This rant in the guise of a review was originally written all the way back in 2012, on a dare. Some minor aspects of it have been modified ever so slightly to reflect my current feelings for this series.
Humour is a thoroughly subjective matter. Its functionality depends on several factors such as personal tastes, current mood, specific settings, styles, pay-offs and the charismatic endeavour of its igniting devices - which is to say, the comedians and/or props involved. There are shows, animated series to be exact, out there that are usually considered funny and entertaining by a general audience (like the first season of “Adventure Time!”, to give you a random example) but that, quite frankly, don’t really appeal to my tastes, mostly because they try too hard to be nonsensical and weird for the sake of being nonsensical and weird or maybe just because something about the main characters’ behavior annoys me to death.
The peculiar shtick about the show is that every character is the literal personification of almost every nation on earth. Hidekazu Himaruya’s serialized piece should theoretically work as an allegory about the various political roles of each state during the most prominent historical events of the twentieth century but it chooses to do so in an extremely light-hearted, yaoi-ish manner. The titular main character is, in fact, Italy, a completely useless and coward buffoon that can only think of eating pasta and being ambiguously homoerotic around the uptight Germany and the awkward Japan - as in, the rest of the Axis Powers during World War II.
Believe it or not, I don’t feel offended by the over-the-top portrayal of Italy’s worthlessness on an international scale (that would be pretty accurate, sadly enough) and I do not harbor any negative sentiment over "Boys Love" and other such genres clearly not meant for my demographic; with that said, I have a few reservations on how these various aspects are combined in the overall diegesis. Its main focus is the relationship between the three main characters, which could have actually escalated to a rather bold satirical representation of the game of politics as opposed to what it actually turned out to be. The issue here is that “Hetalia” is not a satire, it’s a fluffy comedy with a very large teenage female fan base. As such, the most fundamental political and social occurrences of the last one-hundred years of human history are pretty much reduced to an excuse for said fluff. The image of the personifications of Italy, Germany and Japan frolicking together on a deserted island very much feels like a 1940's satirical cartoon published by a French newspaper rather than the subject of a silly, tonally deaf comedy with ANIME HI-JINKS but that's what we've ended up, instead. Even worse than that is having the Austrian invasion of Italy during the previous war (one of the bloodiest and most tragic chapters in my country’s history, might I add) deformed and twisted by the pathetic acts of cowardice of our main character instantly surrendering to the enemy. You might be starting to see why I have a problem with this show.
I could argue that, perhaps, that aforementioned, pitiful scene right in the first episode might have been a direct homage to Alberto Sordi’s performance in Mario Monicelli’s “La Grande Guerra” (one of the most revered Italian tragicomedies in cinema's history), but this show is obviously not that clever. Speaking of cleverness and lack thereof, the overarching humour falls more flat than Wile E. Coyote down a cliff. At first it’s *nice enough*, with all the personified nations reprising their most commonly known stereotypes for the sake of a good chuckle: America is egotistical and self-centred, France is effeminate, Great Britain is stubborn, Austria loves to play the piano in the most inconvenient places, etcetera. Unfortunately, being all one-note clichès with no real substance, their various gags get old pretty fast, thus leaving nothing but a sour flavour in my mouth as I scratch my head in the face of some of their most baffling antics.
At the end of every episode, which are averagely five minutes in length each, there’s a segment called “Chibi Hetalia”, which is exactly what you might think it is. It’s a super-deformed parody depicting a cute child version of Italy during the Austrian domination around the Renaissance period. It doesn’t have any tangible relevancy with anything else other than being adorable in the most artificial sense. Cuteness sells, after all.
In conclusion: “Hetalia: Axis Powers” is a waste of satirical and allegoric potential, a dull rehearsal of horribly misplaced Shounen Ai tropes that come off as way too light-hearted for the subject matter and, on top of everything else, it's not very funny.
Then again, I might be too biased against it.
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