Forum - View topicDaily Cosplay - Hetalia: Axis Powers' Germany and Italy
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championferret
 Posts: 765 |
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I'm definitely not trying to defend this, and dont quote me on this but I -think- the museum was actually some distance away and they werent actively trying to do the pose in front of it, but the fact is someone wanted to take a photo of all the germany cosplayers at a certain con and then someone had the bright idea to yell 'do a nazi salute!' The really messed up part is that most of the people doing it were kids, 14 year old fangirls and such, and some of them literally had no idea that what they were doing was offensive. Some of them apparently didn't even know what the nazi salute was or what it meant, they just knew it was 'a pose for german soldiers' or something. (Or so I've read internet comments saying so; who knows if they were telling the truth, but its still a fact that the hetalia fandom tends to skew very young) I've spoken to younger hetalia fans who literally don't even know the details of the holocaust, who have said that Hetalia was the first time they'd seen WWII imagery. Like they werent even actively trying to be malicious, they just straight up had no knowledge about anything about the character and costumes beyond what they'd seen in an anime. And that kind of thing scares me. When I was still a big fan of this thing, I was in my early 20s so I knew what happend in WWII, what was sensitive and what was indefensible and what Should Not Be Done By Fans, and I always assumed that the average fan was the same way. Looking back, I dont even know anymore. |
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dormcat
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 9902 Location: New Taipei City, Taiwan, ROC |
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Seconded. Even if WWII theme is needed, a Wehrmacht uniform would be perfectly fine. Other than filming historically accurate movie e.g. Der Untergang I see no reason dressing up an offensive uniform, particularly doing it "for fun." |
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Knoepfchen
 Posts: 698 |
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I'm not familiar with the series or their costumes, but think the use of a swastika in a cosplay is completely distasteful, no matter the accuracy. You'd probably not get away with doing that in Germany where the public display of the Hakenkreuz is illegal. There's an exception for artistic (and some other) purposes, but I highly doubt cosplay would be seen as such. There's a limit to expressing yourself when it insults the memory of so many people who got murdered under this symbol and also the people of today who are trying their hardest to never let things like that happen again and who have to live with the memory of the darkest period of their country's time. This is not about how accurate your costume is. Is about how indifferent you are to the feelings of the people and the world around you. I'd feel offended and very angry seeing this at a convention, and I'd probably want to engage the person to inquire what they were thinking putting that on (if anything at all). Not cool.
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DerekTheRed
 Posts: 3544 Location: ::Points to hand:: |
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Emphasis mine. I find this extremely hard to believe. There were two things that my school district relentlessly pounded into us. 1) Slavery was bad. 2) The Holocaust was bad. We learned how slavery was bad starting in 4th grade, and the Holocaust started by 6th. We read the Diary of Anne Frank, we read Night, we watched Escape from Sobibor, we had a Holocaust survivor come in and give a speech about her time in a concentration camp, we visited the Holocaust Museum nearby. It absolutely baffles me that any 13 year old wouldn't thoroughly and completely understand that the Holocaust is not to be made light of. |
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championferret
Posts: 765 |
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Different schooling systems? My memory is fuzzy but I dont think I learned about WWII in any detail until the second year of high school - when I was 13-14- and I remember at that age I was one of the few attentive students in my classes and there were a bunch of other kids who barely paid attention. And even so it wasn't done in a lot of detail (granted this was a rural highschool in australia not exactly renowned for being good). So sadly it actually doesn't surprise me that there would be kids who don't know about it, or know so little that it doesnt seem like a big thing to them. I think your experience should be the norm with this kind of thing, though. |
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Ultimatum
 Posts: 162 |
