Forget everything you learned in history class, and imagine all the nations of the world as cute guys hanging out on a wildly inappropriate reality show. Now, toss in every stereotype ever and prepare to pledge allegiance to your favourite superhero in Hetalia Axis Powers!
Maybe you'll surrender to Italy's charm. He's a sweetie who's always got a noddle in his mouth and he's BFF with blue-eyed Germany and shy Japan. Sounds nice, right? Of course, their friendship sort of causes WWII, but is that really such a big deal? Not if it means those adorable allies France, America, and England will be stormin' the beach!
Hetalia presents an allegorical (A story in which people, things and happenings have another meaning, often in structure, as in fable) interpretation of political and historical events, particularly of the WWII era, in which various countries are represented by anthropomorphic ( means "human shaped", attributing of human shape to god, object, ect…) characters.
So far, over 40 countries have been personified as human characters. In Hetalia, these characters are normally referred to by their country's name. Other places that are not necessarily countries have also appeared as characters, including ancient empires such as the Roman Empire, Germania and micro nations such as Sealand.
As listed above each country/nation has a representative, each representative has a different stereotype that contributes to their country,Such as Alfred (America) is often seen eating cheeseburgers, Hercules (Greece) loves cats, Feliciano (Italy) is addicted to pasta, and the most infamous one: Francis (France) is the extreme bisexual hopeless romantic.
It was originally going to be aired on TV, but Korean protesters found its portrayal of the Korea character (Im Young Soo) to be offensive. (So it was cancelled.)
Each representative has a human name as well, I mean come on how you would act if someone said "s'up china", it'd be really weird.
Many Hetalia characters have noticeable taglines, such as China constantly saying "aru," Russia letting out a "kolkolkol" when he is displeased, or Romano shouting "chigi!" Other phrases, such as "I'm the hero!" (America) or "I'm awesome!" (Prussia) have become memes within themselves. Perhaps the most recognizable line is Italy's "pastaaa~!" from the first episode. Another popular tagline within the Hetalia fandom is asking "who?" whenever Canada is mentioned. This is due to the Character Canada constantly being ignored by the other characters, and he is even shown to be somewhat translucent at times.
A very distinct feature that many Hetalia characters have is an ahoge, or piece of hair that sticks out from their head. Examples include America, Canada, the Italy brothers, South Korea, Taiwan, Austria etc. In some cases (the Italies), the ahoge is said to be an "erogenous zone." Austria, however, just seems to be annoyed when his ahoge is tugged.