What gets me about Swedish stereotypes is how we're apparently seen as pretty alien, to the point where there's an actual recognized type of alien in UFOlogy that's just "looks vaguely nordic".

The stereotypes applied to us aren't particularly negative in the grand scheme of things (if anything we have a reputation of being cozy and progressive that's entirely unearned) and they aren't particularly inaccurate in the grand scheme of things either (sure, I had a US friend who was under the impression that Amsterdam is a Swedish city, but at least he got the continent right, which is more than some countries get), but at least in my limited experience, Swedish stereotypes in particular seem especially surreal.

Sometimes it feels like foreigners don't quite know what to make of Sweden and they are willing to believe just about anything could go down here.

I guess that's what you get when your international legacy is like five parts furniture store, one part arthouse cinema, two parts pornography, ½ part conservatives yelling about how terrible we are, ½ part liberals idolizing us and the rest being some vague notions about vikings.

I think that's why the whole "swedes don't feed their guests!" smear campaign proved so sticky, people where like it's Scandinavia who knows what they are up to up there? Sure, they let their guests serve, sounds plausible.

(For the record, that whole thing is based on like, suburban families hosting kids from other suburban families who have dinner waiting at home and it's an outdated notion on top of that, it's not generalizeable to culture at large. Mind you, we are antisocial in many other ways, but this stereotype in particular is false.)

@Owlor we should start a conspiracy theory that Sweden isn’t real, and Swedes are actually alien entities that enter our reality via SCP-3008