#set up my hetalia stuff in my new apartment today and started thinking about it zzz

[syrupyyyart]

I'm unfortunately feeling the annual urge to draw hetalia fanart again

[thatoneitaliangirl]

Interesting Dreams

I really think I have an issue with otome games- Ikemen in particular. Like, I had the weirdest dream last night, and I mostly blame otome games. It was one of those dreams that are dramatic and feel like your watching a movie, but they also are so fucking random and are jumping all over the place- at one point there was a boy dressed in a cape and I called him out for being suss and he said in a fake posh British accent, whilst swooshing his cape mind you,

“I’m sorry, you see, I have stage 4 ADHD.” And I was just so confused, I was like,

“Did you just compare your ADHD to cancer?” 

The main part of my dream is why I’m here today to tell you this fanciful story. 

Basically, I was some beautiful vampiric woman with a dramatic backstory. I don’t remember everything, but I was living in a mansion with some other people, and I had been turned into a vampire. What does that sound like, hmm? Unfortunately, the people I was living with were not great historical figures, or even vampires, we were just all misfits with no where to go, living together in this large creepy mansion in the middle of nowhere. And when I say creepy, I mean this place was like something out of Scooby Doo. Dark, gloomy, and it even had a freaking cemetery in the back. In my tragic back story, I was married to some noble or something. I remember that our clothes looked fancy and that we were probably rich, and it was like late 1700′s early 1800′s or so. We had a son who was maybe about 6 or 7, and in the beginning I had thought that both of them were murdered and I was left alive, and afterwards was turned to a vampire for some reason, I don’t know. The thing with being turned into a vampire though was that it came with a curse of sorts. Once turned into a vampire, no one could recognize you, or at least, wasn’t supposed to. I guess that’s a pretty good defense after turning, so you couldn’t be caught, but I don’t know. So, my husband shows up, and it’s like present time at this point, and for some reason I can recognize him, but he can’t recognize me. I’m freaking out, cause one, he’s supposed to be dead, two, I know that it’s him and I’m not supposed to, and three he believes I’m the reason our son died and he recently received news that I’m alive and has been hunting me down to kill me. Now, he has suspicions that I am in fact me, and his time at the manor is spent trying to prove that I am me and wanting to kill me. I don’t know why, but at one point I find myself in the cemetery out back being followed by my husband and the two men he’s traveling with. I’m surrounded by gravestones and its foggy as fuck, and I remember looking back and seeing them. With some quick thinking, I use magic of some sorts and change the name on a random gravestone to my name, which, btw, isn’t my real full name. It’s my real first name, Jenna, with the last name Clemence. Shocker. Though, the man that’s my husband is neither Luka, nor Jonah. I don’t remember my dream ever giving him a first name, but he didn’t look anything like Jonah or Luka. If anything he looked like a mixture of Zen from Mystic Messenger, and Prussia from Hetalia. He had long white hair that was put back in a low ponytail, and it had one of those bows in it you see in men from like the 1700′s. But, after he was turned into a vampire, his hair changed into a dark maroon color and his bangs were a bit more perfect and nice if that makes sense. So, I put my name on this gravestone, and he comes over to me and I point it out to him. I’m like, 

“Oh, I know I have the same first name as your late wife, but look! This appears to be her gravesite! It would seem she has passed after all!” And he’s like super suspicious of me, but he can’t out right prove that I’m his wife, and so he chooses to drop it. Weirdly enough, this is where my dream kind of jumps, because it goes from us being in the cemetery, to me and two other guys from the manor searching the house in which my husband and son had ‘died’ to find out how my husband survived and how he was turned, but that’s where it stops. I remember bits and pieces of the house, that it was really weird and falling apart. Thinking about that house actually gives me weird vibes, I don’t know why. Like just imagining myself being there is creepy I guess. Anyway, my dream jumps from that act to another with an entirely different plot. We’re in the same mansion, but for some reason I’m now an Inhuman with electricity powers, and I’m apart of the Avengers . . . I did binge watch the new Avengers game, so that could be why-

