Hetalia

Axis Powers Hetalia, alternately known as Hetalia, APH, Hetalia: Axis Powers, and Hetalia: World Series, is an Anime/Manga series by Hidekaz Himaruya. It is a comedic retelling of world history by using anthropomorphic personifications to represent different countries, starting with the Axis and Allied Powers of World War Two. Hetalia is a portmanteau of the Japanese words "Hetare" and "Italia", the former meaning something like "pathetic" or "helpless" and the latter being Japanese for "Italy". It is a reference to one of the main characters, who represents (Northern) Italy and is well known for both his love of pasta and his tactics of either surrendering or running away when confronted with a fight.

The series started out as a webcomic before becoming popular enough to spawn both a manga and an anime, along with a movie named "Paint it, White", a video game, and several CDs. It is meant to be a humorous series, hence the title and the behaviors of the personifications of the nations themselves. The series is not set on any specific timeline, though it did start out with WWII, and so tends to cover a wide range of both nations and historical events such as both World Wars, colonizations/conquests of Italy (both the northern and southern parts, which are represented by two separate characters), and the War of Austrian Succession along with some strips/episodes that don't focus on any particular time period and/or are set in modern times.

This series does suffer from some shipping wars, but luckily due to the enormous cast&mdash;over 40 characters have shown up in some way in the series&mdash;and abundance of justifications for ships (due to historical or canon events) they usually are not too serious nor result in too many cases of characters dying for a ship. However, this does not mean that the fandom is scotch free of any bad slash and is probably more prone to it as the majority of the cast are males.

The International Academy of Hetalia Fanfiction is the OFU for Hetalia and is written by Lily Winterwood.

Agents Native to Hetalia
At this time none are known about.

Missions in This Continuum
Also none at this time.