Yeah, I like Hetalia, too. Your description was pretty much America's character, spot on. Thing about "anime" is this: While the animated cartoon as a concept has been around for hundreds of years (Europeans started making dirty flip books out of page margins pretty much as soon as books became cheap, accessible, and popular), it was 100% an art form brought to its full realization in the USA, with Winsor McKay, Sullivan/Mesmer, the Fleischers, and yes, Disney/Iwerks. When I was a kid, the only Japanese animation I really remember being around was Kimba and Astroboy, both by the same author who was himself inspired by Disney. So Japanese animation itself is an example of Japanified Americana thrown back at Americans .. and Americans love it. Just like America in Hetalia would. How meta.
(I hate using special terms to denote who did what. To me, a comic book is a comic book and a cartoon is a cartoon no matter where it's from, and using special lingo is fuckin' racist. Doesn't matter what sort of audience it's aimed at, either. Either I like it or I don't, and it oughtn't matter where it's from, right?)
And all that "declining nations" shit is a load of hooey from corporations who think they need to make twice as much next year as they did this year, or they're not "successful" somehow, and think the only way to do it is to make sure humans keep doubling THEIR population as quickly as possible. This started in the late 1980s, when the effects of effective birth control was just starting to be shown, and population growth in the West was normalizing. Oh, yeah, the Baby Boom? Fuckers got hooked on selling to all those kids in the 1950s, and they thought the Boomers should have tons and tons of kids, too ........ because they're fuckin' ignorant of population dynamics (even without the Pill, it would have been only natural for birth rates to settle down. This sort of thing happens after mass deaths in various species.) Anyway, so that's when they started screeching about "declining birth rates", "debunking" the population bomb (if human generations were shorter than 20 years it'd be more obvious. If you were to see human explosion in the rat population, you'd be fucking alarmed. Just because of quicker generation turnover happening before your very eyeballs), all so they could stuff the West with mass immigration and chain migration and all that other crap, coupled with "waaaah, telling african beggars to use birth control is raycist" garbage. Oh, and when Canada brought in mass immigration (it was Mulroney who did that, btw, AFTER taking away our Baby Bonus cheques!), the job market turned right from a worker's market, to an employer's one. It was all a scam for cheap labour.
Yeah, I like Hetalia, too. Your description was pretty much America's character, spot on. Thing about "anime" is this: While the animated cartoon as a concept has been around for hundreds of years (Europeans started making dirty flip books out of page margins pretty much as soon as books became cheap, accessible, and popular), it was 100% an art form brought to its full realization in the USA, with Winsor McKay, Sullivan/Mesmer, the Fleischers, and yes, Disney/Iwerks. When I was a kid, the only Japanese animation I really remember being around was Kimba and Astroboy, both by the same author who was himself inspired by Disney. So Japanese animation itself is an example of Japanified Americana thrown back at Americans .. and Americans love it. Just like America in Hetalia would. How meta.
(I hate using special terms to denote who did what. To me, a comic book is a comic book and a cartoon is a cartoon no matter where it's from, and using special lingo is fuckin' racist. Doesn't matter what sort of audience it's aimed at, either. Either I like it or I don't, and it oughtn't matter where it's from, right?)
And all that "declining nations" shit is a load of hooey from corporations who think they need to make twice as much next year as they did this year, or they're not "successful" somehow, and think the only way to do it is to make sure humans keep doubling THEIR population as quickly as possible. This started in the late 1980s, when the effects of effective birth control was just starting to be shown, and population growth in the West was normalizing. Oh, yeah, the Baby Boom? Fuckers got hooked on selling to all those kids in the 1950s, and they thought the Boomers should have tons and tons of kids, too ........ because they're fuckin' ignorant of population dynamics (even without the Pill, it would have been only natural for birth rates to settle down. This sort of thing happens after mass deaths in various species.) Anyway, so that's when they started screeching about "declining birth rates", "debunking" the population bomb (if human generations were shorter than 20 years it'd be more obvious. If you were to see human explosion in the rat population, you'd be fucking alarmed. Just because of quicker generation turnover happening before your very eyeballs), all so they could stuff the West with mass immigration and chain migration and all that other crap, coupled with "waaaah, telling african beggars to use birth control is raycist" garbage. Oh, and when Canada brought in mass immigration (it was Mulroney who did that, btw, AFTER taking away our Baby Bonus cheques!), the job market turned right from a worker's market, to an employer's one. It was all a scam for cheap labour.