#Himiko Toga and the Completely Bullshit Love Triangle

[justatalkingface]

Just finished reading your Momo answer and... hoo boy do I have some things to say about Hori.

With how he writes his female characters, to be all soft, pretty faced, and waifu shaped cutouts, it just feels like the author is being a pervert.

(Looks at how Hori has claimed Mineta is his self insert in some way)

This is the kind of stuff that you should've grown out of doing AFTER puberty. To not think or write women this way because it's just feels misogynistic.

Sure there can be some exceptions to SOME degree. Like Uraraka, Mina, or even La Brava.

But they always tie back to something, to either be a love interest, a damsel in distress for a male hero to save, or just be mistaken to being in a relationship with someone older than her.

And I just have a funny feeling that even if BNHA ends and make more, this won't be the end of objecifying women and just making them gentle waifus.

Yeah. And the sad thing is, it started off so much better.

It's hard to remember these days, but between Momo getting hyped as a recommended student who is clearly smart, Uraraka saving Izuku right back in the Entrance Exam, and Asui being an integral part of getting off the ship in the first villain attack, it's like Naruto if Sakura took out the second mook ninja in the Wave Arc with Sasuke instead of just standing there the whole time.

It wasn't the best, sure, the guys clearly had more focus, but they were doing things, actually participating in fights, which really was more than girls got in most shonen, and that's the reason, I think, people clung so hard to the idea that, 'MHA does women better' even as it grew more and more clear that wasn't the case.

But now... it feels like they've all regressed. Uraraka has turned from the girl who interned with someone called Gunhead, eagerly learning some kind of MMA style, to being the Token Female Teammate, coded to support The Main Character and to be his waifu in the future... when she's not being randomly thrown half assedly into whatever the fuck is happening with with Himiko Toga and The Completely Bullshit Love Triangle. Momo is now rather meek rich girl who only stands out because she doesn't have to buy the things she gives everyone else, and Asui is... Ochako's appendage into the Toga story, so... what. Implying a harem for Izuku? I'm not sure Hori has even thought that far ahead with her beyond giving Uraraka some back up when she tries yet again to talk down Toga.

I mean, hell, for all that she's a living fetish wearing a skin-tight suit, at least Mt Lady won originally. Ever since that first chapter, though, I honestly don't think she's won a single fight she's been in on screen. These days she exists to hold back Gigantomachia while the more important people do literally anything else, before she inevitably fails because he's basiclly the Super Nomu version of her.

And just... at least back then, even if she was Default Unsavory Hero, she was a character. At this point, Mt Lady feels more like an somewhat sexualized background Hori puts up every once and awhile rather than a person.

That's not even getting into Mirko. From a broader perspective, Mirko is such a mixed bag, because on one hand, she's a brash, aggressive hero who brutally beats up her enemies, and as bad a fit as that is in setting for someone we're supposed to wholeheartedly support, she's a breath of fresh air compared to how passive and soft every other woman feels at times.

But on the other hand, she's a literal bunny girl that Hori seems to delight in using as a chew toy, and there's so much messed up with her seeming to exist solely to be his plaything.

Then, to top it off, post War Arc every new female character introduced seems to be made to fulfil one role before being discarded.

The longer the story goes on, the less they feel like people, and more like one or two character traits (unless you're Asui, who literally seems to be a prop at this point) in an aesthetically pleasing shape made to display them.

And considering how these final parts of the story seem to be nothing more than just the most basic plot points, made without the padding required for a decent story, the fact that they've all been reduced to these empty things is just so telling. If these are all women ultimately are in this bare bones vision of Hori's story, it doesn't feel like a woman will ever be anything more than that, no matter how much time he may spend on them in the future.

[justatalkingface]

Himiko’s “thing” for Ochako always felt like it came out of nowhere to me. Like, we’re given reasons and justifications for her love for Izuku, but the Ochako thing felt like it just randomly happened, just because Horikoshi needed something for the two of them to do in the final battle, especially since it seems to have completely overshadowed her original thing for Izuku anyway

Hmm. I hate to disagree but, on Himiko's end at least, the fact it came out of nowhere made perfect sense because, well, it's Himiko. Part of her characterization is 'falling in love' with people more or less at random, and then using that 'love' as justification to hunt them down. (it's pretty clear to me that, among other things, her Quirk makes her look at people and, at some unconscious level, see them as 'food' as much as they are 'people'. No seriously, so much of Himiko is coded as a predator: stalking, mimicking, ambushing; these are all things that a predator will do to successfully hunt their prey. In all honesty, reading her as, like, a half-vampire or something, one that is badly raised and so doesn't properly understand her own motivations, makes so much of her actions make sense, because Himiko is mixing 'hunting' behaviors and desires with 'romantic' ones. Then, between the mechanics of her own Quirk, how feeding, which gave her positive feedback in both being full for once and doing something that is natural to her, turned her into someone else, and just how little understanding she has of herself and her own desires, all these various conflicting impulses eventually evolved into her 'love' and her obsession with being her 'loved one'.) So, Himiko 'loving' Ochako makes sense because she doesn't understand what love actually is, and the way she uses the word is basically a sort of personal slang for a combination of obsession, lust, and hunger. It's not someone genuinely falling in love, it's her predatory behavior locking onto another target, often for shallow reasons about her finding them attractive, so I'm sure as soon as she sees Izuku again, she'll refocus right back onto her other desired food source, and that much makes sense.

(Really though, when you look at her and what drives her seriously there's a fascinating story here, but Hori clearly can't be assed to actually do that in the slightest. Put her in a story that'd spend time on her motivations, like Tokyo Ghoul, and she'd fit a lot better.)

The problem is the narrative, because it keeps placing them together, and dramatically panning in on them, as if there are real feelings there. Not only that, it makes it seem like those feelings of Himiko's are, to an extent, returned when Ochako's interactions are dead ass, 'Hey, what if you stop murdering people alright?'

Until recently, there's been basiclly no justification for there being any sort of feelings between them, because one is channeling her usual stalker serial killer behavior, and the other is literally trying to arrest her, but it's just the narrative is just... shipping them so damn hard. At this point I'd swear it's going to start playing romantic music in background while it zooms in on their faces or something.

Worst part, though, is just as Himiko has her 'big moment of villainy' (which is terrible on so many levels), it feels like Ochako is.... giving into the narrative's peer pressure, at least in part, and trying to approach Himiko as more than just the hero trying to stop her, between being concerned about her tears and apparently unironically wanting to talk about love with her, when before I thought it was her frantically trying to distract Himiko while she was on Twice Time. And that? That has no real support anywhere in story, beyond in the most meta of senses the story itself, and feels just a few steps below the author physically pushing their heads together and saying, 'Now kiss'.