can you stay for a while;

[long_scarves]

Do you remember the days when I used to use this journal for more than just memes? Because I sure don't.

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the { first ✚ impression } memeI guess so this post isn't completely meme'd up-- What sort of relationships would you like to RP in the future/like to RP the most? Familial, friendship, romance? OR what's

Comments

[rinnington]

lol really

Okay disclaimer for anyone who would care to read this I feel bad summing up someone else's culture in silly Hetalia terms but I did live there I guess! But a lot of generalizations ahoy.

Well, yeah, the American Revolution isn't that big a deal from what I can tell, according to some surveys and stuff there are apparently a lot of people who don't even know what it was. I learned that on wikipedia. The empire is a big deal, but America wasn't part of the empire for a long time, so it's not typically included when you'd think of the British Empire.

But that doesn't stop them from being culturally tsun tsun for America. But they're culturally tsun tsun for everyone. They're often kind of caught between Europe and America and don't know if they identify more with European culture or American culture, when the truth is they identify with both. They prefer to be independent and really value British things, but more so than other European countries (probably because of the lack of language barrier) they follow American movies and TV and culture and fashion as stuff. Of course, it's a shared back and forth, but I found the culture pretty similar in a lot of ways.

And obviously they also have really strong political ties with America, too. But that's where the tsun comes in, because like...Tony Blair is one of the more hated recent prime ministers, and the reason is very much that he was too close with America, which is not at all liked. Being on good terms with America is good but doing what America tells them to do is bad. Plus, it is really common to mock how Americans are ignorant about the world, or Bush sucks and Americans are stupid to support them, or American culture is shallow and stupid. Grumbling about stupid Americans and making fun of Americans (though not to our faces usually) is pretty common, but a lot of that is unfair because generally I felt like British people were equally likely to be ignorant, didn't know much about *why* Bush was so bad, and these are the people who pretty much invented and refined crappy reality TV shows (they love reality tv so much reality tv and all their tabloids endlessly cover stupid reality tv stars). But yeah there's always panic that American culture is polluting the culture and any Americanisms that creep into the language are the end of civilization as we know it.

I think there's kind of...how can I put this without sounding like a douche. Some people don't seem to realize the empire is not there anymore and it's no longer the Victorian age. Britain fell in power and prestige pretty rapidly following WWII because the war drained their economy, but no one really noticed in the country itself. So yeah, they're kind of arrogant about America back, not that America isn't arrogant about how it treats Britain. Because they do take it somewhat for granted that they're a very very important country with the most important of cultures.

But pretty much, it's really IC for England to treat America like a bratty kid who is kind of embarrassing, but also kind of cool and well, okay, maybe we do have extremely strong cultural ties that we're going to make a bunch of embarrassing speeches about.

Also the girls I knew all thought American boys were the dreamiest because they are "cute and nice". So that one strip where the English girls all love America, yeah, it's so true. They also think France is sexy.

[rinnington]

Anyway that's modern stuff, but I would also basically say England is the most badass of nations. Because it's a tiny freaking island but it holds out in wars so well. My favorite British history is definitely WWII because goddamn they were so badass. Ahhh I forget where this was from but there was this great quote about WWII Britain which was basically. Britain could have easily got really good terms if it had made a deal with the Nazis after the fall of France. Hitler was really only interested in continental power, so if Britain would have surrendered, he probably would have let it keep near total autonomy, just limiting its military and probably taking a few colonial possessions. Instead, they fought a war that basically bankrupted them as a country (within a year of the Battle of Britain, they were relying entirely on loans from the US for financial solvency) and resulted in them losing their entire empire (which just about everyone knew would happen to Britain if there was a long prolonged war). And this quote was someone saying that Britain would obviously surrender, to which the reply was that Britain would lose all its empire and its way of life before it gave in, because it would prefer to lose everything and lose it on its own terms than lose anything and be conquered.

Just in general, while both America and Britain's roles in WWII and their importance is very heavily exaggerated (Stalin liked to say that America gave the money, Britain gave the time, and Russia gave the blood, which is 100% true), it's still pretty inspiring how awesome they were. There are a lot of cool stories. TL;DR when America says "I saved your ass in WWII" England has every right to beat him to death. That is something English people really really hate! Although it's also not technically fair to say America was on the sidelines for the first few years, because they did almost entirely fund the war effort with extremely generous loans. But it's still IC for the country to think that anyway.

I-Is that what you wanted. I'm so lame.

[is_an_island]

siz

siz you're so dorky

[rinnington]

I just was excited ;u;

[is_an_island]

But ahhhhhh this is so helpful! ajfd;iajdfl this is above and beyond anything I expected so ajdfkj THANK YOU ;u; /bookmarks

Though that was one of my thought processes in playing England ajfidjd like the fact that when I started to learn world history, I just remember distinctly learning that England was an island and the advantages of it and how they controlled the sea and it was really like wow.

ahhhhhh but thank you ;u;