But we’re stuck in the mansion, and for some reason can’t get out. Like it’s not explained or mentioned, I just know that we’re stuck and can’t even set foot outside the mansion. Tony Stark’s arc reactor in his chest starts to malfunction, and the only way to keep it going is to take it out and for me to ‘charge’ it with my powers by putting it in my mouth . . . But not just in my mouth, no, it has to be touching my teeth- I don’t know why, and I never claimed that my dreams make sense- but holding it in my teeth hurts like a bitch, and I remember actually feeling the vibrations in my teeth and how badly it hurt. Like, I find it insane that my dream was so vivid that I can still remember the exact pain I was feeling in my teeth. (Low key, I think this might prove my suspicion that I’m grinding my teeth in my sleep, but I digress) It was really weird. But, to remedy this, Tony creates this blue jelly like stuff to put over my teeth, kind of like a whitening strip, that puts a buffer between my teeth and the vibrations and it stops the pain. A couple of times during this act of my dream, I had to fight things- they were like entities that were in this mansion, and again, while it was never specifically mentioned, I knew in my dream that these things where what was keeping us stuck in there, and that we were trying to hide from them. Kind of like Hetaoni if your apart of the Hetalia fandom. If not, it’s a game (Based on another game) featuring the characters from the anime Hetalia that get stuck in a mansion and can’t leave due to an entity messing with time and keeping them stuck there. And while the mansion gave me weird, creepy vibes, nothing about time was ever mentioned, and the only thing I remember about fighting them was that I was drooling a lot because of the stupid blue shit I had to keep on my teeth and the constant vibrations from charging. My dream had briefly jumped from that to another act where we were still in the mansion, but this time I was a doctor. My doctor name wasn’t my real name, I can only remember that it was long and started with a D. And I literally remember nothing of that part of the dream, but I remember I was a doctor, because at one point I had actually woken up in real life to move, and I heard a voice from behind me whisper ‘Dr. ______’ whatever my name was, and I remember thinking to myself,

“Oh shit, something just said my name. That was creepy, but I’m going to choose to ignore it and go back to sleep.” And after that, I remember nothing. Do I think there was some being whispering in my ear? No, obviously not. What it probably was, was that even though I was awake and had opened my eyes for a couple of seconds, I wasn’t fully awake and was still kind of dreaming. I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, but sometimes when I’m falling asleep and I’m in that space where I’m not awake, but I’m still aware of my surroundings and I’m not fully asleep, sometimes I’ll start to hear voices and noises. I’ve always just kind of explained this to myself as my dreams starting to form, but I don’t know if that’s really what it is. What I’m trying to say is that this is what I think the voice was. It was a really freaky dream, and I just find it odd that no matter how much my dream changed it’s story line, it all revolved around that one mansion-

[allbeendonebefore]

I was kind of under the impression that this is just a widespread thing in Alberta, especially because of the Angus Reid fractured federation survey (I cant include the link here, but you can Google it, its from January 24th 2019). When got back into Hetalia, I imagined the dynamics kinda changed to this, which would be pretty bad tbh. I hope its not that aggressive in Alberta, I will never be able to go check tho, too expensive :( I loved the bad french btw

i see you guys sending these asks super late at night and i wonder whether any of you sleep - idk where you’re writing from and i may be on the west coast but are you guys ok wherever you are? I just woke up but I have my tea and if I’m not caffeinated now I surely will be as I answer this.

I’m sure I’ve seen the survey you’re speaking of before and before I address it in any specific detail I just want to back up and re frame Why I’m Being Like This in regards to recent events and my orientation towards answering these questions in terms of Hetalia the way I do, because I think it’s the heart of how I answer.

the tldr of it is:

1. I have an opportunity to make interpretations of reality in unexpected and challenging ways, therefore widespread opinions don’t govern anything but my stupid gag comics in the simple sense that if everyone was represented by widespread opinion alone all the time, nothing would change and

2. if i can answer dozens of asks about ralph and oliver hanging out there’s absolutely no reason I can’t answer asks about ralph and jean hanging out, lol.

3. If you’d like a shorter, more concise “vision statement”, I have one on @battle-of-alberta here. (although now I notice the links don’t work on mobile so you’ll have to be on desktop for that one)

I’m assuming this will be long so cut time

(and yes, alas, the bad french is my legacy and I’m afraid it has not improved much although i swear i was an A student when i was actually taking it) (and no please don’t visit now, purely for pandemic reasons, it would be really expensive And you’d have a bad time) (and talking to me is free lmao) (I do not mean to say that you need to have feet on the ground to understand a place at all, i mean, at the moment I don’t lol)

headings because I say a lot

what even is hetalia

At the most basic level, Hetalia is a tool that can be used in a variety of ways. It can be for memorization, current politics at a glance or historical relationships in different settings. I use it for all of these things, of course, I certainly use it a lot in comics that take place in the much more distant past in @athensandspartaadventures. When I was writing that, I was in undergrad and AaSA was a tool to help me pass my exams, I didn’t think of how it might be read or interpreted by people who have lived in or experienced those places these days, or what kind of political and cultural tensions it might reveal. (Not to say that it has gotten me into sticky situations, exactly, but I am more aware of where things like that would arise now).

