Danbooru

Hetalia & Human Names

Posted under General

As some of you may know by now, a lot of characters from Axis Powers Hetalia have human names alongside their country name. For example, Belarus is really "Natalia Arlovskaya", China is really "Wang Yao" and so forth. I figure sometime in the future that this would've came up, so I'll just tackle it now.

It appears that those "human names" were given by the original author yet aren't used by him today.

Most of the earlier cast members have a "human name" in addition to their nation name, though they were never used in the actual series and were first given to the characters by Himaruya when a fan requested alternate names to refer to the characters by when it came to shipping them.

Despite never being used in canon, the alternate human names stuck with the characters until late 2007, when Himaruya shut down his old blog and completely redesigned his Hetalia website. Characters created after 2007, later in that year, or that were not mentioned in the original name listing, do not have any sort of official human name to refer to them by and are only known by their nation names.

The early character profiles also gave most of the characters "human ages", but this detail was dropped following the redesign of the profile page. However, some later-personified nations (such as Iceland) do have an age listed for them in their character designs.

With that in mind, do we want to use their real names? What will be Danbooru's naming policy on this? Are we to continue with country_(hetalia) format?

The way I see it is that we have a few options, the only issue is consistency. While most countries have a human name, there are a few that haven't been given one.

If we are to change it, it should look something like either of these:

Natalia_Arlovskaya
Natalia_Arlovskaya_(Belarus)

The rest is in your hands now, I suppose. I'd just like to say I'm fine with leaving it how it is, and the change would require a lot of aliasing I think. We're probably better off leaving it alone but I just wanted to get this topic over with.

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