#mha226

[thequietmanno1]

Thelreads, MHA 226, Replies Part 2

1) “Oh she’s not happy having to revisit all those painful memories, at all.”- That and I think that’s she’s pissed that Curious is judging and labelling her from an outsider’s perspective of her actions, re-contextualising them to fit within Curious’s views, rather than honestly attempting to see things from Toga’s perspective and understand how she sees the world. Curious is interesting in Toga’s story, but she’s not really interested in ‘hearing’ the story as it stands- simply finding out the parts of it that align most with the narrative she intends to write for the MLA’s propaganda

2) “Oh fuck  you, you overgrown evil smuf. What, isn’t blowing her up enough, you also need to conjure a fucking gauntlet to flatten her face?”- I kinda think she does actually. Curious’s quirk seems to differ from Bakugou’s in that it seems she can’t explode herself, but can explode other things. Curious is able to detonate her mines with a thought from a safe distance, but said distance indicates that she ‘needs’ to be that far enough away from the explosion, since unlike Bakugou she’s not immune to the blasts that she produces. This indicates that her quirk is supposed to be something to be used long-distance, as is she’s too close, Curious will get hurt from her own explosions. 

Therefore, her body can’t naturally explode itself, nor does it have natural defences against explosions, so to help encourage Curious to keep her distance, the quirk simply turns any object or person she touches into a walking bomb. If Curious picked up a stick, she could turn said stick into a mine, but exploding it would also blow her hand up. Therefore, the gauntlet is an object designed to be an activator and focuser of her quirk, directing the explosion in one direction whilst also acting as an object she can activate the quirk on. Plus, it’s a massive big brass knuckle, so that’s always handy to have in a fight.

3) “Sure, it wasn’t the way she was treated ever since she was a kid by parents that clearly despised her for being different and how she was made to just act like she was told instead of actually helping her understand what she was doing, or finding ways to help her, oh no, its society’s fault….”- Well, in certain regards that’s not wrong either- it was society’s collective pressurisation and condemnation of non-conformists and their families that motivated Toga’s parents to teach their daughter to suppress her ‘undesirable’ traits, though presumably it’s something along the line of an informal understanding?

Society obviously won’t tell parents to force their children to repress themselves to Toga’s extent outright, but the collective opinions of the people around them clearly would have had a negative view of the family as a reflection on the daughter’s behaviour, so whilst it didn’t outright ‘say’ that Toga needed to ‘conceal, don’t feel’ herself, it didn’t dissuade the family from taking that course of action, even if they took things too far in the end.

4) “Not that the detail would matter, you already said you want to use her death in your favour and is willing to distort it to do so, and if you only want the details to just satiate your thirst for knowledge then- “- Well, for Curious to twist the narrative to her advantage, she has to ‘know’ what that narrative is in full. She may be a crazed fanatic, but she’s also a journalist at heart, and she clearly wants to confirm or validate her hypothesis with Toga before she goes to print. Curious may be fine with altering the view of Toga’s past to suit the MLA’s agenda, but outright printing and publishing false information? That’s something no journalist would willing do- you can’t move the people’s hearts with faked news sensations- it’s gotta be genuine at heart!

5) “I said before how Toga seems to be out of touch with reality, like the Pyro from TF2, correlating her murders with normal stuff, but now I’m getting sad because I know that she really never was taught what or why it wasn’t right.”- It’s hard to teach somebody right from wrong when they’ve been taught from an early age that part of themselves is naturally ‘wrong’ even though it feels right to them and is a natural part of their psychological make-up. Toga couldn’t find acceptance within Society’s ridged views of ‘normalcy’, so ironically, it was only within the more open-minded and accepting group or murderers and villains in the league that she can find a place to be who she really is. 

It’s only amongst fellow outcasts who don’t fit into the system that Toga can be told she’s not wrong for being the way she is, so clearly defending them, even to the point of getting shredded like this, is clearly something ‘right’ for Toga. She’s a serial Killer, but she’s got a heart that cares deeply about things around her, just like everybody else. If she can only find a place to be amongst a villain group like the league, then clearly she’ll embrace being a villain if it means protecting the one place she feels at home with.