These days I look back on a lot of my experiences - both in IAMP/Hetalia and just as a person, and I think that if Hetalia is a tool it should be used with some awareness of intention and responsibility. Things in the fandom have changed as it became more mainstream and more well known and I think there’s a definite worry about screwing up or not representing Everything or not pleasing Everybody or not doing it Right. I have a simple, insufferably academic principle.

(That said, yes, you can still do it very wrong if you write a methodology.)

Still, it’s a comfort to me that I’m just doing the things the way I say I’m going to do them, and that is the underpinning of Inspired But Not Constrained By Hetalia. I don’t do things Himaruya’s way, I can’t do things the way IAMP would do them if it were running today because it’s not and things have changed, all I can do is do them how I would do them.

I have hurt people in the past because they sometimes couldn’t tell whether I was writing From an Albertan Perspective or not, and I’ve evoked some preeetty spicy comments over the last decade, and I realized that tone and perspective are something that really shapes how people understand and interact with my work and I’m trying to use that understanding in a conscientious way)

what even is alberta

So when you’re me and you’ve grown up in a province that is the Angriest in the country and the most Misunderstood in the country and the most Entitled in the country and nobody outside of maybe Saskatchewan has a good thing to say about you half the time and maybe you’re tired of that... you get kind of depressed thinking about how every year some kiddo comes on the internet ready to be excited about making or celebrating characters that represent themselves and No Matter Where They Go running into everyone else’s negative impressions first and foremost.

We joke about how everyone hates Toronto, though I’ve always understood it in a teasing way because I’ve never ACTUALLY met someone (outside of our current legislative assembly) who REALLY hates Toronto, but it does feel like I’ve encountered (directly or indirectly) people who do Genuinely hate Alberta and hoo boy is That a strange feeling. I mean, there’s an understanding that BC also ‘hates’ Alberta but half the people in BC are originally from Alberta so it’s a, uh, different feeling.

The story of Alberta from everywhere else is always the story of that Angus Reid article and the memes and comments and listicles that spin out around mainstream media. Alberta is giving too much. Alberta is getting too little. Alberta is too stupid to understand that equalization payments are a good thing actually, and Alberta is too dumb to understand you don’t really need EI if you make enough money in six months to own a house and multiple vehicles Just Because you own a house and multiple vehicles. Alberta is destroying the environment for everybody. Alberta has a huge concentration of white supremacists. Alberta is the Texas of Canada* and has the conservative streak and bible belt to match. Alberta should get annexed by the US. Oh, but Banff! We like Banff, though.

And like I said, politicians use these widespread feelings to stir up the sentiments of people who can’t afford to travel, people who are naturally suspicious of mainstream news, people who have barely even left their hometowns let alone the province and have no other means of validating what they hear, but people who’s emotions are genuinely tied to real feelings of alienation that really exist and HAVE existed for generations. And when the so-called “laurentian elites” in ontario and quebec make fun of them for being uneducated red necks, well, you hit a wasps nest and expected what, exactly?

what even am i doing

And like I’m faced with this question every day I decide to pick up my stylus and badger you all with unsolicited comics: do I want this to continue? Do I want to wear the mask that fits? Do I want to stand aside and say #notallalbertans #notlikeotheralbertans and stand over here on the island** patting myself on the back for not? being? there? Do I say yes, you’re right, and stand aside and watch loud mouth white supremacists co-opt wexiters and let them lead the perception of the province I grew up in just because that is what’s currently happening? Do I acknowledge the widespread sentiment and then pick apart every other province to say Well Actually You’re Equally Problematic Hypocrites, So There?

