Bigotry in the Hetalia fandom.
There's something going on in the R/A comm right now that's got me so upset I want to talk about it here. If you don't follow the R/A comm, this should still all make sense.
( I am angry and it goes behind a cut. )
( I am angry and it goes behind a cut. )
Yes, yes, very much yes.
And I don't know if you dug any deeper into the archives on this, but there was another fic by the same author which I honestly found just as (or even more) disturbing, on adjacent grounds: it was about the Alaska Purchase (fine) through the lens of the "It was only rented," ehm, 'interpretation' (okay). Neither of the characters did anything particularly reprehensible in the fic...but the footnotes boiled down to "Yeah, Americans only believe what they believe because they're arrogant pricks who like to believe that Russia has been constantly hard-up for money; the Alaska Purchase probably was just a rental agreement, ~but we'll never know for sure.~ This is all totally historical, btw."
No. No no no no no. Why would you do that? It's just...incorrect! And you can read the Alaska Purchase treaty online yourself; it's not like the details of this agreement have been ~lost to the murky mists of time!~ And people are accepting what you say as fact because it's the fucking footnotes and that's supposed to be where the facts are at! And...and...arghh!
I honestly can't tell if she was deliberately lying just to smear America, or if she was "merely"(?) carelessly ignorant and didn't mind if her facts might be wrong because it gave her a chance to smear America, but--frankly, I don't think it matters. We have a responsibility, if we are going to be exposing our readers to information under the guise of historical fact, to make an effort to ensure that that information is as true and unbiased as we can reasonably hope for it to be. Active deceit and wanton disrespect are pretty much equivalent, in my books.
...And I'm still angry about this, three days later! I hate being angry about things!
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