Hetalia Axis Powers
ヘタリア Axis Powers
In a tumultuous era of World Wars and general uncertainty for the future, Germany did not expect that his only constant allies would be North Italy and Japan. Despite being a descendant of the once-powerful Ancient Rome, North Italy is weak, useless, and overly in love with pasta. In contrast, Japan is reliable and pragmatic, but has strange obsessions that would bewilder anyone. Believing he drew the short end of the straw, Germany must think of a way to make this unlikely alliance work. To rub salt into the wound, the chaotic Allied Forces arrive, determined to stop the Axis Powers in their tracks. While they all share a common goal, none of the Allies can set aside their centuries of differences to fight as a cohesive front. As conflicts continue, these personified nations act out the events of World Wars I and II in a comedic and entertaining manner. [Written by MAL Rewrite]
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In a tumultuous era of World Wars and general uncertainty for the future, Germany did not expect that his only constant allies would be North Italy and Japan. Despite being a descendant of the once-powerful Ancient Rome, North Italy is weak, useless, and overly in love with pasta. In contrast, Japan is reliable and pragmatic, but has strange obsessions that would bewilder anyone. Believing he drew the short end of the straw, Germany must think of a way to make this unlikely alliance work. To rub salt into the wound, the chaotic Allied Forces arrive, determined to stop the Axis Powers in their tracks. While they all share a common goal, none of the Allies can set aside their centuries of differences to fight as a cohesive front. As conflicts continue, these personified nations act out the events of World Wars I and II in a comedic and entertaining manner. [Written by MAL Rewrite]
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KirbyCoded
September 5, 2024
Hetalia was a phenomenon. It cannot be overstated how popular it was during the tail end of the 2000s up through the mid 2010s. Cosplayers online and at conventions, roleplayers, fan content on Livejournal, DeviantArt, YouTube—it was practically inescapable. You couldn’t move five feet without bumping into some friend group’s cosplay photoshoot or an AMV. If you’re watching Hetalia as of the time of writing this review, it’s a safe assumption that you’re either nostalgic, a general internet or fandom enthusiast, or fourteen. And if you’re fourteen, I implore you to please seek out better gag anime such as Lucky Star, Azumanga Daiou, Way ofthe Househusband, or, if you’re well versed enough in anime tropes, Saiki K. That being said, I will not sugarcoat this. Hetalia is… not great, to say the least. This isn’t a hot take by any means; you’re far more likely to find people saying Hetalia is bad than people who say it’s a masterpiece modernly. But the reason *why* they say it’s bad is, almost always, the sin of being kind of cringe and popular with young girls. You’ve seen it with Twilight, you’ve seen it with Divergent, and, of course, you’ve seen it with Hetalia. Instead of an actual deconstruction of the issues present, people gravitate towards simply dismissing a piece of media as “cringe.” But Hetalia is far worse than cringe—it was outright harmful to its primarily teenage audience. Hetalia personifies countries and uses them to retell historical events as if they were interpersonal drama, which is a perfectly fine concept on the surface, but pull back the layers and you’ll find a myriad of problems that hint at a creator with some very concerning political views. To start with what was the primary draw for a lot of its original fanbase, the characters—in a vacuum—are fine for the most part. They’re all based around stereotypes of different countries, with some standard anime fare thrown in for good measure. A good example would be England’s British stuffiness being mixed with the standard tsundere archetype, or Italy being a great cook and artist while also being a ditzy genki boy. There’s an odd glorification of the United States that’s especially prevalent in the jarringly serious segments on the American Revolution, but is mostly mitigated with WWII era to modern America being portrayed as a stupid, obnoxiously friendly attention whore gloryhound. Though, the word “characters” is misleading. They don’t really work as characters, given they’re more representations of the citizens of the countries they’re personifying than actual people, they work much better as vessels for jokes. The most notable part of the characters, at least in the dub, isn’t their personalities or the stereotypes they embody—it’s their voice acting. While I can’t speak for the Japanese cast (and really, why would you watch a comedy subbed anyway?), the English cast is star studded. Hetalia bolstered the careers of nearly every actor involved due to how popular it was at the time, but they’re all talented in their own right and were mostly getting plenty of work prior anyway. Todd Haberkorn, J. Michael Tatum, Patrick Seitz, Eric Vale, Maxey Whitehead, and Cherami Leigh are just a small fraction of the cast members with impressive resumes. Jerry