Obviously I’ve been saying no for a while. I’m perfectly happy to acknowledge the reality and when I draw stupid gag comics like this or this you can tell (hopefully) from my style that it’s tongue and cheek. When I draw less stupid not-gag comics like this or this I am trying to explore the Real Sentiments in a way that doesn’t completely polarize the issue and spin it out of control. I’m more of the opinion that even though Current Sentiments do get in the way that as personifications they 1. have some perspective and as people they 2. have some interest in not throwing out a friendship that was a struggle to build up every time the polls change or some new radical party seizes power. I do a lot of research and I want that to be reflected in my understanding of each characters deep seated beliefs and motivations, but I don’t want to let either the history or the current realities dictate the future if I am going to try to do that myself. 

why even am i doing it for

So like really the heart of the matter is: I am writing what I write for my thirteen year old self. She was the me who moved back to Canada from the United States, who’s first introduction to living there was a hellish surge of nationalism after September 11th. Who’s defense against that was to hide behind a shield of Canada is Better, Actually and who returned to Alberta during the boom years to realize that, oh wait, the rest of the country thinks we’re assholes just like they think the United States is. Who spent her teenage years learning that, boom or bust, the widespread sentiment in and out of the province is just as narrow, shortsighted, self interested, and stubborn as her own fiction of What Canada Was Supposed to be Like. Who learned that propping up that image at the expense of her friendships was not worth it, that propping up that image at the expense of people who are suffering and dying under that image is not worth it. Who found herself rehashing the same sort of gut reaction defensiveness online because the Guilt and Apologizing on behalf of her province compared to others felt Really Heavy for a kid who didn’t have any clue what to do about it and was just there to have fun and learn some stuff.

So I’m writing for anyone else who finds themselves exhausted and saddened by coming online and seeing that the only way that people can imagine Alberta is as an antagonist. I’d like to challenge everyone to start to imagine it better. It’s my little “escape” from reality, and for me it’s much easier to talk to people here where the stakes aren’t as high and the grievances a little less personal.

I’m also writing (in a more secondary way) for everyone who’s ever looked at alberta from afar and wondered What is going On inside your Head and is it always This

(no comment at this time)

as always, I’m here to explain At The Very Least what goes on in My head because at the end of the day, that’s all I can do. And though there are some things that make me angry and emotional, I’m happy to explain why. Happy to answer asks or chat on discord or whatever, any time I have the time. :)

footnotes

*This is just a footnote to say something I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of my comments, but this is an annoyance that me and my Texas Tomodachi share lol

**You’ll notice angry Albertans online have a favourite tactic, and that’s pointing out hypocrisy. They can justify A N y T h I n G by calling another province a hypocrite “so there” (i.e. BC can’t claim to be environmentally conscious because of Victoria’s sewage problem or Site C) - and while I am interested in shattering the image of Alberta vs. the Perfect Rest of Canada a little bit, I feel like it’s a very lazy argument that is used to deflect and not to help. I think it is more useful to unpack the sentiment of Why Alberta Still Feels Taken Advantage of rather than mudslinging, and when the mud starts flying no one seems interested in addressing problems anymore.

[battle-of-alberta]

BoAB Meta Essay 1: 5 W’s

Hello and welcome to this strange and silly yet semi-serious project of mine. Battle of Alberta is a Hetalia-inspired comic and ask blog following the adventures and mishaps of rival Canadian cities Edmonton and Calgary. I started this blog in 2018, though I first created the characters a decade ago in 2010 as fan characters for the I Am Matthewian Project. This little illustrated essay is just an introduction to me, my orientation towards this project, and why the heckaroonie I’m doing this.  

Who: About the Author 

My name is Hapo. As I’m writing this, I’m a graduate student at the University of Toronto and hope to have that wrapped up in the spring of 2020. Though I’ve been dragged around the continent for one reason or another (usually the result of a gravitational pull of a university town), I consider Edmonton to be my hometown and fully acknowledge and relish in the resulting bias I was raised with. I am a 3rd or 5th generation Albertan depending on how you count it and a settler on Treaty 6 territory. My educational background is in Classics, Ancient Societies and Cultures, Linguistics, Archives, and Museum Studies; my academic interests kind of revolve around the construction of culture and memory. I also tend to enjoy challenging stereotypes and misconceptions and disturbing ideas about seemingly hierarchical top-down, center-periphery relationships. Most of all, I love drawing satirical comics of varying degrees of silliness and sharing them with people. I currently use a Wacom tablet and Clip Studio Paint for my comics.

