fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #708 ]

[ SECRET POST #708 ]

⌈ Secret Post #708 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

101.

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[Bleach, Soifon]

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[Twilight]

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[Gaang Jr]

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[CSI]

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[Hellboy]

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[World of Warcraft]

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[Hugo Weaving]

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[Keira Knightley]

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[Bleach]

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[sup, MGS genderswap]

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[Farscape]

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 20 pages, 498 secrets from Secret Submission Post #102.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 2 3 - broken links ], [ 1 2 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 3 4 5 - too big ], [ 1 2 - repeat ], [ 1 - posted twice ], [ 1 2 - doing it wrong ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

This. Thank you.

And if you're talking about the fic I think you're talking about, I think that's one of the best fics in Hetalia fandom, period. So. Yeah. And it is horrible and gutwrenching and effective, which is what a lot of people here seem to be missing -- you want an effective way to bring the horror of history home? Make them people. It's a lot harder to get abstract about atrocities when it's happening to people. The anthropomorphism cuts both ways.

It was just something that occurred to me while I was reading all of the threads.

dsjlk OH WOW you flatter me, holy crap. Thank you very much, I'm honestly floored by your kind words. I don't know what to say. ♥

BUT that's what I think too. It's often hard to make someone feel real emotion about atrocities happening to a nation half a lifetime ago, but the anthropomorphism really brings it home.

I haven't read any of the fics that the OP singled-out, though now that I'm looking at the responses to the Rape of Nanking fic, no one is saying "omg hot!" Everyone is saying "Wow, this left me speechless," and variants. Again, it's a matter of one's personal opinion and morals on the matter; but there is such an intense gray area here to be taken into account -- one that I think the OP did not consider when deciding to judge all of Hetalia fandom, and one that I don't think everyone railing against the people who requested, wrote, and responded to that fic considered either. (Of course, the only fic I looked at the responses for is the Rape of Nanking fic.)

Hey, it's true. *smiles* Good fic is good. (

mithrigil actually brought that one up when I was wavering about whether or not I wanted to go darker places with my Hetalia fic; she pointed out that you'd proven it could be done. So.)

Yeah, it's interesting to me that so many people seem to be using the Nanjing fic as a specific example of "what the hell are they doing?" because the way I read it, that one was so much about the psychological horror and not at all about the kink. I don't know if the same holds true for every example the OP listed, but I think it indicates that people in this fandom are taking the gray areas you mentioned into account as they write, and they are aware of the sensitive nature of what they're tackling, as a general rule. (There might be exceptions, of course, but it's fandom, you always get a couple of idiots. Those people, though, don't represent the majority, and they never have.)

My gosh I don't know what to say. Thank you. ♥

Yes, exactly. I could understand why someone would still think that it's trivializing to do so, but I don't think it gives them a platform from which they can judge someone else. But I guess that's their... prerogative? Unfortunately.

I don't know what kind of bizarre sociopath YOU are, but I am completely and totally capable of feeling horrified and saddened by mass human tragedy without having to read fics about anthropomorphized bishounen acting it out for me.

Also, I'd like an explanation for how "Victorian era racism" helps bring any kind of tragedy to light, or what possible benefit China/Tibet rapefic has, or how Native-Tan getting Raped by Everyone and impregnated really enlightens people to the atrocities committed against them.

... did you really just call me a sociopath?

omg ♥

Thank you for making my night.

Not disagreeing with you here on the effectiveness of bringing the horror home via anthropomorphism, etc...but it already DID happen to people, real ones at that, not anthropomorphised bishounen countries.

It did, yes, but I think it's a question of scale; after you reach a certain point, death tolls and the like become statistics, because otherwise it's just too much to process. And there's a certain amount of othering going on when you're reading about history that also serves as a distancing mechanism. (And I don't think it's necessarily bad that people do it -- problematic, yeah, but if we didn't we'd just have no way of processing things.) Hetalia makes it harder to do both, and that's where it can be really effective, I think. When you make tragedy a personal narrative, it really brings a lot of things home.

I'm sorry you think that tragedy only feels "real" and "personal" when it happens to bishounen anthropomorphized countries. :(

Please. Learn to read, or fuck off.

What? All I'm seeing here are ficwriters patting themselves on the back for taking horrible tragedies and rewriting them with angsty bishounen, like that's somehow raised awareness or made the tragedy more "real".

The tragedy was already real, you moron. Circlejerking about how your fics really captured the horrible nature of things through anthropomorphizing the countries involved and makes it more real than the fact it actually happened to real people just shows how self-absorbed and thoughtless Hetalia fans really are.

It's actually more on par with taking this sentence, "Diplomatic relations between China and Japan were severely strained for many years following the conflict," and turning it into a story about two brothers whose relationship was destroyed by war and betrayal, and who must try to move on from there while still unable to come to terms with one another. It is a way of approaching the issue that neither denies nor lessens the countless tragedies, while still holding merits in its own way. I don't condone the exploitative nature of the kink meme request, nor do I think the author should have really put her fic there in the first place, but if someone were to try to write Hetalia fiction about this topic, would it be totally inconceivable that this might be what they have in mind?