6) “She put another mask to escape the things that woman was saying, and the pain she was feeling. It was right when she was being told how miserable she was for acting like like that that she become another person, again, not exactly subtle, but still really well placed.”-It may also be partially out of a desire for companionship in a really stressful moment. It’s all but stated that Toga swings both ways because her idea of suitable partners is tied up with blood, which doesn’t differentiate between male or female (unless you want to get some in-depth CSI analysis in there) so Toga ‘loves’ Uraraka as equally as she does Izuku- in fact, I kinda get the vibe she wants to be in a relationship with the both of them at the same time. 

Toga’s alone, in mental and physical agony and facing the very real possibility that she’s about to die here, so her transforming into Uraraka could be seen as her trying to get close to one of the people she most admires as a means of having them spiritually standing beside her in this sea of enemies. Toga thinks she’s going to die alone here, separated from her teammates, and without them, she lacks anybody else in the ‘normal’ world that she used to have a bond with- her friends, her family, all that vanished when she took her mask off, but in this manner, she can feel like she’s got somebody in her corner cheering her on even as she faces the firing squad down.

7) “Yeah, it seems like it was just that, he knows that Midoriya loves Uraraka, and she subconsciously turned into her, because, like she put, she wanted to get closer to the people she loves, and Midoriya is the spitting image of that boy she turned into a knife-holder.”- Actually, it might be the opposite- Uraraka seems more aware of her feelings towards Izuku, than vice-versa- Izuku’s got a lot on his mind right now, what with All Might retiring and the changes in OFA, so he’s not really thought a lot about romance in general, but Uraraka’s free of all those worries, so she’s more able to see Izuku is a relaxed light and admire him from afar. It’s similar to how Toga admires the pair of them from afar, and just like Uraraka secretly hopes Izuku will one day understand and return her affections, Toga hopes the same from the pair of them.

She wants to be close to both of them, because she can tell there’s a genuine bond between them that she also wants- it may actally be exactly what she was looking for when she gave her own ‘love confession’ to Saito, and not receiving what she was hoping for, consoled herself by indulging in her blood cravings whilst looking for that special something in her victims, something she wants, but has never been given, no matter how hard she acted the normal girl- somebody to genuinely understand and bond with the ‘real’ version of Toga, in spite of her flaws.

8) “SHE CAN USE OTHER’S QUIRKS AS WELL?!

HOLY FUCK TOGA WHY DIDN’T YOU EVER USED THAT BEFORE?! OR DIDN’T YOU KNOW ABOUT IT? HOW COULD YOU NEVER DISCOVER SOMETHING LIKE THIS?!”-It’s a logical side-effect of her own power’s limitation- like Monoma, she has a time limit for how long she can stay transformed, so she’s already had to deal with the complications that come from her body physically transforming into a new shape whilst moving around- it’s difficult enough to learn how to move normally in a new body- activating said body’s unique quirk would be an additional complication on top of that, especially since it’d be rare of Toga to have studied her kills enough to realise what their powers were and how they used them. 

She had her quirk’s usage suppressed throughout Middle School to fit in, so she only really started using it regularly once she ended up on the run from the heroes and police. Just like Deku, she never pushed her powers to the limit, and thus lacked an understanding of her power’s potential, nor had a reason to experiment with her abilities- she got along just fine with what she had by drinking their blood and physically transforming into somebody else- she probably assumed that was the extent of her quirk’s shapeshifting abilities. Additionally, it seems Toga likes turning into ‘cute’ people she likes, whom all seem to have a generally humanoid body-type. Toga isn’t interested in drinking the blood of guys like Shoji or Ojiro, because they’re not her type, therefore she never turned into an in-humanoid body before and thus never realised she could duplicate heteromorphic-quirks as well, in addition to regular quirks.

