Hetalia

I've been a fan of Hetalia since around 2019-2020. I started online schooling about a year before the rest of the world, because my family coincidentally decided on doing so well before the pandemic hit. In this further plunge into online fandom culture as a result of my lessened in-person interaction, I quickly discovered Hetalia. I don't remember exactly how I stumbled across it. It could have been through Pinterest memes- it could have been from a random YouTube video- the culprit of many fixations of mine. Whatever it was, it stuck! I had a huge interest in history as is, and this little show with a relatively loose factual basis, a plethora of comedic appeals, and lots of gays, was hitting all the marks. I stayed in the fandom for about a year or two before discovering all the darker parts of it, and basically stopped interacting with Hetalia all together as a result of this. It wasn't until just a year ago now that I got back into Hetalia on a whim. Now, I'm still enjoying it strongly while remaining critical of some parts of the series!


Ship and let ship?

I'm a bit of a believer in live and let live, ship and let ship. By all means if you want to judge someone for liking a relationship that's a bit heinous in your eyes, judge all you'd like! But I'm very anti-harassment.

I used to be a firm believer in FACE family, and I still really like them as a family! I didn't like USUK much as a ship, and more so shipped FRUK. Despite this, I recognized that other people didn't view US and UK as brothers or father/son like I did, and instead saw them in a totally different light.

I think there’s a lot of nuance people miss out on in current fandom culture of the fact that in some fandoms, headcanons reign supreme. Hetalia especially is riddled with strange relationships, and has deep roots in pedophilic and incestuous ships directly from Himaruya himself. USUK undoubtedly is sometimes more brotherly, and sometimes more romantic. Some people leaned towards discarding some of the ship dynamic and instead went for the full family relationship, while others discarded the family dynamic and leaned into the ship stuff. I think whichever one you choose doesn't earn harassment and I think people should be more open minded honestly. Even though I see them familialy, and couldn't really view them romantically because of that perspective, my perspective isn't God's word, ya'know?

All this to say I don't really have a shipping DNI for Hetalia. If you ship something I'm uncomfortable with seeing, I'll handle it myself by like.. blocking you or hiding your posts or whatever. I don't know if ship and let ship is a hot take these days or what, but whateva! I've seen lots of valid approaches to discomfort with things like this online and I'm always curious to learn about more ways people think about it all these days. However you go about it, I'll still always stand by being anti-harassment because all it does is put more harm and negativity into a space that you could be curating instead for your own peace of mind, rather than seeking out conflict with people you know disagree with you in a fandom space. If you go out of your way to harass anyone, even if I agree with you more than them on whatever the controversial subject matter is, I probably won't get along with you. Harrassments lame-o behavior.


More lukewarm takes and random rambling about my fixation soon.