Jewell even used the exact same voice here as Russia as he would for Victor in Yuri!!! On Ice just a couple years later. If you’re planning to watch it in spite of this review, go ahead and see whose voice you recognize. In any other show, I would be frothing at the mouth and excitedly pointing out every actor I recognized, looking characters up and seeing what else they were a part of. In Hetalia, I’m just disappointed they weren’t playing characters in a better show. Though, despite some of the material they were given to work with, the voice acting was absolutely not one of Hetalia’s many, many issues—though they really shouldn’t have hired white people to voice the Asian countries. Based on that list of voice actors being nearly entirely men (and one of the two women being best known for playing a young boy in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood) you can probably guess that Hetalia does not have a lot of female characters—and yes, we will get back to the obvious effects of a cast of almost exclusively pretty anime boys later. It would honestly be less insulting if there were no women in the cast at all instead of just very, very few. Even if you don’t want to acknowledge this as an issue of misogyny for whatever reason, it’s still a problem because it severely limits the character designs. Giving France or Russia estrogen wouldn’t have made Hetalia a better show, but it would have at least added a little more distinction between the million different blond men. I never want to see another blond anime boy in my life. The misogyny is blatant, but it pales in comparison to the racism. While eventually more South Asian countries were designed, Hetalia, to this day, has exactly three African countries if you don’t count ancient Egypt. And one was likely just picked as a leftover to serve as the player character in the PSP game. To put that into perspective, there are over fifty African countries in the real world, and there were just as many in 2009 when the anime was released. South America has even less, with only two. That’s not even going into the lack of Mexico or presence of any Native American nations despite having multiple episodes showing the colonization of the Americas. I could tell you exactly why they did this, but you’re not gonna like the explanation. And again, this is a modern issue (how Hetalia is still around is beyond me), this isn’t just because the show is from 2009 and the webcomic is even older. Speaking of, while Hetalia does manage to have some funny gags, some of it is… dated, to say the least. Ignoring any outright offensive or harmful content, some gags are very randomz rawr XD, for lack of better terminology—the type of thing teenagers with “roar means I love you in dinosaur” shirts and a MySpace page would laugh at. While this isn’t necessarily a drawback if you’re nostalgic for that era, and comedy is always subjective, it’s just… really not funny. This is especially true for the movie which forgoes the historical comedy entirely to focus on that sort of humor. That being said, it’s not all bad. Aside from some of the characters being genuinely fun (whether by virtue of the actual writing or just because they happened to get a charismatic and funny voice actor), Hetalia’s biggest upside is being legitimately funny at times. Episodes are only around five minutes each, and the characters talk fairly quickly, so gags are rapid-fire. For every actively awful joke about how fat America is despite him being designed as the world’s most fuckable twink, they take another five chances to throw something genuinely good at you. And it works. Just about every episode has at least one gag that at least got a snort out of me, if not actual laughter, and everyone I’ve talked to about it has said something similar. Now, Hetalia could have been an alright (if dated and racist) gag comedy focused around portraying world history as family drama if it weren’t for the elephant in the room: the titular Axis Powers. Yes, *those* Axis Powers. Hetalia jumps around the timeline a bit, but the main focus is World War II. The Allies are portrayed as incompetent and unable to work together at best, and outright villainous at worst—with a gag about France spreading “rumors” about Germany, and the dub taking it a step further and explicitly saying that those “rumors” were about Germany killing Jews. It’s ambiguous exactly what those rumors were in the original Japanese, so it’s nowhere near as bad there (which is the case for just about every mention of Jews in the dub), but that doesn’t mean it’s off the hook. The lax view of Nazi war crimes present in any language you watch it in is what bred an environment that allowed those jokes to be written in the first place. To say it louder for the people in the back, that’s Holocaust denial! Hetalia is a show that perpetuates Holocaust denial. Suddenly, the stories of cosplayers doing Nazi salutes make a whole lot more sense. Italy’s war crimes were downplayed at best and outright erased at worst. Italy, as stated earlier, is portrayed as a lazy ditz, and his first instinct is always to give up. So, to put it simply, he’s harmless! Mussolini who? Japan doesn’t