Okay listen: I've got a confession to make.
I'm discontinuing this story.
I'm really really sorry...I know I've promised countless times in the chapters that you'll all definitely get to see the ending I had planned, and it doesn't turn out that way anyway.
The ending that I had planned, so you can see it: they all go back to earth somehow. They're literally thrown out of the spaceships because of a revolt among the aliens. America has some sort of brain tumor that requires him to stay, maybe. Or they just kill him. Because he'll eventually respawn, right? RIGHT? I didn't know. I still don't know. Russia would go out into a snow-covered field of sunflowers (how the fuck would that work, btw) and shoot himself in the head. Would he die? Would he regenerate? Who fucking knows. Nationhood was really badly defined overall. The characterization was awful. It was all just bad.
It's just not going anywhere. I started it in middle school based on the image of Russia burning to death accompanied by that Ed Sheeran song "The A Team" that planted itself in my mind for some reason and ended up rambling for a really long time in a bunch of notebooks. I was in love with the idea of no happy ending - in books, you can always anticipate that when the main character(s) go in with their plan, it will succeed. And I wanted to break every expectation of that, and since the only fandom I was in was Hetalia at the time, I ran with that. But the problem is, the nations are stronger than this. They've endured worse for their countries. The torture is pretty bad, but so many worse things have happened that it pales in comparison. Maybe something like Kagerou Project or even Tokyo Ghoul, where the characters I wanted to destroy aren't eternal gods of the land.
But back to breaking expectations - I wanted to defy the main characters so completely that they were powerless. Everything they tried would fail. The only reason that they got back to earth at all was on the whims of the aliens - because there were two ranks, the "common" people, and the scientists. The nations were high priority for the scientists, so the common people, during the revolt, got rid of them to spite the scientists, and all the crap in the atmosphere was taken by the aliens since they still needed a new power source. However, the reader only finds this out through Lithuania, who breaks character and steals a helicopter to get into the ships and then promptly gets lost. The thing is - all the planning and scheming by the nations meant NOTHING. The aliens were superior in almost every way.
I'll be honest - I'm still a lot of a sadist. I still like the idea of a story where everyone is nearly powerless. But full powerlessness is almost as boring as everything managing to go off with nary a hitch. Hetalia is also kind of a bad fandom for trying to make people powerless and broken in - they've got to carry entire nations on their backs this whole time. They're not that fragile that a few nightmares would break them. A human AU would've been better, but even that would've failed - I'm so brutal with all my characters that the humans would've died right off the bat. Which still would be all right for me, except that I need them all alive for later actions. Also, what I did to the nations in some future plans was break them so thoroughly that they probably wouldn't recover anyway, so there's no point in that. Tokyo ghoul definitely would've been better, what with their advanced regen & stuff. But then the ghouls would starve to death b/c no flesh for them to eat. Or there would be flesh, and Kaneki would have to struggle with the ethics of eating "mysteriously procured flesh" or maybe he wouldn't depending on when they were taken. But this isn't about Tokyo Ghoul.
I might type up a quick plot synopsis of the second half of what I planned as a separate chapter, so you at least won't be hanging on a cliff this whole time. If anyone cares to see that, let me know in a PM or review, otherwise I won't.
By the way, this chapter was supposed to go like this: Italy has a nightmare about a teleporting tree that transcends time but not location that eats him and then he goes absolutely batshit insane. It was spooky when I wrote it at 1 AM as a 12-year-old, but described like this, it's pretty fucking dumb.
There was also a part in the further future that started out ok but then delved into incest before I remembered that in my canon, HK & Taiwan are related and revised the whole thing. It's still hella sketchy and ugh.
Once again, I'm really sorry for dragging this out so long to cancel it at the last moment. (at this point I'm not sure if ANYONE'S still reading this/waiting on a new chapter since it's been more than half a year, but there's probably at least one person...) I hope that this crime of mine is forgivable.