Uraraka is the exception to all that, because circumstances prevented Tog from Sucking her dry when she got her blood sample, and her interest in her drove her to analyse her character and fighting style at the first opportunity she got, which happened to be the licence test, where Uraraka had to demonstrate her quirk’s combat usage by necessity. Her quirk having such an easy activation switch and physical release move, in contrast to whatever Curious does to mentally explode her mines, made it even easier for Toga to use the quirk, because she knew Uraraka to a better Standard than her usual targets, thanks in part to her obsession with shipping her, Uraraka and Izuku.

9) “HOLY FUCK NOW SHE’S ABOUT TO WIPE THE WHOLE ROOM CLEAN WITH JUST A SINGLE MOVE

SHE’S ABOUT TO SLAM-DUNK THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS”- Good think Uraraka’s power is a combo-type. Land consecutive hits, and then finish off the special move for a multiplied high score and a TPK. Therein lies the downside of surrounding yourself with mindless followers willing to sacrifice themselves for your sake- if something happens to you, they’re all left wide open for a killing stoke. After all, they’re already willing to throw their lives away to protect you, if you get hurt, they’re going to be too preoccupied with trying to save you to think about protecting themselves, hence why Toga was able to float the entire street before anybody could stop her- their fanaticism backfired on Curious’s strategy to beat Toga.  

As an aside, Toga’s also really lucky that Uraraka’s quirk has high defensive properties as well. It doesn’t matter how hard you hit somebody if you weigh absolutely nothing- the law of inertia will send you flying backwards instead, minimising the damage you take from whoever’s targeted by the quirk. In fact, that seems to be how Curious goes flying off there- the force of her own explosion buffeted her upwards once her weightlessness came into effect and she floated backwards from the blast, hence how she gets so high so fast. That actually adds more Karma to her demise- not only is she killed by her own power indirectly, she’s killed because she literally and metaphorically got too close to the sun in the process of achieving her goals. 

Uraraka’s power is touch-based, Curious’s is long-range and requires no physical movement to activate. If Curious had stayed away from Toga and relived upon her meat-shields to defend her, she’d have beaten Toga out in endurance, but because she got too wrapped up in the story, and assumed Toga was too near-dead to properly fight back, she got up close and personal to get the in-depth scoop, allowing her to be affected by the zero gravity and for her entire gang of followers to fall next when they realised she was in danger and took their eyes off Toga. Curious killed herself by engaging in a needless battle to state her own desires, rather than relying on the disposable Liberation mooks to wear the league down from a safe distance.

10) “Uraraka would instinctively know to touch her enemies to dispose of them, but you wouldn’t, and yet you still acted in that way. Like you almost became her for a moment…”- Interestingly, it seems to combine their fighting style for a moment there. Toga’s dropped her last knife, so she’s bare-handed and thus not able to fight in her preferred manner, whereas Uraraka never uses a weapon because her gravity power is an unparalleled advantage in close-range, the only downside being that Uraraka needs to be physically capable of getting close and taking the opponent in hand-to-hand. Toga’s trained her body-to above average levels in her serial killer modius operendi, but she’s based her entire fighting style around using blades and hand-held weapons to attack, lacking bare-handed means of fighting. Toga seems to instinctually combine both their fighting styles to rapidly affect as many liberation goons as she can, before she even recognises what she’s doing. 

Part of it may be instinctual or subconscious understanding of how Uraraka’s powers work thanks to her Quirk’s ability to absorb and replicate her appearance and quirk, part of it may be toga subconsciously realising the best way to take advantage of her new-found power before everybody can react to the sudden turn of events, but either way it’s indicative of what Toga said about becoming those she loves. Toga basically becomes Uraraka’s evil counterpart here, using her powers in an overwhelmingly violent manner completely opposite to the first time we saw her use it to save Izuku- from falling to boot, for extra irony- and the torn ‘mask’ on the double-spread shot showing Uraraka’s warped expression with the ‘real’ Toga’s bloodied face peeking through it. It’s like Toga summoned Uraraka in her hour of need to save her and fight beside her on behalf of the league, and it’s possible that if Toga absorbed enough blood from her target, she could actually develop a perfect mental copy of Uraraka inside her own head, fitting with her desire to become her in mind and body.

