A series in which all of the characters represent different countries. You just have to think of it. Hetalia follows the chronicles of the personifications of countries as Italy, Germany, Japan, America, England and France in a bunch of random sketches. I really liked the idea when I learned of it, so how did this series turn out in the end? Good, though it could have been done better.

I absolutely loved this series when it started messing around with cultural differences. This series really has a number of priceless episodes in which it takes different stereotypes under the loop. The references to each country’s history are also really hilarious at times. You’re obviously supposed to take them with a “little” grain of salt and this series by no means attempts to retell its version of history, and yet there are times when this series is surprisingly accurate and provides a free history lesson.

I really wished that I could have raved about this series, but unfortunately it’s incredibly inconsistent. It likes to waste entire episodes on topics that just… aren’t funny. A bunch of episodes are just random fanservice of gay pairings of the different characters, near the end of the series there are a bunch of episodes dedicated to a strange and unfunny subplot between Liechtenstein and Switzerland and there’s also a strange unfunny subplot about America cleaning out his garage that just keeps returning over and over.

I’m really not sure what was up with these kinds of episodes. They seemed to want to introduce some sort of serious storyline among the comedy, but that SO doesn’t belong in such a series that’s only made up out of five minute episodes. And I mean, this series has so much material it can choose from, and then it devotes three consecutive episodes to Liechtenstein, of all things.

Hetalia should have been better balanced. The episodes really range from utterly brilliant to utterly dull, and especially the dull ones can ruin the fun of this series a bit. Nevertheless, the brilliant episodes are definitely worth watching, so let’s hope that the second season is going to do a better job here.

On a final note: I do urge everyone to not take this series seriously. It’s never meant to insult anyone, just poke some innocent fun. The last thing you want to do with this series is take the jokes personal, which they obviously aren’t.

Short Synopsis: For whatever reason, Japan, Germany and Italy end up stranded on a desert island.
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
Easily one of the most nonsensical episodes of this series yet. Again, it emphasized on how Italy only thinks about food. In this episode, he offers Germany some of his local dishes in order to seal the alliance between him and Germany, and builds a castle of Spaghetti (as a reference to the tower of Pisa, of course ^^;). Next episode, the rest of the countries should arrive, so that should prove to be fun.

Still, with this entry I’m going to stop blogging this series. It’s not because of the political incorrectness of the series, the stereotypes or the negative comments I’ve gotten about it. I still like this series a lot, but I hardly have any inspiration to write about it for every single episode, so I thought that I’d better quit while I’m ahead, before I burn out completely. It was a nice experiment definitely, and when I started blogging this series, I hoped that it’d be like Master of Epic (which was a lot of fun to blog for me when it aired), but the episodes are just too short for that. Perhaps I’m going to do some compilation posts along the way, but I’m not going to promise this.

Short Synopsis: Japan makes his appearance.
Episode Rating: 7/10 (Enjoyable)
One thing I don’t get with this series is why they’re bothering to make next-episode previews. I mean, what’s the point, the episodes are just random strings of sketches, why would you need a 30 second preview of something that’s only 5 minutes long?

Anyway, in this episode you really can see that the original Hetalia was just a string of random comics put together. This episode has about five of these, mostly dealing with Japan, but there’s also a short skit about Italy’s history, where it was ruled by Austria.

The reference from U-Boats to giant robots was quite nice, since the second world war probably played a huge role the popularization of he giant robot-genre, though I do hope that Japan in the future episodes is going to get a bit more made fun of. Apart from the U-Boat references, he felt more like another straight guy for all the Italy jokes (okay, and the penis joke, but that one didn’t work too well).

The history-lesson was nice though. I never knew about those long Italian wars which nearly completely destroyed the Italy which was thriving the renaissance. If I understood this correctly, Italy was in the middle of a war between France and Spain, and it ended up fighting countless wars with France, and eventually it lost its powers when France allied itself with the Ottoman Empire. After the wars, Austria came and took control over the country for a while.

Short Synopsis: Okay, so this time Italy really allies itself with Germany.
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Good)
Ah, now things make sense: episode 1 was supposed to be the congress of Vienna (hence why France didn’t appear in that episode), episode 2 then fast-forwarded to the first World War, in which Italy was supposed to fight Germany but simply goofed off, and now we’ve come to the real meat of the story: the Second World War. This episode seems to be the prelude of it, where Germany is angry because France beat it in the first one. The end of the previous episode was just a preview for this one. I’m glad that at least something of this show makes sense. ^^;

The best thing in this episode was definitely the really weird song composed by Italy, which probably meant to highlight some of the cultural differences between the countries (German girls are bigger? They’re scary as tourists? lol). The karaoke may have been a bit too much, though. I never understood why fansubbers feel like they want to stuff the entire screen full of random text, saying the same in English, Romanji and Kanji. It clutters the screen and is hard to follow. And sure, for real songs I can understand… but such a silly song as that one?!