have it much better, and may be even more egregious once you remember that *this is a show from Japan,* portraying the Axis (that, remember, Japan was a part of) as a quirky trio of friends. Yes, trio—other members of the Axis, such as Romania and Hungary, are never implicated. I have no doubt the original mangaka knew about them due to how much research some gags would’ve required, which means this is yet another case of historical revision. Hetalia seems to love doing that. Speaking of, while Hetalia tries to take a “nobody is safe, we make fun of everyone!” approach to its comedy, it’s obviously scared to make fun of its home country. While it does make jokes around Japan, they’re all about rudeness masked by politeness, excessive apologizing, and emotional unavailability, and they’re told in a fairly kind way. Contrast with how scathing some of the other countries get it (like jokes about China keeping his citizens poor, or France sexually harassing the rest of the cast) and it becomes clear how much Hetalia doesn’t want to target Japan despite how easy it would be to make a joke about something like Japan’s work culture, suicide rates, or criminal justice system. Now, the portrayals of Japan and Italy are concerning, but by far the worst one is Germany. The very first scene of the anime has Germany shutting all those other obnoxious countries up and getting the world meeting back on track, and he’s portrayed as exactly the same during WWII. Because if there’s one thing the world was missing, it was the Nazis portrayed as one of the most serious and level-headed members of an ensemble cast! It wouldn’t exactly be good if they completely skipped over Germany’s war crimes, but what makes it even worse is that they don’t. While kept to only a couple lines, there’s multiple times where Nazi crimes or eugenics get referenced, like when he asks Italy if he “wants [him] to gas [him],” or when Italy lists him being “whiter than anyone” as a compliment. The historical revisionism and Holocaust denial is even more concerning when you remember that there is a legitimate, genuinely educational side of Hetalia. It could never be a primary source of history of course, but you could seriously learn some things by paying attention and maybe looking it up later—which is bad considering *the primary audience was teenagers,* who aren’t exactly known for being able to pick out misinformation from what they consider to be trustworthy sources. While you obviously can’t pin all the blame on Hetalia for that— especially since it wasn’t created with the intention of having an audience of kids—it would be wrong to say it has no responsibility in separating its misinformation from its actual historical fact, and it’s not okay to spread misinformation just because you think your audience is full of adults who may be able to tell the difference. You should always be cautious of the information you’re giving and the messages you’re spreading, regardless of who you’re catering to. It’s hard to focus on a good joke when two minutes later, Italy and Germany have a gag about just how much they love eugenics. Nazi apologism is a lot to take in, so let’s take a breather and talk about something I alluded to earlier: the effects of a cast composed almost entirely of pretty anime boys. Now, if it were just fujoshis fighting over which blond men should kiss, that would be notable in a paper on fandom history, but not a review of the actual show. That is to say, Hetalia has queer content. This is not a case of fandom doing what fandom does best and shipping their favorite hot guys together—it’s not even queercoding. Hetalia has actual gay representation. Italy is just… canonically bisexual. Not teased at, not ambiguous bisexuality, not bi lighting and hint-hint wink-winking the audience. He flirts with women and gets an actual, on-screen kiss with a man. There is not a single twist in media that will ever recreate the shock of learning that Hetalia has actual queer content and the fujoshis were not lying or exaggerating. I’m still stunned. Hetalia is written by a man, by the way. The manga is seinen. This isn’t yaoi. This is gay content by a man for other men. Contrary to what the majority of the other negative reviews say, this is actually one of the better parts of Hetalia, if only for making it more entertaining. Fun fact! In the webcomic, they talk about gay marriage! Not in a ”getting married for political reasons” way like the anime, the actual human rights issue of gay marriage. I could not make this up if I tried. Overall, I cannot in good faith recommend Hetalia to anyone besides maybe people who are very into fandom or internet history, and even that has more to do with its impact than the actual content. Hetalia has some good elements, whether that be some fun characters or the occasional funny joke, but a couple good bites of an apple can’t fix a rotten core, and a couple fun elements don’t change the fact that Hetalia contains historical revisionism and portrays the Axis Powers as the good guys more often than not. Don’t watch it, it’s really not worth it. You have far better options for both historical shows and gag comedies now, so take advantage of them.