11) “FUCK’S SAKE HORIKOSHI, STOP WITH THE FUCKING WHIP, I’M TRYING TO UNDERSTAND WHAT’S GOING ON”- Just Horikoshi reminding you and Toga that she hasn’t miraculously healed from her internal injuries, she’s still basically 95% dead on her feet, and that her borrowed power, and the transformation that comes with it, is running out. It’s actually possible that the more Toga uses a Target’s duplicated quirk, the faster her blood supply and resulting transformation runs out, hence the mask starting to peel off here is a sign that she hit her limit when using zero gravity and can’t float any more target, though the end result would still be the same even if she didn’t voluntarily release the quirk.

12) “Oh yeah, she pulled a shonen-protag on us, and we didn’t even saw it coming”- The league didn’t just hijack the title, they hijacked the 1A kid’s roles as heroes in the story, will all the associated benefits that come with the job, such as spontaneously developing new powers ( or rather, re-contextualising the powers they already possess in new and effective ways)  in crisis situations.

13) “DING DONG, THE BITCH’S FUCKING DEAD”- I actually like the fan- translated version of this scene more.

Really sells how she’s so wrapped up in her journalistic mania, the concept of her own morality hasn’t even entered her mind, even as she’s plummeting to the ground.

14) “My god, that was quite the backstory, and I feel like a fool for being played like that by Horikoshi, that bastard. I was believing he would go the “She was born twisted” angle and was quite disappointed for a moment, before he slapped me in the face and said “HA, YOU’RE WRONG, YOU IDIOT””- Rather than ‘twisted’ it’s more like Toga was born a little ‘different’ than others, but societal pressure and their desire to not be seen an ‘inadequate parents’ due to their daughter’s ‘bad behaviour’ caused her parent to attempt to over-correct Toga’s behaviour, eventually pushing her to the breaking point. If anything Twisted her, it’s the social consciousness that her inherent needs were something to be repressed rather than accepted and adapted. 

Toga just needed somebody to understand her- still does, in fact- which may be why she’s so fascinated with Izuku, who’s somebody willing to reach a hand out to others in need, even if he knows they’re not on his side, as Toga saw first-hand in the licence exam.

@thelreads​

#bnha #thelreads #mha226 #chapter replies #my hero academia

[thequietmanno1]

Thelreads, MHA 226, Replies Part 1

1) “Time to see the truth with my own eyes, on Chapter 226: Bloody Love.”-

L: ‘realises the truth of Toga’s situation is that she was failed by both family, friends and society until she fell beyond the point of no return and became a blood-crazed killer without anybody able or willing to show her the proper way to live’ Me: Truth hurts, don’t it?

2) “Right at the moment her mask fell completely and she snapped, oh this is just what I needed…”- Judging from the way they refer to that Saito guy in the present and not the past tense indicates that he survived Toga’s love confession, but It’s likely the event was severely traumatic from him and his fellow classmates- dude’s probably still carrying the scars around with him at whichever school they went to- probably has trouble sleeping and such too, given how Toga’s been appearing on the news in nation-wide events like Kamino and then managing to escape law enforcement time and again- can’t be good for his mental health being reminded that she’s still out there, free and walking about, not to mention her quirk could potentially allow her to be anyone around him, still wanting to finish the job she started…granted, he can’t know Toga’s moved on to another lookalike, and has bigger concerns than him, but the poor guy must be having one hell of a hard time as the league grows in fame and notoriety

3) “Oh jesus fuck Toga, a fucking straw? Are you kidding me? That sounds ridiculous instead of disturbing.”- assuming it wasn’t something she picked out of the school cafeteria, it shows premeditation in Toga’s attack on him, that she’d planned on draining his blood in the most efficient manner to avoid splattering too much of it around and to most efficiently drain it from the wound- thinking about it, her needles and IV drips are basically just more combat-capable version of her initial ‘gear’ here, allowing her to drain the blood at a moment’s notice in the heat of combat without spilling a drop

