Hetalia Axis Powers

I jumped into Hetalia Axis Powers with high hopes. Online friends and real life friends gave the series such high praise. They swore that Hetalia was one of the best anime they'd seen. At appearance, Hetalia looked as good as they said, with a great set of beginning episodes. As the series progressed, however, I began to feel that Hetalia was just an over-hyped series that didn't deserve the credit that it was getting. At first, I loved the story. With every country represented by a single character going through the events of World Wars I and II, what wasn't to like? The beginning of theseries brought up the relationships between the countries very well, and stuck with the important, historical points of the two wars. As the series progressed, however, the story began to steer away from the wars and go towards what could have happened between countries if the countries were just one person. I thought the relationships took over the series and made the story lose traction. With the character heavy series, at least I could watch them progress through the series. The characters, however, showed very, very weird interpretations of the countries. Even with foreign countries, I felt that the characters were just falsely advertising their countries with stupid quarks to make the characters "better" for the series. A great example, I think, is England, with his ability to see mythological creatures. As funny as that made going to Japan's house, the idea was still stupid. Another example is America's giant fear of horror movies. As funny as that was at times, I felt the idea was still stupid. And what was with the alien that was with America? I feel like I was the only one that didn't get that. As far as the sound goes, I felt that the theme song got extremely annoying very quickly, even with different countries sang the song. Often, I skipped over them, or just turned off the episode when the song began. With no real fluctuation with the music, the sound lacked in the series and made Hetalia even more bland. The one thing that I did enjoy in the series was the art. I liked how the countries were animated, but sometimes, the art got a little weird. I felt that the flags to show the countries were very distracting. The text for the country name would've just been appropriate. Still, the animation was cute, especially during Chibitalia, and I often got really engrossed in the art. At a series, Hetalia could have been much better. I wished the show was better constructed, story wise, and the characters weren't quite as dumb. I believe that it's over-hyped, but there were some good moments. I would recommend Hetalia to anyone looking for a funny, short episode series, but I won't be watching the series again.

The idea of creating a story with characters representing countries or aspects of a single country has been done many times in literature. Midnight's Children with India and Pakistan as Saleem and Shiva. The Tin Drum with Oscar Matzerath representing the German people during the Nazi period from 1933-1945. 100 Years of Solitude, where almost every facet of Colombian history and culture has a character devoted to it. Where does Hetalia fall when matched up against the aforementioned 3 novels. Well...nicht so gut. Hetalia relies on very simplistic stereotypes and slapstick humor that isn't really that funny. You won't actually learn anything about history fromwatching Hetalia either. According to Hetalia, WW2 was about the saintly Germans and Japanese fighting the moronic Americans and evil Russians, all while protecting the unbelievably stupid Italians. Amazingly this isn't actually the most extreme example of far right Japanese nationalism and historic revisionism in anime. That dubious honor belongs to Code Geass. Why is Hetalia so darn popular among anime fans where I live? The answer is Yaoi and Yaoi fanfics. That's pretty much it.

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.

Have you ever imagined how this world would be if every country was a person? Neither have I. And this is exactly what Hetalia is about, that and jokes about pasta. We watch our hero Italy struggle to..... well what, I really have no idea what the characters in this story try to achieve. And wait, did I say 'story'? What story actually, is there a story in Hetalia? This anime has no story, the characters are stereotypes of countries, the art is pretty bad and the music is 'certainly interesting'..... And guess what? I actually liked this show. Though, the fandom is kind ofcreepy, please stop shipping countries. ~Story~ 0/10 Well, there is no story to begin with. Our main characters are Italy, Germany and Japan and most of the time they are 'fighting' in World War II, though our main character Italy isn't really fighting, he's just fooling around and interacting with the other countries. And that's it! Though it's quite interesting to see history this way, this anime could have been a lot better if it had a damn story. Also, sometimes it's just pure stupidity, the only way to watch and enjoy this anime is by putting of your brain. So that's exactly what I did and in that case every episode turns into 5 minutes of randomness, gay undertones and sometimes an interesting take on world history, but most of the time it's just jokes and randomness. [CONCLUSION] There is no story, only randomness. Because of this I can't give this anime points for the story. ~Art~ 4/10 The art is pretty bad, especially during the chibitalia parts. There is not much to say about it, it's not special or extremely ugly. It's just that it looked cheap and that the characters designs during the chibitalia parts were supposed to be cute, but it ended up looking really weird. [CONCLUSION] The art is bad. The anime looked cheap and the animation during the chibitalia parts was just creepy. ~Music~ 6/10 After watching this anime, I woke up at 3:00 or so and the very first thing that came to my mind was: 'Marukaite Chikyuu'. If you watch this show, please skip the ending song, because it will haunt you, it's so catchy and silly. And I promise you, if you give this song the chance to sneak into your brain you will regret it forever! The Japanese voice acting is okay, but the English voice acting is one of the best things I've ever heard. Every country has it's own accent, this is really hilarious. One big problem, our main characters are an Italian, a German and a Japanese guy and their accents may be funny at first but after a while you're done with them. [CONCLUSION] The English dub is better than the original one, yes it's possible! Also the ending song is so catchy that it's not even funny anymore. ~Characters~ 5/10 Shallow, stupid stereotypes, that represent a country.... well, at least the characters are interesting. You have Italy, a weak coward who's stalking his friend Germany, the ultimate tsundere and there is Japan, a guy who seems to have no emotions and is totally done with his European allies. The are the Allies, England, who is superstitious and a horrible cook, America, who believes that his country is the centre of the world and eats way to many hamburgers, Russia, who is creepy, very creepy and China who hits people with his wok pan and builds Chinatowns everywhere and France, a pervert. This is the main cast, ladies and gentleman, we have to deal with these retards every episode! And if you think those guys are weird enough already, just wait until you meet Belarus, Sealand, South Italy and last but not least Prussia. [CONCLUSION] Weirdest cast ever created, some stereotypes are on point, but some others are just racist or random. And no, I don't ship these countries, they are countries, how can this fandom ship countries?! Well, at least the cast is not boring..... ~Enjoyment~ 10/10 Yes, I enjoyed myself while watching this and it changed history lessons into pure comedy. It's stupid, random and there were yaoi-undertones for no good reason, but this anime is a perfect example of 'just put of your brain and enjoy the show'. This anime will not learn you a lot of things about history, but it will changes your view on history forever, but I'm not sure if it changes in a good way.... [CONCLUSION] The enjoyment level is over 9000! It's not a good show, actually it's a bad show, but that doesn't mean that this Hetalia isn't hilarious. It's so dumb and stupid that it made me laugh out loud about the pure stupidity and randomness of the anime. Also the fandom is one of the worst I've ever encountered, they ship every character in crazy yaoi ships, it's actually really sad. Should you watch this anime? If you want to keep your brain functioning in the right way, no. If you want to have mindless fun and you have a few hours to waste, yes.