User blog:Ceras SanMarina/Thoughts.

I wonder how well a general Kitayume wikia would be received, or how it may work out. I've been considering possibly starting one up, since Kitakou has been getting scanlations and more info on it has become available. There's a Japanese fanwiki for the Kitayume characters already, but it'd be fun to have something for others who can't speak/read Japanese.

One problem is that Himaruya deleted a good deal of stuff related to both Kitakou and Barjona over the years, and some trivia on the series only lives on by fans' words (such as Noto's change in personality). Looking at "Noto-sama"'s character chart, there are a number of characters that I don't really recognize from the series either. Apparently Himaruya did some games based off of Kitakou, which he later deleted.

It seems that we've had a misconception about Hetalia all this time too, as it appears only chapter 1 of the webcomic was a 2003 thing (not sure about the Japan omake), if what I've read is right. The "flagship" webcomic for Kitayume was actually Kitakou in 2003, and Hetalia was spun off into a full series in about 2005 or 2006 (maybe even 2004, someone claims to have seen some Hetalia stuff as far back as either 2004 or 2005 when Kitayume got linked on a wank community then, but they thought little of it at the time). Barjona seems to have been made before the Hetalia series, and it appears Kitakou was abandoned later on in favor of Barjona (while both seem to have been abandoned for Hetalia, which has taken a backseat to "Chibi-san").

The Asia Profiles
I'm considering doing revamps on the profiles too, especially where it concerns Japan, China, and Korea. Though the last incident on the wikia got resolved, it appears Japanese fans think international fans are quite anti-Japan, or make him seem more "evil" than he is. Apparently the Hetalia livejournal community and some of the English scanlations gave them that impression too.

The thing is, if there were certain strips mistranslated, it's hard to really tell if no one offers to correct them or if there aren't any retranslated versions. And then there's the controversy over whether "Japan betrayed China" or not (um...). It seems the Japanese fandom feels Himaruya even got things wrong about Japan and the other nations, which kind of amuses me (though it's hard for me to read most Japanese text, I do know some fans that can understand it better and sometimes online translators can net legible results in between all the awkward translation gibberish).

Still wondering whether to render their names in Western order or not, though. That WOULD be the question!

Other things

 * Looking back at the Swiss Dopiness scanlations, I saw a footnote I had forgotten where Himaruya mentions Prussia as having grown out of the Margraviate of Brandenburg. He was probably just talking about the historical Prussia and it might not have had anything to do with his plans for Gilbert, but I still find it interesting. But then you have Himaruya's later profile for Gilbert which boils his evolution down to: "St.Maria Order" -&gt; "Teutonic Knights" -&gt; "Prussia". I guess this is where that "Brandenburg is an offshoot that merged back with Prussia" fan-theory could come into play. But then what of Baltic Prussia? There's the theory that Gilbert killed him, but detractors of that one point out that it would be odd for him to keep the Old Prussian place names. It's interesting stuff to think of for fanfiction or headcanon, that's for sure.

(Personally, I think of Gilbert as being Brandenburg in the present day and just going by "Prussia" anyway. I think it makes sense, when you consider how closely tied both were and that Brandenburg was the source of power for Prussia. The books I've read lately on the Kingdom have further made me consider that. And whether he started as Brandenburg or Teutonic Knights, he's still "younger" than HRE unless you consider him Baltic Prussia. I'm not sure what theory Japanese fandom subscribes to, but he's generally portrayed as that older brother to HRE, whether or not they go with "HRE=Germany")


 * Himaruya has made a website for Chibi-san Date, but the flash is awfully slow: http://www.kitayume.us/chibisan_date.html . To my knowledge, there have been no scanlations for this series yet.


 * I wonder what should be done about all the pairing articles. At first, the past-tense format I used seemed to make sense in my head at the time, but Infiniteowl's way seemed to make sense too. I guess the individual strip cases can work for smaller pairings, while for the ones like Germany/Italy, it would probably work better to just give the run-down treatment. I don't know. I've grown a little tired of working on the pairing articles myself, mainly since my focus strayed further away from that. Germany/Italy was one that I didn't think I could handle writing since it'd have to be quite in-depth, but the trollings on the wikia (including a crappy trolled version of an article for it) prompted me to make one. HRE/Chibitalia was one I had fun working on at the time (what with all the debate of whether HRE is or isn't Germany). I'm glad that there was clarification on the Reichs bit because that confused me some when it was first added (yet I kept that bit anyway in case and just edited the formatting some). I wouldn't say the Reichs bit would be the best "evidence" to use especially due to the propaganda and Nazi relation (the odd few Germancest fangirls who use Hitler's quote about the "marriage of old Prussia and new Germany" as evidence for why Germancest should be canon definitely make me irritated. 'Cause if you're trusting the words of Nazis to try and boost your ship...I don't know what to say about that. Doesn't help that these same ones had thinly-veiled racism towards Italians because "Italy did bad things in WWII" and bashed the character and his fans for it too.), though it does make me wonder if Himaruya has ever heard of that or not.


 * Would you believe I have almost 2000 edits by now? I can't D:.