I’m interested whether this series is going to portray the Jews. It’s been a very touchy subject, and I can’t remember any anime about the world war that even bothered to mention it. But then again, Japan did a lot of nasty stuff in the second world war, but if my memory doesn’t deceive me they didn’t have a lot to do with the Holocaust. One ironic thing here is that Homosexuals were also among the ones who were systematically wiped out, and the Germany in this series has just “allied” himself with a guy whose preferences are… questionable to say the least. ^^;

(EDIT: oh wait, I now see that the song was already karaoked in Japanese already before the fansubbers touched it… what?)

Hetalia: Axis Powers

Short Synopsis: Our lead characters… are a bunch of countries.
Chance of me Blogging: 100% (yeah, because I’m already blogging it)
I’m still a bit bitter that Holland wasn’t made fun of in this series so far (especially when even Estonia has its own character), but sarcasm aside, I really liked this series. You can trust Studio Deen to come up with the more crazy mangas to adapt, and the huge amount of country references was hilarious to watch. It’s going to be interesting if this series can keep this up. As for the ones who got offended by this series: you should start poking fun at other countries yourself.

Fresh Precure!

Short Synopsis: Our lead character receives the power to become a magical girl.
Chance of me Blogging: 0% (Obviously not)
So yeah, I checked this out in the hope that it might actually be something worthwhile, but in the end I couldn’t really find anything to really make me keep watching it, although it did turn out a bit better than your generic mahou shoujo series. I particularly liked how one of the bad guys put too much sugar in his tea because he had never seen it before, and the costume design is nice enough, but overall it really doesn’t try much to set itself apart in the mahou shoujo genre. Especially the lead character just tries too hard to be funny, the mascot character too. Not to mention the abysmally animated concert scene, the the downright painful ED and how everyone conveniently disappears when a monster shows up. I could also whine about the very bad physics in this series, but hey, this is a mahou shoujo series for kids. What else could you expect?

Denpateki na Kanojo

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is a legendary king who happens to be stuck in the body of a random high school boy.
Chance of me Blogging: 40% (Perhaps)
Yeah, the way this one started definitely got me worried. Here we have a legendary demon king inside a high school boy, and guess what: a cute girl arrives from out of nowhere to protect him. Still, this OVA is good stuff. The episode was well told and pretty nicely built up with some pretty good suspense parts. The lead characters slowly grew likable, and the action doesn’t aim to be as over the top as possible, but kept all the fight subtle but believable (I love it when a character actually gets disabled when hit by a very hard and solid object). Some parts were a bit too emo for my liking, but this is going to be a pretty good OVA if the rest of the episodes can keep up this pace.

Short Synopsis: Italy allies itself with Germany…
Episode Rating: 7,5/10 (Excellent)
I really hope that this doesn’t turn out into one really big mistake, but for now: why not? I’m going to blog this series. I’ve been looking for something light to blog since Bonen no Xamdou is about to finish, and this one can nicely fill up its slot. And besides, I’m feeling rather politically incorrect right now and the alternatives aren’t looking that pretty either. I’ve been considering to blog Kemono no Souja Erin, but episode four confirmed something that I’ve been suspecting all along: it’s simply a WMT-wannabe. It wants to create a dramatic climax in every single episode, and instead of letting events flow naturally, it throws in some random angry dragon or sickness for every single episode. I’d much rather wait for the real thing that airs in April.

Apart from Master of Epic, Hetalia is going to be the only pure comedy I’ve blogged, but it could be a lot of fun as long as it remains to be funny. Anyway, about this episode, it pretty much played on the uselessness of Italy in the first world war (which they indeed lost miserably ^^;). Seeing as Italy forms part of the series’ logo, “Hetalia” sounds awfully similar to “Italia” (Italy in katakana) and the voice actor of Italy sings the ED (which is horrible, by the way, the only bad part of this series so far), we’re going to see Italy’s incompetence back very often.

The third main character of this series seems to be Japan, which is a bit strange, since in World War I, Germany and Italy had an alliance with Austria-Hungary, while Japan sided with the Western European countries…