Analyzing - Blog Posts

This is just a small analysis on how Himiko Toga’s emotions influence the usage of her quirk throughout the show:

(Major spoiler warning for My Hero Academia!!!)

Himiko Toga has always loved a lot, and because of her quirk, Transform, she would express her love by drinking blood. When she drank a dying sparrow’s blood and happily showed her parents, they pressured her into suppressing her quirk, and by extension, her love, “I fall in love too easily. With animals, with villains, heroes too, boys, girls, anything alive. Because they all have such lovely blood flowing through them.” (Episode: A Girl’s Ego).

Since she wasn’t going to drink blood to show her love anymore, she started envying others, instead. She envied their quirk, their smile, their relationships, and more, “Everyone told me I shouldn’t smile, and it made me so envious” (Episode: A Girl’s Ego). A prominent example of her envy is with Izuku Midoria. She is constantly asking for his blood, and saying that it’s because she utterly and truly loves him. While this is true, she is intentionally ignoring the reason why she loves him so much, that being how she would rather be him than be herself.

The one character that she loves purely at this point in the show is Twice. But when Twice gets killed by Hawks, she ends up switching from using her powers because of envy, to using her powers because of hatred. She does so by turning into Twice and making clones of herself in order to get revenge on Hawks, along with other heroes. “Die, heroes!” (Episode: A Girl’s Ego).

Himiko Toga has now gone through three stages. Love, envy, and hatred in that order exactly. In the episode A Girl’s Ego, Ochako Uraraka manages to get Toga from hatred back to her final and first stage, love. Ochako Uraraka is the one who ends up fighting Himiko Toga, but instead of harming her, she just tries to talk. This doesn’t work, however, because Himiko Toga is way too blinded by hatred to cooperate, “I’ll make you stop talking, Ochako Uraraka!” (Episode: A Girl’s Ego). Eventually, Uraraka manages to get Toga to go back to Envy, “You seem normal because you played by the rules! You have no idea what an easy life you had!” (Episode: A Girl’s Ego). Now that Toga had went back to the stage of envy, it was easier for Uraraka to get her back to the stage of love. “Ochako, am I cute?” “The cutest in the world” (Episode: A Girl’s Ego).

Himiko Toga never stopped loving. All she needed was understanding, and that was enough to clearly see how she drank blood out of malice. It was always pure love and affection. Now that she had someone who loved her for who she was, she decided to save Ochako’s life at the expense of her own. “Thank you, Ochako. You made me so happy. Genuinely, truly happy” (Episode: A Battle Without a Quirk). In this heartbreaking scene, Himiko is shown, alive, holding a sparrow that looks exactly like the one she had drank the blood from in her past. But this one looks up at her and flies away as Himiko smiles at it. Though it’s true that she had started and ended her life loving how she wanted to, the first sparrow was dead, symbolic of how back then, Toga only knew how to take. But now that she had met Uraraka, the sparrow was alive because she knew a way to love that now benefits everybody.

“If only I had understood then. If I’d had experienced this kind of love before, maybe I would have wanted to give people blood just as much as I wanted to drink their’s. And then maybe the world would have been an easier place for me to live in.”