Nations as People is a fascinating concept, but it's mainly used for political cartoons and things like Hetalia: Axis Powers and Scandinavia and the World. Even then, both works just poke fun at the nations and their personified relations. It's not like there could be any serious effects if there really were personified nations...
...right?
WorldStory is a soon-to-be-actually-published webcomic or book series, which explores the idea of Nations as People and plays it out as if they were always secretly present from the very start of human history, deconstructing it along the way.
Each comic of the randomly-ordered series focuses on a specific group of major characters, never the same for two comics, and all plots are strongly focused on parts of history. There is no set main character—it's whoever you want it to be, because history has no main character. The view, however, of each and every one is different depending on the comic. One country may be the protagonist of a comic, and the antagonist of another.
Basically, history textbooks meet Nations as People meet Deconstruction. And angst. Lots and lots of angst.
WorldStory provides examples of:
- Action Girl: All of the female nations are this or have a moment of it at one point.
- A Day in the Limelight: It’s the goal of the series to make many comics, each focusing on one time in history, that always center around a different group of nations each time.
- All Love Is Unrequited: Every nation has had a crush on another at one point. The love being reciprocated or not is another story.
- Arch-Enemy: England and France, America and the Soviet Union, Sweden and Denmark, Greece and the Ottoman Empire, Prussia and Austria, North and South Korea, China and Japan, the Roman Empire and Carthage…the list could go on forever. Basically, most nations have been at loggerheads with each other at some point.
- Berserk Button: Never call any nation weak or cowardly to their face, or tell them that they or their people deserved their national tragedies.
- Blessed with Suck: Nations are a different kind of human species: they're immortal, they can heal almost instantly or otherwise inhumanely quickly from wounds a normal human would probably die from, they have eternal youth, they have a sixth sense to tell apart a nation from a human...and yet, they learn to kill at an early age and almost always lose their parental figure(s) if they have any, see the horrors of war for hundreds and thousands of years, witness every national tragedy and go through every war that befalls them, can almost never get too attached to a human due to the eventual heartbreak, watch countless people die, and can never truly befriend, trust, or even love any of the other nations—the only ones who have also experienced their suffering. Wow.
- Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: America, France, and England (though the third's hair is more strawberry blond than actually red). True to the character types, England is fiery, France is smart, and while America isn't outright dumb, she can be pretty ditzy and is a bit Book Dumb.
- Break the Cutie: This is basically the treatment of every
nation when they grow up. - Literal Split Personality: Often happens when a nation is undergoing a civil war, if there aren't two siblings representing it already. Sometimes, one part of a nation's split personality is a gender-flip of the original nation.
- Meaningful Name: Each of the nations choose their human names because of a significant figure in their history or folklore, or has one of the most well-known names from their country.
- Older Than They Look: All of the nations look like they're in their late teens or early twenties, but are hundreds and thousands of years old.
- Sibling Rivalry: Common among the nations. Some cases are Scotland and England, North and South Korea, and Ireland and North Ireland.
- Sweet Polly Oliver: In historical times, the female nations often pulled this off to get away with being in combat.
- Who Wants to Live Forever?: All the nations are immortal...which means they've seen every tragedy that happened to them for hundreds and thousands of years, and can't die unless the countries themselves break apart and people no longer use those national identities.
- World of Badass
- Would Hit a Girl: Required for nations. In war, gender standards are practically nonexistent for them. Examples are the England/France, Spain/Portugal, America/Soviet Union, and Sweden/Denmark rivalries.
