#yet she still throws a shit fit when Ochacko and Izuku are not happy with almost getting stabbed

[problemswithbooks]

It all feels like a retcon starting from the first look at toga’s backstory because it doesn’t sync up when you put all her actions together. I thought maybe hori was trying to say toga’s quirk became unfortunately linked to arousal after years of suppressing it and it being triggered by her feeling of admiration for her crushes. But yeah that would have been too mature to tackle for my hero though I could maybe see it with chainsaw man. So I don’t know get what’s going on right now except toga’s mentally ill because of her parents and society and he keeps trying to make last minute parallels between toga and touya.

I think the issue is that Hori never spent as much time or effort on Toga as he did with Shigaraki and Touya. Even now her backstory is rather limited in comparison. We got full chapters worth to explore what happened to Touya and Tenko but Toga's is a couple pages or panels here or there with everything being rather vague.

Hori likes using her for sexy pictures and drawing suggestive stuff with Ochako, but she ultimately isn't given as much thought as her male counter parts. Which given the already bad implications of her character has only made her even worse.

Take this latest chapter. We get this page for Quirk counseling.

It's just 2 panels that are honestly really vague. It also comes after her drinking blood from a bird her parents think she killed. Toga says it fell on the ground but that doesn't mean she didn't kill it (baby birds are often on the ground until they fully can fly, or it could have been injured), so that's not helpful either. On top of that it makes sense her parents would find the behavior bad regardless because it either means she killed an animal or picked up an already dead one and proceeded to eat it. Neither of those are great and both are harmful to her.

We just don't really get a good look at how the Quirk counseling worked. They say that they'll make her 'normal' but that doesn't mean they abused her. They could have just explained why it was wrong for her drink blood, like the health issues it could cause. On top of that Hori drops the 'it happens all the time in our current society' line, but we have never seen anyone else like Toga. Not even Stain was ever hinted at being like Toga despite their similar blood based powers.

This is like if we reduced the Touya chapters to a black screen with Enji commenting that he can't train him anymore and we didn't get to see how much Touya struggled with what he perceived as rejection, or how Enji completely ignored him afterwards. Or if we cut Shigaraki's father's abuse to just him yelling at him in black panels before he accidentally killed his family.

Then we get this. This honestly makes Toga look worse, not better in my opinion. We see that she drank blood from someone before she snapped at school. She says they got hurt so she kissed it better, but if you look at her, she is covered in quite a bit of blood. Maybe her friend did get hurt but they were either really badly hurt and bleeding a lot and Toga did not help them and instead started licking them, or she might have even made their injuries worse to get the blood she wants.

If Hori cared more about her character he would have been shown what happened here. Or in the very least put less blood if any on Toga, which would show she didn't hurt this person or ignore helping them with a serious injury because she can't think of anything but blood.

As it is we have no idea if her friend got really badly injured and Toga ignored helping to just feast on them, or if her friend told her to stop, or if she made the person's injures worse. Yes, her parents are wrong for saying Toga's not human, but if she's attacking injured friends that's a huge problem.

One of the biggest issues with Toga is that she is both portrayed as so obsessed and desperate for blood she can't comprehend why anyone might not like her shoving a straw in their neck, but at the same time she was and is at times able to be perfectly fine. She can't understand why Ochako or Izuku, in desperate situations caused in part by her might not be happy with her, but can also turn around and comfort Twice and understand that he feels responsible for the death of a team mate.

It's impossible for me to feel bad for her because when I read her chapters I just see a drawing of an offensive stereotype that does what ever the author wants them to do. Toga just doesn't feel like a person at all. She's nothing but the sexy shell of a teenage girl that Hori doesn't seem all that invested in past her being cute and giving him an excuse to have two girls being all touchy and hot.