripts and/or books of hours!) Which means while they probably had syrups and similar from concentrations of fruit, there was no jellies or jams as we understand them today.
Your comment about Alfred giving Arthur a pb&j was perhaps one of the best ways to absolutely rock his world. It's the ideal food to introduce to a child version of Arthur Kirkland.
OMG HELLO FRIEND i am so tickled to see you here in my askbox and this was so great not only because of how silly it is to consider but also because you know your stuff OBVIOUSLY and its so interesting to learn about how people ate back then because eating is such a cultural unifying human thing. and i think alfred would try to consider that maybe taking him to taco bell would be a really bad idea for 6 different reasons but alfred's idea of Old Food is still 100s of years later than little medieval arthur. but he would try ok. he would make a pb&j and share it with The Boy and arthur is like--why is this bread stark white and sweet. *googles something* what is a peanut and how is it butter. what the devil did you do to this grape. this isn't a grape. HE PROBABLY DOESN'T EVEN RECOGNIZE THE JELLY AS BEING GRAPE ADJACENT. aaaand like you said the sugar content of jelly--probably smuckers in this situation--is through the roof.
anyway thank you for humoring this situation. i tell my non-hetalia friends all about how cool it is that so many of my mutuals are so knowledgeable about different parts of history. my medieval england mutual and my cold war mutual and my latin american mutuals and so on. lets be so real here im the 1800s america mutual aren't i. ill carry the torch i know no one else will. who wants to talk more about 1812 *everyone groans*
Hello, remember me? I’m the anon who asked about medieval england meeting modern day America
Arthur has to be really confused, plus the fact that pretty much everyone he knew is either dead, or way older than him now but hey at least he’ll be experiencing fast food for the first time, or eating since i doubt he was getting proper nutrition due to the famines at the time, and hey Alfred gets to understand Arthur better, so it’s not all bad
omg yes of course i remember and yes on fast food but also yes on alfred just making the kid a pb&j and it rocks arthurs world. like we must remember arthur doesn't know what a tomato is so he's got a lot of learning to do. theyre going to a grocery store produce section like a beast. arthur do you want a kiwi? you're getting a kiwi.
oooooooooo. states au person come chime in this is interesting. west va splits off and makes a new version of al basically and its amelia...... take me home country roads amelia.....
if NP's come out of the ground, are they technically plant people? do you think they do photosynthesis the first few years of existence? their little ahoge/curl is the plant stem...
Ok yes let’s do more plant people body horror THEY HAVE STEMS. THEY PHOTOSYNTHESIZE. I think of the part of A Human Invention all the time how Alfred spends his whole life “I’m not dirt I’m not dirt” and then he goes to space and the distance from earth makes him literally turn to dirt. I love shit like that. Give me Nations with weird biology that need to be in the sun. Give me nations othered by humanity because they are not human. I love that stuff.
Can’t stop thinking about an angsty historical hetalia AU based on my Headcanon that colonies only become personified when they have the potential to become their own nation- but will eventually “die” if they fail to do so, by just fading as if they were a country which no longer existed, like Ancient Rome for example.
So. Since I’m a sadistic person and a masochist at the same time, I’ve been thinking about an au in which America never won the revolutionary war and therefore never became it’s own country- I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.
Arthur inadvertently killing his son by winning the war? Being so obsessed with winning back his “colony” that he doesn’t even consider the possibility that since America had declared independence it had inadvertently made Alfred a nation. And by winning the war he had “conquered” the US, thereby destroying said nation and in turn its personification- aka his own son?
Sorry if this got a bit confusing but holy shit just- the angst potential is astounding. I just wanted to see what you thought about it, honestly, considering you’re the queen of hetalia angst.
thank you for the message <3 my thoughts on it under the cut because Holy Shit
First of all you are evil secondly YES. I love alternate history America loses the revolution. A few people have tackled it before and I always eat it right up. I’ve never seen an interpretation before where Alfred fades though so that is very interesting!!! It would make sense ESPECIALLY because America was recognized by France and Spain and (struggling to remember if Russia did but I don’t think so bc they were “Neutral” but they did support the cause privately) being recognized is a big deal for nations. So not only did Alfred declare himself independent but the other big powers in North America (not France anymore by this point but he’s an honorable mention) basically said Yes I See You and that would make America’s defeat even worse.