4) “Uhhhhuuu… Alright, I take it back, it managed to get creepy. Really creepy.”-considering that Saito’s still alive and was clearly writhing about in pain on the ground in the prior scene, this panel looks like it was taken from his POV of Toga as she ‘kissed’ him, emphasising her horrifying nature to the victim, especially since her straw would have required her to lean close to him anyway. Poor guy was probably pinned down watching Toga suck away his life blood for several minutes before someone noticed what was happening, given how empty the corridors are- it’s likely he followed toga to a private location to give his love confession to her, only for that to backfire on him with Toga’s own ‘confession’

5) “Jesus fuck Toga what is with that face oh my god this is so messed up, considering this is supposed to be the moment she snapped and showed who she was behind her mask… She’s supposed to be happy here, and that just sent a chill up and down my spine.”- Well, she finally crossed the point of no return, and she’s experiencing a flood of emotions from what she’d doing- relief and happiness at throwing away her mask and indulging in her desires, free of the constraints her family tried to enforce on her, to the point that she’s moved to tears, but at the same time, there’s a hint of sadness in those tears, as someone as Smart as Toga must be aware that she’s now lost the happy ‘normal’ life she had before, including the friends and family she’d nurtured since childhood, and that loss must be affecting her to, even through the euphoria she’s immersed in. Toga’s just in a state of pure emotion right now, beyond the point of rational though, but she’s aware on some level that she’s lost something irreplaceable in exchange for the pleasure she’s feeling now. Not saying that she doesn’t feel it’s worth it, but it’s still got to hurt her a little.

6) “Oh boy, its the parents… Not showing their face, saying that they tried their hardest to raise her but its her fault that she turned out evil, and that she’s a monster…”-In retrospect, this does feel a little bit like a sympathy play to the media, putting the blame on Toga’s nature despite their best efforts and being too shamed to directly appear before them, but from their POV, this is actually correct. They saw that there was something different in Toga from an early age but their reaction was to try and stamp out the discrepancy rather than understand it and how to work with it. They could tell that this would spell trouble for Toga down the line, but they ended up framing this as a problem rather than an additional aspect to tToga that needed to be taken into consideration when educating their daughter. 

They were afraid that Toga’s abnormal urges, driven partially by her quirk, partially by her innocence and lack of understanding, would reflect badly on them as parents. After all, just like quirks can be hybrid blends of both parent’s powers, so too can Toga’s personality indicate similar ‘deviancy’ in her parents to an outsider’s POV. They wanted Toga to fit in, but they ended up pushing the agenda more from the perspective of the collective judging the individual, rather than working with Toga’s individuality and working that into society as an inexact fit, but one that would let Toga still live life as herself, without having to repress so much of herself until it exploded.

7) “Oh fuck, Baby Toga just fucking murdered a bird and drank its blood, going by her mouth.”-I think it’s more that Toga found the dead bird’s body and was fascinated by its blood, which adds another layer to her parent’s reactions to her drinking it- she’s basically eating raw roadkill, and treating it as the best thing ever, which is very unsanitary. I assume Toga’s quirk comes with a secondary effect of her not contracting Blood-Bourne diseases or such from her consumption from various sources, not to mention her ability to adapt to various different blood types, otherwise Toga might have gotten sick from consuming the very thing that powers her quirk.

8) “Manifestation of Darkness… What the hell are you even going on woman?”-From a certain Point of View, Curious isn’t wrong. Toga’s like a cautionary tale to others who would attempt to repress their child’s eccentricities for the sake of saving face and maintaining social status amongst their peers, hence why they should instead try to work with said individualities rather than against them- where she twists the narrative is reframing it as purely a result of the societal-driven quirk counselling sessions forcing Toga to her breaking point, when rather it was the authority figures in her life, her parents, teacher, neighbours, who all taught Toga to hide her ‘deviancy’ away until the needs of her ‘darker side’ overwhelmed her reason. 

Toga is the result of a social failing, it’s true, but said social failing is more on the behest of her family, rather than the system- there’s nothing inherently wrong with kids being taught how to control and use their powers in ways they can work into society, it’s when that gets taken too far and they’re taught to repress them to the point that their powers barely exist that things reach the tipping point of madness.

