aphanon_meme | part 363 paper snowflakes

part 363 paper snowflakes

It's... December! I can't believe it's almost the end of another year. Time is weird. Anyway! There's been a lot of neato Hetalia news in the meantime! That game ~~(that I can't get working but will look at videos and screencaps of so I can play vicariously)~~! The image of the first doll! The musical promo images!! What are you most excited for?

Enjoy part 363!

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Just one thing? Damn...

Maybe this one thing within the Ancients' group but I guess I would just bring the fandom back, because canon content isn't as satisfying as it was. Fortunately, it's way more stable than 3 years ago, but still...

yep. well, what can be said, we're getting older.

content is better than the doldrum birz years though. and i'm glad no more emperors/historical figures though i am also sad for himaruya that that didn't work out. but seriously, aside from caligula's mom being occasionally hilarious, that was a major snoozefest imo.

Plus wasn't there some wank about transphobia though?

Else I agree I wouldn't read them again because I really don't care about the life of historical figures, but at least we got Mama Egypt and Persia? Even if I hate hate hate how the grandchildren thing was implied because it's so against Hima's rules. I can explain more indetail if you want.

i doubt himaruya would've been concerned about a wank about transphobia from tumblr.

yep, i don't care for them and moreover i don't think they were as interesting as the idea of personified nations from the start, anyway. what grandchildren thing? please do explain, i may have missed this entirely... i admit i skipped a few of those strips.

http://stirringwind.tumblr.com/post/101359966360/re-aph-persiairan
This post summarizes pretty much everything that was bothering me.

Since APH isn't on the big picture anymore, almost no one types a 1000-1500 word essay about Himaruya being a raging transphobe, a racist and/or a revisionist.

That's a good thing the obnoxious fans went away aside from the 13-year olds discovering APH?

oh, i remember this now! yes, i agree - it's possible that himaruya just had not researched it fully. i guess there is also the small possibility that the grandkids might refer not to modern iran but to other more recent nations that were heavily influenced by iran and/or formed by groups of people that originated in iran? i am not familiar with the history of the region so i don't know if there are likely candidates for that.

to be honest, although i wish there was more activity in hetalia again i am not sure now's a good time - now being a time when the fandom landscape has been pretty thoroughly terraformed by the sjw movement and "tumblr culture." i'm seeing people in fandoms with much less potentially contentious subject matter get driven out by drama, shipshaming, kinkshaming, and other accusations made in the name of fandom's warped form of "social justice" and i suspect that if hetalia became popular right now it'd be awash in this sort of crap.

i mean, look at steven universe, probably the least "problematic" and most progressive canon out there - and yet, its fandom is the worst for wank and even bitches about canon at length in arguments that i can't even begin to make sense of most times. i love that show and yet avoid all its fandom aside from art blogs that ONLY post art, because otherwise it's just a headache.

"it's possible that himaruya just had not researched it fully"
That's what I thought since the main topic at hand was Rome and his surroundings. Since the Empire was clashing with the Parthians & Sassanids, obviously, Hima had to put Persia in the equation. Still, I'm gonna add more to stirringwind's post and say Persia/Iran had more like siblings than grandsons, just like China refers to any nation under the sinosphere as his younger siblings. Anyway, I'm pretty sure he's going to correct that once he realizes the info doesn't match up.

Yeah I realize getting back on LJ/Dreamwidth is nearly impossible since everybody is hokked on Tumblr under shades of sj. Undertale and Star Wars fandms are the trendy fandoms now and it's even worse from Undertale since you have that one annoying portion who claims it's the best game ever of all time and try to lump as many buddies as they can, and the other who plays fandom police; so instead of seeing "ur ship sucks and everyone who ships it suck" you see "ur ship is abusive and if you ship that ur an abuse apologist sweetie uwu". That and dx every violent troubled character as autistic so nobody has the right to hate them/call them out.