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Yeah, that was my mistake. They didn't know the museum was nearby, apparently. The image of a large group of kids doing the nazi salute still makes me shudder, though. If they don't understand the significance, it's even worse--indifference can make a group suffer as much, if not more, than outright hatred. I can't weigh in on the kids not knowing about the Holocaust (since I don't know many people under 18 these days) but if that's the case that honestly terrifies me. I do remember learning about it a few times, but it was the usual "here's the facts, here's the numbers, here's the test" style of teaching, so I don;t know if it actually made an impression on anyone or not. We did read Number the Stars, though, in 4th-5th grade, so that's something. |
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RestLessone
 Posts: 1426 Location: New York |
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I'm gonna agree with this. Schooling systems may be different, but WWII and the Holocaust are a pretty huge topic. The US was heavily involved with fighting in the war and it is often seen as one of the only wars with a clear-cut 'bad guy.' I can't remember when I first learned about it, but I did read Number the Stars in 6th grade. It was likely I heard about it before then, too. By the end of 8th grade, we had gone to the Holocaust Museum and had had a survivor speak. In high school, 10th grade covered recent European history, and we watched Schindler's List. People 14+ years will have already started high school and taken ~3 years of middle school education. I might be able to believe they didn't know exactly what the German salute was, but not having any idea about WWII? No. They're trying to cover their asses by saying, "Oh, I didn't know it was that bad!" and such. And here's another thing; these kids involved with the Hetalia fandom will have started on the Internet, where WWII-related Hetalia discussion and fanfiction are ubiquitous. If they are putting enough effort into getting a costume, they'll have likely spent time on these forums. I like Hetalia and buy the volumes, but the fandom leaves a bad aftertaste (sometimes). The series avoids these dark subjects, not out of disrespect, but likely because there isn't a sensitive way to handle it. During its inception in 2008, Himaruya used a swastika on concept work and a couple strips. As it grew in popularity, those aspects were dropped. Much of Hetalia doesn't even take place during WWII, anyway. |
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SailorTralfamadore
 Posts: 499 Location: Keep Austin Weeb |
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Is this about the Anime Boston thing a few years ago? I wasn't there, but if they did the infamous photoshoot at the Prudential Center Mall as I thought I heard they did, the New England Holocaust Memorial (it's an outdoor memorial, not a museum) isn't particularly close to that at all. It's several subway stops away, in fact.
I don't think the particular details are relevant, anyway. Doing the Nazi salute is bad, doing it during Passover is extra-bad, regardless of whether you're doing it in front of a Holocaust memorial or museum or whatever. Just because they're ignorant (and as others have said, I'm not buying that a bunch of American teens and young adults are "ignorant" of how bad the Holocaust was) doesn't justify that most people are going to take it as hate speech. It doesn't justify the hurt it would cause to people who are victims, or who are related to victims of the Holocaust. Intent is not what matters here. I also agree that, since Prussia and Germany don't wear any Nazi regalia in Hetalia (at least, the anime, I haven't read the entire manga), it kinda seems like some of these cosplayers are just looking for an excuse to dress up in Nazi garb. Which I find pretty icky. Maybe they like the aesthetics of the uniform, but how would your mind be able to get around what that uniform represents? Man, this all makes me so glad that Hetalia is a series that I've enjoyed by myself and with a few other friends who know their history and aren't going to excuse crap like this, and that I've stayed away from the larger "fandom". |
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Fedora-san
 Posts: 464 |
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Not liking people dressing up in SS uniforms is one thing, but telling a country not to use a symbol that has existed long before Nazis just because people are too ignorant to know the difference between a Swastika and a Manji is something else entirely |
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doomydoomdoom
 Posts: 278 Location: Michigan, USA |
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But see, you're working on the assumption that I give a crap and a half how old the swastika\manji is (it's ancient), or what the differences are (a manji is a backwards swastika or the other way around, although I'm sure deeper differences have been assigned to them). Neither do Jews who know about\care about their history, I suspect, and definitely not Holocaust survivors. The Nazis took it, they ruined it, and now it's a creepy and disgusting symbol of evil that has no place in modern times. Come up with a new damn symbol. Debates soothed, problem solved.