9) “And by God, Toga is even more out of touch with reality here, she’s barely conscious, and she still looks like she wants to murder everyone there.”- Well, I’d say that’s more the blood loss and massive internal bleeding making her woozy and light-headed- Toga seems to spend half this fight slipping into and out of her old memories of her past and barely conscious of what’s happening around her- and getting so light-headed due to low blood supply can make you feel giddy and disorientated- which probably tires into Toga’s attempts to ‘run away’ from the conversation. She’s unable to physically flee, but her mind is running back to happier times away from the painful present, back to when she felt happiest, as a contrast to her current misery that Curious is inflicting upon her. She’s basically half-dreaming for most of this fight until the end when she manages to get her act together enough to focus on her present needs, rather than her past wants.

10) “Holy hell, I wonder how Toga’s even alive at the moment, the adrenaline is not being enough to even let her stand.”- Pretty sure Toga managed to level herself up some whilst helping out Tomura- enough to the point she’s not going to keel over and die from enduing damage that would have wiped her out if she was still the same as she was prior to joining the league.

11) “Suppressed? Oh, what, you’re going to say that her power compels her to kill and drink the blood of others? Because I can’t see how not being able to use a shapeshifitng quirk would lead one to becoming psychotic.”-Well, in some cases, it’s possible for shapeshifters to become so mentally in-tune with the person they’re impersonating, that it’s possible for them to ‘become’ them, to a certain extent, at least in their heads, so Toga’s ability to physically become others may also lends a hand to her smarts and versatility when under pressure- she’s hard-wired to be able to become them in body and mind, which, when mis-handled like she was, becomes a desire to be anybody else other than herself. 

After all, if her own parents don’t love Toga become she’s different and there’s something wrong with her, then Toga just has to become somebody else they will love, just like any normal girl her age. She tried mentally shifting herself to being a ‘normal’ toga for years, but she couldn’t erase the ‘real’ toga and her desires no matter what she tried, and eventually the schism between the ‘real’ Toga, shunned and rejected by those closest to her, and the ‘fake’ Toga, who got all the love and acceptance the real Toga desired, drove her to the breaking point.

12) “Alright, but the actual answer isn’t that much better, as now they implied that exists some sort of counseling group that help people that have trouble controlling the urges their quirks give…?”- I think said group also drums into kids the inherent ‘wrongness’ of using their powers in excess or in public to an unacceptable degree, though given the variance in powers and utilisation of them between different people, what’s considered ‘excessive use’ obviously has a lot of grey area. It’s understandable though- if you’ve got a kid like Bakugou, able to create explosions from his hands at will, then obviously said kids is going to want to use his cool powers all the time, to play with them and have fun with them, even though it’s a dangerous ability if mishandled. But they can’t exactly take the quirk out of the kid, so they’re stuck trying to figure out ways to teach kids not to incorrectly use the guns that they’re born strapped to their hands with, and hoping that each kid takes the lesson to heart at an early age going forward, lest an accidental ‘mis-fire’ lead to tragedy.

As a side-effect, this also comes with kids getting taught how to prevent losing control of their powers by controlling the urges that comes with said powers. At the risk of minor spoilers, I read somewhere that there was a side-story at one point about how Izuku met a kid that was apparently causing villainous attacks with poison gas at people, only for it to be revealed that he was actually suffering from the side-effect of suppressing his own quirk for so long. Said quirk accumulated poison gas within his body over time, and after a certain point he had to release it, but the problem was, every place he went to be alone enough to release what was effectively a Sarin Gas explosion always had people in it, and the longer he held the gas within him, the more he started to suffer backlash, his own body physically breaking from the strain of containing the inevitable explosion for too long, and minor leakage from that causing his apparent villainous actions. 

