I read so much mha fanfic I was like ‘huh maybe I should actually like watch the show’ lmaoo Blog is mostly just fanart/meta I like sometimes I have opinions tho
uhhhh experimental thing. adding the base colors also bc as per usual they get lost in the filters lmao. text in the back is badly copy-pasted chorus of sixth magnitude star
One of my mutuals has been reblogging Togachaco or Togaraka or whatever you wanna call it, and some of the posts gave me Opinions. For instance, I don't think a roleswap AU really works with them. Ochaco can be turned into a villain, but Toga can't be a hero.
Toga's whole thing is that she has a creepy Quirk. Drinking blood is gross, turning into your friend is creepy. So she's forced to suppress her Quirk, which she can't do forever, which leads to her being ostracized, which leads to her becoming a villain.
There are two possible Himiko Togas. (Himikos Toga?) One is what we see in canon—an outcast, ready to be recruited by any group or cause that'll accept her. The other is a Toga who successfully conforms to societal expectations, who masks and acts Normal and gets a Good Job.
There are two reasons the second Toga can't be a hero like Ochaco. One is that Ochaco is too honest. She's not a rebel, but she's not a hidebound rule-follower or an aloof ice queen. Conformist Toga could take the role of Iida or maybe Todoroki, but not Ochaco's.
However, the bigger reason is that Conformist Toga is predicated on not using her Quirk. Her character only works if her Quirk is socially unacceptable; even if those norms are lifted for a superhero (even if her Quirk has no obvious combat applications), Toga would never have had a chance to practice using her Quirk before becoming a superhero.
I can imagine an AU where Conformist Toga is, I dunno, a secretary for some superhero, or a civil servant somewhere in the justice system, or someone else hero-adjacent who encounters Villain Ochaco, who convinces Toga to take off her mask and discover who she really is.
But a superhero? A Toga who was allowed to be a hero can't be Toga.
While the fate of the League is of course incredibly messed up, unfair, and infuriating; something that really grinds my gears is all the reactions to the League stans calling this unfairness out by going "well they had to die and deserved to, and they would have gone to prison otherwise anyway, it's not like there was any happy ending available for these horrible criminals," when, like...yes there was. They totally could have Vegeta'd it up in here; MHA is not a realistic series.
Like, Edgeshot survived using his own body to sew a guy's heart up by living as an eyeball with hair on a string.
Endeavor, the known horrible domestic abuser and outright rapist, is retiring publicly shamed (to an extent) but still to great wealth, recognition as a great hero, and with his entire free family having at least a positive opinion of the man.
And of course this latest chapter 429 implied that all those societal failings caused by the horrible MHA civilians neglecting or attacking people including children, the failings that created the League, the failings the League put their lives on the line to fix and utterly failed to fix because they all died completely ignored...got fixed anyway because Deku was so 'zomg inspirational' that suddenly the MHA civilians aren't horrible anymore. (Read in the tone of this video.)
In short, MHA is full of ridiculousness, injustice, and contrivance when Horikoshi wants a happier ending to occur.
But the League had to die because...because MHA is a deeply flawed story with bad writing and at best inconsistent morals. (And it kind of feels good to say that.) It wants at times to be realistic and even tragic, but it also wants to be optimistic and comic book-y to reward the heroes, and here at the end those elements do not mesh at all. It wrecks the whole thing to reveal that Hori might be kind of a hack.
This is probably a weird note to end my time with MHA's run on; but I find it so strange how I still see people calling Tomura out on just being a destruction-hungry villain with supposedly no plan or follow up...as though he is unique for that simplicity. Especially after the ending we got. Like, Deku and All Might never really had a plan when they were reshaping society by beating up the enemy and everything worked out fine for them, but does anyone call them out for just using violence to mindlessly solve everything with no further plan? (Well, yes. Me. Right now.)
Because like, really thinking about it; how different was All Might's plan from the start of his career to take down AFO and become a symbol, and Deku's plan to end the villains and bring everything back, from Shigaraki's plan to end hero society and bring about a world accommodating to the League? It all seemed to boil down to the same basic premise of Step 1) Beat everyone & everything making things worse, Step 2) ...it all just kind of works out from there. (I guess All Might planned on being inspiring and uplifting, but then we could also count Tomura's plan to be imposing and...uplifting but for different people. Deku was winging it every step of the way though.) Everyone's getting on Tomura's case for doing nothing but destroying; but all evidence from when the heroes do it suggests violence & destruction works. And it just never fails to bug me when people call Tomura out for stuff that's fine when heroes do it.
Which, yeah, let's touch on how it did just work out for Deku that way for no logical reason, least of all anything he planned. He punched out the big bad just like All Might and now things are like a hundred times better than they were under All Might with no more Tenkos abandoned in the street.
If stuff like that just happens if you punch out your enemies hard enough, then why couldn't that happen for Tomura? Maybe if he had destroyed the government & hero society it would've, idk, been so fear/awe-inspiring that all the villains would've been nice and cooperative under the PLF and everything would've been fine. Or something. No more contrived than what we saw with the old lady plot line, MHA is just a series where that stuff works out. Heck, one time it actually did just work out that way for Tomura:
Again, violence and destruction works in MHA. I mean; duh, it's a shonen manga.
Plus all this is ignoring the fact that, unlike those two, Tomura did have a follow up to the violence. He did have a step two, or at least one & a half, after "beat down all the bad guys in the country." Rather than just going "and everything will work out from there," he had his guys plan for the future so he could say "and Spinner, Toga, and RD et. all will make sure everything works out from there." (Admittedly, not much; but also, not hopes and dreams.) He did have a plan, it was just the plan from the Overahul arc, where he was last asked to have a plan: leave it to his allies.
And hey, that means it's actually better than what we saw from genius All Might and brainiac Deku. So why are we still, even after everything was over, acting like there's some expectation as a villain he didn't meet? I guess it's just in the nature of a 'tantrum-having man-child who wants nothing but destruction' to put more forethought into the future he wants to build than the society-uplifting greatest heroes.
That or maybe everyone had really detailed follow-ups for when they won that Hori never went much into, but that'd render this post a bit pointless so shhh.
yknow people don’t become a whole different person when they turn eighteen right. So I’m gonna need you to stop treating the LOV character as two different people (child version and adult version) when you talk about them. Stop acting like Tenko Shimura and Touya Todoroki and Himiko Toga and everyone else died and had their corpses possessed
They do that so that they can feel better about them being victims.
If the child version and adult version are two different people then the child version was the victim and the adult version was the villain that deserved to die and were plain evil.
People unfortunately struggle with complex characters that are both the victim and also people who hurt others because they couldn't "heal" the way people wanted them to.
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