Hetalia, again.
May. 20th, 2009 09:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat1138"Propaganda" is perhaps not quite the right word for Hetalia in that it isn't a deliberate governmentally-sponsored campaign to promote specific political goals, although OTOH that definition would exclude ripple/echo-effect media such as Lee Greenwood's "Proud To Be An American" song and Spike Jones'/Disney's "Der Fuehrer's Face".
But according to the historiography of Hetalia, you would never know that anyone was ever killed in the geopolitical conflicts represented as shounen-ai bishounen slapfights. Internal schisms mostly disappear into monolithic personifications of modern political entities, with the odd exception of differentiating Northern Italy and Southern Italy in some cases-- if the series had been undertaken thirty years ago, would the now-autonomous Baltic and Central Asian republics etc. still appear as individual characters?
Hetalia spackles over various atrocities in all directions-- even limited to the WWII era, not just the forcible expansion of the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and the entirety of the Holocaust (unless that's the intended referent of an otherwise throwaway phrase about Germany "bulldozing over all of those bearded people"), but also the destructions of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. (There is a line about Japan's back yard getting burned down so he couldn't grow food anymore, although Tokyo has not been an agricultural powerhouse for quite some time.)
And of course, as per the central issue of MammothFail, world history is presented in an almost entirely Eurocentric fashion. Even when China and Japan are just speaking to each other, Japan's stated reason for "wanting to grow stronger" is to be able to resist Western colonialism (which China shrugs off as being too complicated to understand). "America" (i.e., the United States) is first shown as a cute white boy found alone in the woods, over whom England, France, and (with fairly accurate national range for the colonization of North America) several other European powers tussle about whom to "adopt"; obviously, no one existed in North America before the Europeans arrived to see their own reflections, and the only hint of the African slave trade is the dark complexion of the occasional character Cuba. (Cuba and Canada are the only other characters from the Americas so far, afaik.) There's also a notable lack of religious conflict as a motive, other than a possible nod toward Al-Andalus and the Reconquista.
(suddenly very tired) Linksplat: Sambo in Japan and blackface as fashion fad (scroll down to the "Yamanba and Manba" section & pic). The Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno book cited as a reference goes into somewhat more detail about how the latter fashionistas went to considerable effort to import cosmetics intended for African-American women, but sometimes cut corners by applying dark shoe polish to their faces instead.
But according to the historiography of Hetalia, you would never know that anyone was ever killed in the geopolitical conflicts represented as shounen-ai bishounen slapfights. Internal schisms mostly disappear into monolithic personifications of modern political entities, with the odd exception of differentiating Northern Italy and Southern Italy in some cases-- if the series had been undertaken thirty years ago, would the now-autonomous Baltic and Central Asian republics etc. still appear as individual characters?
Hetalia spackles over various atrocities in all directions-- even limited to the WWII era, not just the forcible expansion of the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and the entirety of the Holocaust (unless that's the intended referent of an otherwise throwaway phrase about Germany "bulldozing over all of those bearded people"), but also the destructions of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. (There is a line about Japan's back yard getting burned down so he couldn't grow food anymore, although Tokyo has not been an agricultural powerhouse for quite some time.)
And of course, as per the central issue of MammothFail, world history is presented in an almost entirely Eurocentric fashion. Even when China and Japan are just speaking to each other, Japan's stated reason for "wanting to grow stronger" is to be able to resist Western colonialism (which China shrugs off as being too complicated to understand). "America" (i.e., the United States) is first shown as a cute white boy found alone in the woods, over whom England, France, and (with fairly accurate national range for the colonization of North America) several other European powers tussle about whom to "adopt"; obviously, no one existed in North America before the Europeans arrived to see their own reflections, and the only hint of the African slave trade is the dark complexion of the occasional character Cuba. (Cuba and Canada are the only other characters from the Americas so far, afaik.) There's also a notable lack of religious conflict as a motive, other than a possible nod toward Al-Andalus and the Reconquista.
(suddenly very tired) Linksplat: Sambo in Japan and blackface as fashion fad (scroll down to the "Yamanba and Manba" section & pic). The Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno book cited as a reference goes into somewhat more detail about how the latter fashionistas went to considerable effort to import cosmetics intended for African-American women, but sometimes cut corners by applying dark shoe polish to their faces instead.
no subject
on 2009-05-21 03:12 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-21 05:25 pm (UTC)I'm surprised that Russia seems to be the only country portrayed with consistent negativity, though perhaps as with Asuka in NGE, the hyperconfident brashness of "America" is intended to be (and received by the domestic Japanese audience as) much more obnoxious than it comes across to most Westerners. But Russia shows the series' closest approach to explicit deadly violence in the Bloody Sunday 1905 (http://community.livejournal.com/hetalia/1045.html) strip, and there's also the cursed Busby Stoop Chair (http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m292/Equivalential/heta3/i_i8.gif) strip in which (as apparently stated more clearly in the tankoubon) instead of the chair killing Russia, Russia unconsciously manages to kill the chair because of being "more evil than the chair". Long memories from the Russo-Japanese War augmented by more recent social friction about Russians in Hokkaido, I suppose.
no subject
on 2009-05-21 05:40 pm (UTC)(Now I'm just trying to not be ill over the responses of the fandom. *reads down the Bloody Sunday thread with some horror*)
no subject
on 2009-05-21 06:18 pm (UTC)Oog.
(Envisions an entrance placard:
flanked by a turnstyle on one side and a mallet on the other.)