Hi everybody, good buddy Kyo here… uhm, I'm not really used to this. Sorry for the nervousness. I'm not really sure about how to go about this. I mean, it's sort of out of the blue but I want to at least put what happened out there for other Hetalia fans like myself. I guess I'll just talk… type or whatever and just get this through. As much of an interesting experience this was, I'd rather not remember it and continue on with my derp life.
All right so, this happened a while ago, before school started, that it went down. But I should probably go back even further to when it really first started. It was when Axis Powers Hetalia was in full swing; second season was still bounding through the fandom and giving out new glorious episodes every Monday.
My older sister and I were both very involved in the series, which was a rare occasion since she often didn't share interests with me. Oh sure, I would force myself to get into whatever she was getting into so we could at least have a reason to hang out, but this was the first she came into my fandom without me working for it. It was really nice. Considering it was still unknown in our small town, it was even nicer to just have someone to relate to.
She and I cosplayed it together, watched episodes together, got merchandise together, you know the whole kit-caboodle. Though she was always able to get more stuff than I was because she actually had a job. At some point, she actually bought a bootleg DVD of Hetalia so she could watch it any time (A picture of which I've provided here thanks to my mother lending me her camera for a second before she had it sold the next week), of course all the episodes just being ripped from the internet sites that had them subbed. I watched one or two episodes with her but really I was content with watching them online so I left her to it.
About two or three days after she got the DVD, she acted really… weird, is the best way I can describe it. In a drop of a hat, she dropped the whole Hetalia series, setting aside her merchandise and shelving her Hetalia cosplays, even selling some of them. When I tried to ask her about what was up, she just said she didn't want to talk about it to the point that she'd glare at me if I mentioned it to her. I was extremely disappointed at losing my sister when it came to sibling bonding and the fandom, at the time just figuring she 'grew out of it' or found something even better. That mindset especially fit in when she started to read Homestuck soon after it to have something to do.
Now here's where it got even weirder, now it's been a while since then probably like about a month or so. I'm not sure why, probably a phone call from my best friend, I got the urge to watch some episodes with just some classic good ol' Italy. Though currently the internet was being worked on by my father, since he was changing phone providers and all that mess, so I decided to look for that Hetalia DVD my sister had.
It took me a long while but I found it shoved in the back of the DVD cabinet, not sure exactly why she shoved it back there... well at the time. The bootleg wasn't that bad really; it had fan art of the everyone as chibi's around the world with the title on top, same for the disc just printed on fan art. I popped the DVD in the player in my room and decided to look through the episodes to find a really fun one, maybe the one when Romano is first introduced.
As I went through the 'Episode Choice' option though, I found something really weird in between episode 23 and 24; for those who don't know it's the 'Liechtenstein and Switzerland' episodes, very cute indeed~ and the 24th has the conclusion of the Axis on an Island arc.. thing. But there was another square choice like an episode, but there really wasn't a title next to it, saying what number it was or what the episode was about. Though it wasn't that it was untitled that caught my interest, but the screenshot of it. It was Italy smiling, looking upwards in a content daze (his eyes actually OPENED mind you!) with glistening eyes and what looked like sand, like perhaps he was laying on it.