If you insist on seeing the Hetalia fandom in this light in spite of everything that's been said, and can't stoop so low as to possibly consider what other motives the fans may have, then I can see no way of persuading you otherwise. Just know that through your narrow-mined and unfounded assumptions, you're throwing a very evil accusation over the heads of a great many people.

Do you feel proud of yourself because you are somehow deeper than the rest of the human race? Unless you feel more sorrow when someone is tortured to death as compared to the thought of your mother dying, you're not any better than anyone else on earth.

I'm guessing you've never actually studied international relations and human rights. Adding to that, you probably have no clue what relativism and universalism are according to human rights, so you have no comparable idea to why these tragedies continue to happen and be justifiable. (Feel free to prove me wrong on this one. I really would like to be.)

Because honestly, wanking over how omgosh offensive people can be on the internet is not stopping tragedies, it's not making you look any better, and it's certainly not showing empathy.

Because making tragedy more easily accessible by giving the masses a figure they can relate to/care about is not new, fictional characters or not. Get over it.

The act of taking an atrocity and placing a human face on it is not new. Take for instance the between three-million to about sixty million estimated people that Stalin killed. Can you honestly try to take in that sheer quantity of human suffering? Most people can’t. Many people believe that no single person could honestly have so little regard for life as to kill, starve, or exile that many people. Nevertheless, he did, we have records of it. It still seems hard to believe though right? I mean, surely there has to be an exaggeration in those record books...

Now. Let’s take just a few true stories from those times, and do a little research and write our own story of a person, perhaps a child, perhaps an adult who went through that. It’s really hard to think that number’s inflated when you read about the person’s suffering, or watch him up on the screen. You somehow are able to understand more just what occurred and how horrible it was with just one person, then a bunch of facts in a book or news segments, aren’t you? And yes, call me callous for saying that, but tell me how many personal causes you got involved in because of hearing one person’s (real or fictional) account, verses a statistic you read in a book.

...where did I say that? I only said that it's easy for large-scale tragedies to get abstracted -- because it is -- and that the very format of Hetalia prevents that kind of abstraction from occurring.

The anon below me said it better, honestly.

How can you say that Hetalia doesn't "abstract" the real nature of things when Alliances are treated like marriages, and Wars like little petty fights and grudges between moe/shota/yaoi stereotypes?

Because that's how you translate such concepts into human terms; you have to reduce the scale. And because it's humanizing, and because there's more to the characters than stereotype if you can be arsed to read the actual canon.

Look, you don't know me, you don't know my work, and it doesn't seem like you know the actual canon that well, either, so please stop making these kinds of generalizations, because what you're accusing people of doing isn't what's actually going on.

Which is why some fans, in an effort to go beyond the superficiality of the source material, choose to explore the darker issues in their fiction and art. Hetalia the series is mostly for fun; I thought this was about the derivative body of fanwork.

I don't think anon is interested in considering our opinions on the matter.

I know, I know, I need to stop feeding the troll. Sigh. I was just having such good and reasonable conversations with people earlier -- and yeah.

I should probably get back to writing America-and-the-Endless fic now. That will be more productive, I think.

I love good and reasonable conversations, particularly when they're fandom-related. It's cool to see people with differing opinions discuss them without going for personal attacks, etc.

... that sounds amazing and I agree implicitly.

...I don't think anyone is denying that, are they? The point being made about that particular story, which I have now finally read and can speak about with some authority, is that it actually deals with the relations of the two countries, surrounding and in the aftermath of the tragedy. There are stories that speak of the personal suffering of the victims, and there are stories that deal with the politics, and the latter is where things can become impersonal and abstract, difficult to resonate with. Anthropomorphism brings it all back, takes the very human pain of the victims and solidifies it into the figures of the nations. Forget the whole bishounen thing for a minute, and think what the idea of countries as people can represent. It's really not all that shallow, and must have been difficult to attempt, let alone complete.

I think what she's trying to say is that it's easier to feel strong emotions about a subject of you know the victims on an individual level (EX: This is John. John has a wife, two kids, and a dog. John likes fishing, hanging out with his buddies, and pottery. John's also a very nice guy who would do anything to help someone. But John died in a flood a week ago.) Rather than on a large scale (EX: 300 people died in a flood last week.).

It's a lot harder to get abstract about atrocities when it's happening to people.

How fucking stupid are you? Historical atrocities did happen to real people. My god.

No, how fucking stupid are you? Historical atrocites did happen to real people, but that's not the point.

The point is that there are still people, who to this day, do not believe these things happened. Holocaust deniers, the KKK, most of conservative Japan*; ring a bell? And when you put things in terms of people instead of statistics, it's a lot harder to deny what's in front of you.

*And before you start, no one is agreeing with these people or justifying their behavior. It's just being pointed out that, yes Virginia, it's a real belief shared by some people.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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