I'm not surprised. As a rule, people tend to be blind to anything that's outside of their own country. Generalizations are deceptively useful since they allow us to give the false impression that we know what we're talking about when referencing the outside world. Shit, yesterday, I made the mistake of assuming that Australia's capital was Sydney, for instance! Canberra? Nope, that one wasn't even in a corner of my mind. D'oh!
We've all heard 'em: Canadians are friendly but spineless, eh? Americans are fat and tasteless and everyone looks and sounds like a Good Old Boy from Texas. The English are all uniformly posh and pretentious and everyone in Japan is a die-hard Otaku who's going to be SUPER IMPRESSED once you tell them their framed Love Hina picture is Supa Supa Kawaii Desu.
It's life, man. Stereotypes are comfortable, and I find them useful as a writer. You can take one, break it down, glue one or two aspects of it onto a different frame, change the ethnicity, tweak the background and think up a motivation and voilà - a decently written character!
I'm surprised, though. It might be some sort of post-Berlin Wall affect, but if you ask me to put a cliché German character together on purpose, I come out of that process with a monocle-wearing Herr who pets fluffy white cats on his off days and spends his evenings plotting world domination or wondering about his Swiss bank accounts.
Seig Heil and shit doesn't even factor into it. Huh.