Arthur thinks he’s saving Alfred from himself by squashing the rebellion not realizing he’s signing the death warrant. I imagine the Brits would execute most (if not all) the main revolutionaries and that would make things even worse because they’re systematically killing the leaders that Alfred aligned himself with. I feel like Arthur would be in denial about this big time. Like no nothings wrong Alfred’s fine he’s British again and he’s gonna spring back up once we get the colony in order.
(Side note: this just gave me the random idea—alternate history where Canada has the big revolution instead of America, upset at being stolen from France, and British America ends up being a commonwealth country instead. Interesting…)
Something I think about a lot is the idea of Arthur being like “if I can’t have Alfred, no one can. If I can’t have Alfred, Alfred shouldn’t exist”. In Matt’s Lions Den interlude he has that thought, like, would Father really rather have a dead child than one who ran from him? So this really feeds into that. I feel like Arthur would realize (taking entirely too long to do so) that no, he would not rather have a dead child. Alfred is in mortal danger and the only thing that would fix it would be America becoming free. Maybe (big maybe here) he would start advocating for freedoms for America to try and save his son, but I’m not sure it would be possible. England just fought a costly war to keep this colony, they’re not going to give that all up to save the life of one boy. One boy who so desperately supported the American cause, no less. He’s a traitor too.
So yeah. Alfred would fucking die LMAO and he’d probably die hating his father for doing it to him LMAO
Yknow how HRE dissolved and people headcanon that he became Germany? I wonder if America did become a commonwealth country like Canada did, a century later, if Alfred would reform without those memories of before, or maybe even vague ones. And GOD Arthur would have to deal with that. He’s got his child back but it’s not Really him. He’s everything that made up Alfred before, but he’s Not the same person as he had been. Maybe he would think they were the same while Alfred 2 was a baby (because he def would be calling him Alfred again) but as he gets older Arthur realizes no, he’s different. Hes grown up differently, and that has caused him to be a different person. That is not Alfred 1.
And I feel like that would crush him. He’d gotten his hopes up that after a century of advocating for more freedoms for British America, he’d brought his firstborn son back from the dead. But he didn’t. And then Alfred 2 has got to grow up realizing that he’s never going to measure up to a long dead version of himself (long dead elder brother, more like) who wasn’t even as good as him. Alfred 2 is so good. The Commonwealth of British America is so good. He listens to his father, does everything asked of him by the Crown. He loves being a part of the United Kingdom. He loves so deeply and openly. So how come he’s not as good as those rotten long dead United States?
well thanks for bringing this matter to my attention!!!!!!!!! I’m gonna be thinking about it for the rest of the day. Someone write a oneshot about the commonwealth of British America. Someone do SOMETHING. This is so YUMMY
Nation Clause (Formerly Santa Clause) anon is back, with proper ideas. I think blonde France was the Old France, and brown haired France is the new one. Blonde France had been the NP from like the late earlyish 1790's to.. okay why do I kind of want him to die on the Titanic? Something something metaphor for the death of the old ways. Brunette France has been in the game since 1912ish and is the oldest, he was probably born in the late Victorian era. I think "old England died due to complications relating to the shit that happened to him in WWI" is a fair thing to say here. Maybe the old England was Oliver and he had the job since like the 1600s. I think Matthew might have had the most peaceful transfer, girl before him was Madeline (is that how you spell it?) and transferred the power down to him simply because she thought she had lived long enough and just kind of wanted to retire. No unfortunate circumstances here she just wanted an heir and also a break
Anyway, lastly, Allen. I agree that the guy Alfred accidentally ran over should be 2p America. I also think it would just kind of be funny if Allen had been in the game since the 70s and, objectively, no one expected him to be replaced so damn soon.
LMAOOOO allen was here for a good time not a long time which is what led him to be the deer in the headlights that night. all the other nations having such a lackluster reaction to it because they didn't know him that well, poor guy. i love all your ideas here and i also like that all the last generation of nps were a bit older, so its kinda like everyone rn is young and dont know what theyre doing. and something about titanic france is so good and yummy to me. poor guy. also love the detail of him first showing up in 1790s so presumably following the previous france being beheaded. poor guy.