It's not like the Japanese don't know any better, because they damn do; that's why Shueisha made whats-their-faces remove the manji in One Piece (on Blackbeard's pirate flag, I believe?) and Naruto. The irony of using what are now accepted to be Nazi symbols should not be lost on a Japanese person, when taking into account the relationship between Japan and Nazi Germany. And I find it appalling that kids today couldn't know what the Holocaust was or what its impact was (although some certainly wouldn't care in any case, fools used to draw swastikas all over the restroom walls at my first high school, and one bathroom had one cut into the wall I believe), and also unbelievable. I knew who Hitler and the Nazis were when I was 6 (thanks id Software!), and I knew what the Holocaust was at 9. No excuses. And, as I suspected, it appears that this cosplayer was using Hetalia as an excuse to dress up as an SS officer. Le sigh. |
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Tempest
 I Run this place.ANN Publisher  Posts: 10430 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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If a group of non-Christians took the cross, modified it slightly, and committed atrocities using it, would you expect Christians to abandon the cross? (setting aside how many atrocities have already been committed by Christians under the banner of the cross) That is exactly what you just asked Buddhists and Hindus to do (combined around 40% of the world's population), abandon their holy symbol because of something the Nazi's did. Should Buddhists remove the wan from millions (100s of millions?) of graves around the world, and perhaps rewrite damn near every Buddhist scripture that starts with wan? What you're suggesting is far more disgusting than the ignorant and callous act of those 14-year-olds. -t |
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-Setsuna-
Posts: 2 |
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Hello guys, first of all I'd like to say that both of the cosplayers are my friends and I was with them at that convention. The Germany cosplayer wore her costume there for an hour or so, took some photos, changed and left that day. She ate some pasta with the Italy cosplayer and had fun with the rest of us all as we always do in normal conventions...
Now I know this subject is a sensitive one. I also know both of the cosplayers just portrayed the characters and weren't trying to send any messages or anything. Though the thing that you're forgetting is that this cosplay belongs to the anime Hetalia and even though the anime is mostly happy-go-lucky, it is a historical anime after all and it shows us all the mistakes the countries made and what they all went through in history. It doesn't particularly say "this is right, this is wrong". Neither does the cosplayer. You don't hide anything in history; in fact, you take lessons from it in order not to repeat the same mistakes. (Which is actually something the Italy cosplayer said after seeing the feedback the photo got.) Prohibiting the uniform and not allowing people to cosplay with it would only make things worse. Cosplay is an art, even though some think it's not. And in art, you sometimes step over lines that we don't in our normal lives. Portraying a country in its darkest times doesn't have to mean the "cosplayer" or the "photographer" supports it. It might offend and upset people, but not talking/photographing/writing/drawing about such matters WILL NOT fix them. Nobody was harmed in this photo-shoot and it definitely doesn't say "join the Nazis, it's something good". Please think twice before seeing everything in the negative meaning. Sometimes, while fighting against hate, you tend to become the haters. There is no need for that. I hope you all have a nice day. |
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dormcat
Encyclopedia Editor
Posts: 9902 Location: New Taipei City, Taiwan, ROC |
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Feel free to persuade Bundestag to change related laws. |
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-Setsuna-
Posts: 2 |
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That wasn't what i was trying to say, i was talking about making it illegal in every country. Also, it is not prohibited in our country. I think you missed the point and concentrated on a minor detail. |
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SailorTralfamadore
Posts: 499 Location: Keep Austin Weeb |
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Actually, one of the reasons Hetalia isn't more offensive is that they're pretty good at avoiding talking about the atrocities these countries committed. They never talk about the Holocaust or Nazis in the show, and from what my friends who've read more of the comic have told me, the same is true there. And I certainly never saw Prussia or Germany wearing any Nazi regalia in it. Hetalia is a comedy before it's an educational show, just a comedy where a lot of their jokes are based in knowing about certain historical events. They're not going to talk about the stuff that isn't funny.
Actually, even actual history books and documentaries leave stuff out all the time, either because it isn't relevant period or because they have a bias or other point they want to make and those facts are inconvenient to that. Maybe that's what you'd like history to be, but that's certainly not what it is.
Cosplay isn't the same thing as people reenacting this in a museum. Cosplay at conventions are meant to be for fun, not for biting social commentary.There are better places to express than where most people are just going to see you for a few seconds, and won't have you explain to them what your costume is "REALLY about", so of course they'll just be offended. Plus, as others have pointed out, plenty of governments around the world (including Germany's) have completely banned Nazi imagery anyway. I can't say that I fully agree with that as a First-Amendment-loving American, but that particular decision certainly doesn't seem to have "only made things worse". |
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