Do you have any HC for them when they were children?
TBH I don’t. But lately I got more interested in Gil’s younger years as the Teutonic Order.Gilbert was born around year 1182 in Acre and I always imagined that he was a small child then, where they found him, and one of the first things he got to see was the bloodshed of the crusades. I think all that blood left a mark on him, it left a mark on his eyes, when he looked at it for the first time as a toddler. And today, whenever he’s bloodthirsty or fanatical, you can still see the red overshadowing the blue. That’s how you can recognize he is really dangerous and also how I try to insert the red-eyes-canon into my blue-eyes-headcanon.
Besides that I HC him as very ambitious - as he really badly wanted to have his own land and that was the main motor of his actions and a thing that made his personality crystallize in what it is today. I just published a HC about that so feel free to have a look :D But now I’ll write that he was incredibly self-absorbed back then (even more than later, you know, teens…) and burned a lot of bridges in his fanatical crusade to Get My Own Land. I remember that Hima called it ‘going on rampages’.
Bc he was born without something most representations had he was so fixated on it and he pretty much got it by walking all over corpses - this molded his personality later to be ruthless, believing that often ends justify the means and also that working hard for things you want is more important than being ‘talented’ and that we get to shape our own destiny and need to be very proactive (which means disciplin is so important, bc that’s something you decide for yourself).But a toddler or a 10 years old boy going on bloody rampages just does not sit well with me and seems not realistic enough. That’s why I have a generally weird relationship with them as children in that whenever I imagine them during their young years (from XIII century onward), I don’t really think of them as small children, more like young teenagers (15 years old, something like that), so not like in the canon.
With Russia, I have almost nada.What I do have: I always imagined he was born around year 862 in Novogrod Land as I read this is the oldest known east slavic ‘state’ and the cradle of Kievan Russ. Which would mean he was the Kievan Russ’, tho I also saw very cool HC’s about how it was in fact a different, ancient representation and Ivan is a lot younger and a child of this representation. Interesting, but I did not give it much thought.
I like the idea of Ivan being very ancient and having this vast land and control from early on. I kinda love the foil him and Prussia are to each other - that Ivan was born with this enormous land, kinda like a very privileged kid in a way, while Gilbert was born with no land at all, which is being super underprivileged in the world of representations, and had to fight for all of it.But yeah, I don’t have much to offer here, I’ve looked into Teutonic order a bit but not Ivan’s past and childhood. But tbh I don’t think it was as brutal and awful ad Hetalia shows it - Mongolia invaded around 1300 so that was long after Ivan’s birth, so he wasn’t so small and helpless. It was still awful and deeply traumatic tho.
All those HC pretty much show them as teens, except the eyes thing and them being born. I just.. never thought much about them as small kids tbh, it never seemed that interesting to me. That’s probably why I just jumped straight to their teens :D Maybe their literal ‘small kid’ years were very short, shorter even than humans, as they had to grow up fast to be adequate representations or smth? (bolded bc that’s actually the answer to your question, the other stuff is just me rambling xD)