Actually I think the callouts for misogyny on LJ started the trend. If you didn't like/express why female character was distasteful you were automatically labeled as a "rabid yaoi misogynist fangirl". The most impressionable part of fandom had to self-flagellate by explaining they didn't like m/m or female character isn't actually that bad. Posting multiple posts about BADASS LAYDEES didn't help either.

ah, i see. i do hope himaruya fills in some more info about persia. sigh. i wish for new characters in general, himaruya would've done a bit better job with introductions. i think he has improved though, czech and slovakia got what i'd consider a more concrete intro where, whether or not i like these characters, i at least got a pretty clear sense of what their personalities are from the outset. unlike say, poor india, where... i want to like the character, but to be perfectly honest i'd have to make up almost ALL of his personality because himaruya's canon didn't give much to work with. and that kills it for me.

yep. that's my big problem with fandom fights, they always happened before too of course but back it was "you're stupid/this isn't canon/that character is lame," not "you're a bad person and liking what you like is equivalent to being an abuser/a racist/a sex predator." heck, even when people bashed ships for being abusive in the old old days, they typically bashed the ship they didn't so far as to claim shippers of an abusive ship were contributing to real life abuse.

there was an article comparing tumblr to overzealous, hypocritical church ladies that i think sums up the culture perfectly.

not to mention this uncomfortable victimhood complex; people don't just dislike something in fandom, they make out that the fact of a thing they don't like existing is somehow victimizing them. likewise, one of the only ways to deflect blame from yourself is to claim to be, in one way or another, a victim.

i didn't really catch the beginnings of that stuff on lj (luckily, perhaps). i was probably buried too deep in slash to notice, and i already avoided places like ontd.

i'm hoping it'll pass in time and i do think sjwism has subsided somewhat from its peak but it is persistently there and especially likes to flare up as weaponry for people to bash on characters/pairings/interpretations they dislike.

I really hope Persia will be featured more often, especially during the Safavid era where there's plenty of interactions with Turkey and Europeans. I was so PUMPED UP for India back in 2011-2012 and it's really a shame he got featured afterwards in illustrations because Hima could've at least done some strips with China about the political situation nowadays instead of just the "Bollywood boy & elephants" facade. Not that I mind that but there's much more to explore about his character. I liked Czech's and Slovakia's introductions and liked the Romania and Bulgaria sketches. Hima has been proven to be effective when it comes to writing about his favourite pairs. He pretty much signed me up on RomBul.

Sjwism is prevalent and won't change unless the political climate in fiction changes as well. With the constant patronizing of offensive ships (incest, abuse undertones...) and the toxicity of callout culture (REMEMBER THING X DID 5 YEARS AGO????), I really don't know how the virtiol is going to rebrand itself. You can't even point the flaws of female characters without people screaming "omg u misogynist", even if they are brash and nasty, you get the "well i hope u dont like male characters like that :))".

And I hate how "ableist"is thrown at every moment for practically anything.

i'm hopeful he'll return to india and persia at some point too, was surprised he didn't because i mean there's a bit of a subgenre for that in yaoi (exotic, dark skinned seme with quasi-indian-ish or middle-eastern-ish fashion) so i think they'd be popular in japan if given a bit more fleshing out and some interactions with others. i liked india's friendship with prussia, but i don't think india stands out enough or rather i have difficulty imagining in in various situations aside from wanting to share dance with people which... is kind of a service-y trait, it doesn't fill in much about his personality or motivations.

yeahhhh i feel like fandom kind of overcompensated in trying to correct the past where people would slap strangers with "yaoi paddles" at cons or make rape jokes constantly. but now we've got the opposite problem and it seems actually a lot worse than the former problem; or at least much, much more pervasive. i find it extremely difficult to avoid the sjw thought police in most fandoms, whereas it wasn't that difficult to avoid the obnoxious fans of yesteryear. and the yaoi paddles type at least never doxxed people.

*him in

*surface-y trait, ha omg... if it's service-y i suppose it'd be a whole other type of dancing wow

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part 363 paper snowflakes

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