#probs gonna lose followers and maybe get some hate mail but straight up idc at this point!!!

[hws-denmark]

Very off-brand but literally just venting and vitriol under the cut about recent-ish hetalia discourse, if you don't wanna see it then don't read it! Cheers.

Alright idk what the fuck happened to fandom spaces over the past 5 years but this shit is super toxic now. It's like the internet has over-corrected from "it's the wild west baybeeeee, ship wars and death threats and downright awful behavior galore" to "have you consumed anything problematic or made a mistake anytime in the past 30 years??? Literally go fucking die you deserve to kys!!". Both are shit. But in my experience, one is a fuckton easier to avoid. Hetalia is a problematic show. This is a fact. There's an anti-semetic joke in the dub. There's whitewashing in the earlier anime seasons. Hima's characterisation of South Korea is horrific. France's earliest characterisations are done real dirty with the amount of sexual assault present. You could write essays about this shit, but honestly it's all been said in better ways before so I don't particularly care to. But quite frankly the amount of harassment from sad trolls and bullies online is nuts over this shit. Five fucking months and it's unavoidable- "Your a nazi! Facist, japanese imperialist anti-semite!!" NEWS FLASH- YOUR KEYBOARD WARRIOR CRAP ISN'T DOING JACK SHIT! YOU AREN'T PREVENTING A-NY-THING, YOU AREN'T HELPING A-NY-ONE! GET OFF YOUR ASS AND CALL OUT THE HATE I GUARANTEE WILL BE HAPPENING IN REAL DANG LIFE IN YOUR LOCAL COMMUNITY IF YOU ACTUALLY WANNA EDUCATE AND MAKE A POSITIVE CHANGE. There's a world of difference between calling out shitty fandom behavior and whatever the fuck this is. It's madness that I have to point out how saying that people talking about cartoon characters from a five minute OVA even holds a single CANDLE to the worldwide rise in nationalist sentiment and anti-semetic conspiracy theory, bourne from a mass refusal to acknowledge history, is so severely minimising. I take it that's okay though because you can wank yourself off on your nice little high horse without actually doing anything to combat hate or improve the world in any way though? The show has so many faults and for multitudes of good reasons you might never want to see it ever again. So block it. Don't interact with it. Blacklist the tag. But it is downright RUDE to be coming INTO the tag and talking shit. That doesn't tell me you're earnestly trying to avoid the series- it tells me you're really really trying to start fights. Bc I have been using the block button pretty liberally recently, and for every normal user venting I see, there's always an equal amount of people who, ironically, seem to dedicate their blog to bigotry against others and cyber-harassment. I've seen anti-hetalia blogs that have been sexist, racist, panphobic and, maybe most hypocritically, one that was bizarrely insensitive to the connotations of a past political regime. And yet minors look to these same people and parrot what they say for clout. In my experience, in a whole lot of anti-hetalia circles, there's a severe case of "mocking because I think it's cringe, but disguising it as concern for others to not look like a straight-up dickhead and have the moral high ground". Is it seeping from twitter? Bc I see that shit there all the time even in non-fandom spaces, the black/white, we're angels/they're devils thinking that real life and sane adults just do not fucking operate on. What I do know is, in the midst of a difficult pandemic, the one announcement in months that was happy and exciting for me left me feeling like dogshit by the end of the day. The weekly episodes that I should be excited for are just making me dread what I'm gonna see online. The nordic five are kinda like comfort characters for me, since I grew up in an emotionally abusive household and so I treated them like the family I never had. And yet, when I wanna go online and look at headcanons and read cool au fanfics, I always seem to stumble upon the implication that doing this is somehow severely hurting someone and that I'm a terrible monster. Logically, I know this is a load of shit. And yet I've noticed I've been putting myself down and looking at more and more self-harm content again recently bc

guilt-tripping with that much weight seeps into your brain like a nasty case of sepsis. Even the more casual "haha hetalia not another pandemic/more brainrot/will punch you on sight" lark starts to fucking drag when it's just SO widespread. Might just queue nice art, drop the occasional fanfic and otherwise stop interacting with the fandom tbqh. This bullshit is not healthy and some of the people on this hellsite are genuine psychos.