If he kept holding back on what his body was compelled to do, was born to do, he would have suffered potentially lethal consequences, especially since the gas build-up was starting to concentrate within him to a level of toxicity even he couldn’t withstand. Toga is a similar case, except her quirk simply compels her towards blood, and doesn’t have any negative effects from not indulging in this craving, besides an ever-present itch that Toga wasn’t allowed to scratch, because he doing so was seen as abnormal for the image that her parents wanted her to have, and they went too far in trying to correct Toga’s ‘imperfections’. It’s for this reason that the quirk singularity is a rising concern, because more and more kids are being born with strong and powerful abilities right out the gate, and it’s getting more and more difficult to control them, not to mention there’s also consequences for activity supressing the powers in more extreme circumstances.

In Japan and other countries, there’s a common societal acceptance of conformity, and ‘Tall Poppy Syndrome’ is quite common, so Horikoshi’s simply using the contrast with how Japanese Society currently works with the individuality provided by western comics to show how illogical it is to try and apply an outdated mind-set to the current standard of MHAs world, yet, in order to keep a lawful, safe society functioning, that’s exactly what the hero society and civilians enforce.

13) “Alright, and so, it turned out it was a combination of both aspects, the quirk and her personality, fusing in a really bad way, I guess.”- The twist being, of course, that there’s actually nothing wrong with Toga’s personality or her quirk in themselves, it’s that she was taught from a young age to repress the ‘undesirable’ aspect of her natural self in order to conform with the majority, and Toga, in her innocence and desire to please her family, complied, not realising at the time how much sorrow it would bring her down the line, and once she was old enough to know better, things had been proceeding like this for so long she didn’t have it in her to confront her family with her inherent need to be herself, and just kept complying with what everybody wanted of her, until it reached her breaking point.

14) “Alright, now that’s out of the way… Holy fuck this is getting messed up, because they are treating her as a monster, even though she’s just a little kid that can’t understand what’s wrong.”- Toga’s childishness and carefree attitude may be partially the result of some part of herself never really getting the chance to ‘grow up’. She repressed her inherent instincts at her parent’s behest before she really understood them, and thus never really formed an idea about what to do with them, nor was she able to talk to others in a meaningful way about her inborn wants and needs because she was taught that showing others this side of her was wrong, and so a childish instinct to satisfy herself remained in Toga throughout her early years until she could ignore it no longer, until she finally decided that living life as others said she should simply wasn’t worth it in the end, if it made her miserable. 

Who cares what the majority think? If Toga lives her life the way she wants to, in a manner that she’s proud of, then it’s a meaningful life for her, far more so that the dull future that awaited her if she remained in the cage of society’s expectations of her.

15) “But okay, I have to backtrack and correct myself, Horikoshi is being consistent with the message here. Toga wasn’t born a monster, she was just a little girl with a weird fascination, that couldn’t understand what was wrong, and was basically called a freak and treated like a monster instead of being taught why killing things are wrong.”- I don’t know if Toga’s supposed to be representative of people with same-sex interests or ‘inappropriate’ views and ideas in ultra-conservative environments that frown upon them for holding these views, but I’m certainly seeing the parallels here.

16) “Holy hell, if she has a thirst for blood built-in with her quirk they could’ve just get her a few bags of blood and it would be okay, but no, let’s treat her like the monster she is.”-I mean, if Stain could have a shot at becoming a hero with his power set before he chose a different path based on his own values and dissatisfaction with the system, then there should have been no problem with Toga doing the same. Heck, Vlad King uses his ‘own’ blood as a weapon, and he’s a teacher! In fact, I think the problem may have been that Toga didn’t use her Quirk at all whilst she was acting the ‘normal girl’. 

Her classmates seemed confused at her drinking Saito’s blood, when they should have known her quirk functions if she’d regularly use it around them, but it seems that Toga was taught to ‘never’ let anybody see her drinking blood to use her quirk- in fact, given that this was before she’d have been old enough to move into a hero course where she’d be free to use her power in a regular training environment, it’s possible that, since Toga’s power needs blood, and she had to hide that fact from everybody around her to appear normal, she was never able to practice with her quirk at all. Regular usage would have been impossible without access to blood, and the students weren’t old enough to train with their powers, so Toga’s desire for Blood wasn’t being sated in any capacity, which probably led to stronger cravings as time went on.

@thelreads

#bnha #my hero academia #mha226 #thelreads #chapter replies