Despite the above, there's relatively little discussion of colonialism in the series compared to intra-European conflicts. IIRC Egypt is the only part of Africa that ever appears, unless you count the Seychelles (which in turn is the only representative of the Southern Hemisphere); this obviously omits huge swaths of colonial forays.
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.
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ninetydegrees
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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.