What: Writing About Cities

I chose to focus on cities because it’s the kind of granularity I like to write about; I find writing from a national perspective too broad and difficult to rationalize from my own experience and while I’ve written from the provincial level in the past, I most enjoy the level of nuance and every day information that comes from living in and studying cities. My other comic, @athensandspartaadventures​, kicked off my love of writing city-states, and my travels to other Canadian cities over the course of my post-secondary studies fueled my desire to learn more about municipal histories. 

Listening to the news, joining protests, and navigating my way through adulthood pushed me to learn how to participate politically on a local level as well. The 10th Annual Hurtig Lecture at the University of Alberta featuring mayors Don Iveson and Naheed Nenshi on the future of cities is an event I feel shaped my attitude towards cities in general, but it also encouraged me to look at the cities I knew with a different, optimistic perspective. I want to inspire readers to understand their own municipalities as complicated, messy, and in need of love and support from the inside.  

When: Then and Now

While I wouldn’t define myself as a historian per se, I tend to look at many things through a historical lens. The history is an integral part of the story that shapes these characters, and while I don’t mean to use history to justify one narrative over others, I do have to make some decisions and choices about the stories that I tell and the characters I am building for consistency’s sake. 

What sets interpretations of personifications apart is the author’s own experience, and at the end of the day it’s my interpretations, gut reactions, and personal experience that colour my work and my view of history. I recognize that I have my own biases and ways of thinking that are rooted in my view of the world as it is today, and I also recognize that those understandings can change. This blog is less a chronicle of one monolithic view of history and more a chronicle of my own perspective and growth. 

During this project, I won’t be shying away from certain historical periods and certainly not modern politics. That said, I also will not be answering asks that are deliberately politically or historically insensitive, nor will I be going out of my way to render explicit periods of great pain or violence. My own discretion is not perfect, but I will be using it as I see fit and trying my best to be responsive about it.

Where: Oil Country

Gavin Crawford probably says it best in his Wild West miniseries satirizing a wide cast of provincial stereotypes: “What do I like best about Alberta? It’s where I live.” My family settled in Alberta before it was a province and while I was not born there originally, it is where I would always leave from and come home to, it was where I went to school and kept all my things, it was where I formed my fond childhood memories and my political attitudes as an adult, and whether I was living in sub-rural or suburban Alberta or across the continent from it, it was always Where I Lived and Where I Would Go if I could click my heels three times. 

I was born in the economic fall out after the NEP reinforced divisions with the rest of the country. I was in grade school while Klein was handing out prosperity bonuses at the height of the boom when we still couldn’t afford textbooks from after the fall of the Soviet Union let alone teacher’s salaries. I didn’t really understand the ire we drew from the rest of the country and the world until I joined the I Am Matthewian Project in high school, and suddenly I had to make a lot of decisions about my own political identity I hadn’t previously considered. 

I understand what it’s like to live in a (tongue-in-cheek) ‘petro-archy' and the culture shock of stepping outside it. I know how it is to feel constantly under siege by the rest of the world to the point that all rhetoric is reduced to calling out hypocrisy while refusing to analyze yourself. I have felt inexplicable rage boil up when hearing jokes or perceptions of my backyard from people in central Canada or other countries, and then having nothing to fall back on when being accused of having no history or culture. Most of all, I get what it’s like to be bombarded with all this stuff as a teenager and as a young adult, and I get how difficult it can be to navigate when you’re constantly and almost exclusively met with “everybody hates Alberta”. My province is dumb, it should be criticized, but I also love it fiercely and I dare everyone, Albertan or otherwise, to start to imagine it better.

Why: Battling it Out

We’ve been through why I am writing about cities, why I’m looking through a historical lens, and why I am a little obsessed with the problematic image of my home province. I think the final question is: why frame it with the Battle? The Battle of Alberta is an age-old rivalry that transcends the sporting events it is commonly associated with, as I touch on in Chapter 1. It’s the source of a lot of amusement for me when reading headlines and listening to petty jabs whether on the radio or in restaurants. It’s something that dies down with each new generation only to flare up again over some issue or another. 

Most of all though, I like to think of it as the start and the end of a healthy relationship, a competitive spirit that makes us strive to be better than each other and better than ourselves. It’s the thesis statement of this project and the wish I have for the future. I don’t mind whether you want to read it as petty or serious, as platonic or romantic, but it’s enduring, it’s constant, and I believe at the end of the day it can be used for good.  

That’s all from me for now, I look forward to your questions and comments as well as to writing more meta stuff like this!  

Hapo