About

If Countries Were People is a popular forum game centered around a hypothetical scenario in which the participants try to reimagine nation-states as anthropomorphized characters with distinct personalities, in a similar vein to the premise of the Japanese manga webcomic series Hetalia. Since its emergence in the mid-2000s, the game has spawned several variations based on the snowclone If X Were People, including TV shows, films, bands and other media franchises.

Origin

Website anthropomorphism has been a long-running theme in meme culture since the early 2000s, as well as similar application to other groups of things, including nation-states, TV shows, drugs, automobiles and other consumer goods. While it is likely that usage of anthropomorphism in arts and literature predates the Internet age, the earliest known writing on the subject of "if countries were people" can be attributed to a blog post by Faithful Hound^[1], published on June 29th, 2006.

Precursor

Prior to being a trope on the internet, anthropomorphized countries were commonly used in allegorical and satirical literature, one of the most famous examples being George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945),^[19] which uses farm animals as representations of different countries, historical figures and ideologies.

Additionally, the idea of anthropomorphizing states, countries or other areas of land has been a common occurrence on television, perhaps, most famously on the animated sitcom The Simpsons. In the season five episode^[20] "$pringfield (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling)," which aired on December 16th, 1993, Homer, the father, helps his daughter Lisa with her school pageant, in which each student dresses up as a different U.S. state (shown below).

Spread

On April 1st, 2008, a member of the Civilization video game message board Civilization Fanatics Center,^[21] ArneHD, posted a thread called "If Nations Were Humans." In the post, the user listed a series of counties and personified them (excerpt below). The post received more than 50 responses.

On February 19th, 2010, the pilot season for HBO^[2] comedy series Funny Or Die began. One of the recurring sketches entitled titled "Playground Politics," in which a group of schoolchildren satirically plays out the personalities of various countries, used people as countries as the central conceit. In the sketches (examples below), children base their personification based on geopolitical relationships, which are then mapped onto schoolyard behavior.^[3]

On August 10th, 2011, Bungie.net^[5] forum member I am Gatorade started a thread titled "If countries were people and went to school together," which spawned 65 responses from dozens of other members on the site.

On March 11th, 2013, Cracked ^[12] aired the pilot episode of "If Websites Were Real," which brought renewed online interest in anthropomorphization of digital entities and media franchises.

In 2016, there were at least two Reddit threads with the subject "If X Were People. The first appeared on July 27th, entitled "If Cities Were People"^[8] and the other was published on August 10th, which Redditor pvr97aus05dc15 titled "if States Were People."^[9]

On August 3rd, 2016, Playbuzz^[11] posted a series of images entitled "What countries would look like if they were people," which literally anthropomorphized countries.

On July 31st, 2017, the Instagram^[22] account @memevist posted "If Skincare Products Were People," a variation on the meme. The post (shown below) was captioned "im uhh 50% tired, 25% sad + 25% anxious lmao,,, also this is not a new series, but i knew if i called it a beauty product people would be commenting informing me that it's not one!" Within one day, the post had more than 6,500 likes.

External References