#like the way naked toga is hugging ochako with her legs spread is bad

[problemswithbooks]

With the tentative and rough translations out, i have to say, yeah, Hori really doesn't get what he's actually writing and if he was trying to make Toga's entire deal a metaphor for queerness, he's ended up being quite offensive.

Like first off it seems he has Toga say she falls in love easily with boy and girls and...animals. Which, I always felt the bird thing as a kid could have negative connotations, but wrote it off as 'she was a little kid and this was before her desire for blood was wrapped up in her romantic feelings' type things. So having Hori reinstate that yes, she does still love animals to the point of blood drinking desire--a desire Hori coded as sexual/romantic is not a good look.

It also just makes me question if she could ever own a pet or if she'd end up killing it because she loved it to much and she needed to drink it's blood.

Also getting her perspective on the boy she attacked isn't great either. The translation is rough and basic so it could change, but I don't think there's any translation that could make the situation not read poorly.

In the rough translations she says something along the lines of "I didn't ask to drink his blood because I was afraid he'd hate me and think I was a decent monster."

I could see an alternative translation being "I asked for his blood and he called me a deviant monster, and I sucked his blood."

Again if Hori is trying to make a queer metaphor with Toga, this is a huge issue. Her attacking the boy was always a big problem, but if he didn't bring it up again I think a lot of casual readers would have forgotten it. But now it's front and center again and brings back bad connotations for Toga and a queer reading of her character.

Because again if we read her blood drinking as queerness, and Hori has already coded it in the past as lust while just last chapter confirming that Toga sees it as kissing in the very least we get two equally bad reads.

A) Due to fear of rejection Toga did not ask for consent and decided she'd just make sexual advances toward someone she had a crush regardless.

or B) She got rejected and told no, and then made the sexual advance anyway.

With a queer reading this only becomes worse because it pays into the really negative and even dangerous idea that same sex attracted people will go after anyone regardless of consent or the other persons orientation. It continues to perpetuate the idea that queer people are sexual predators, who target straight people or in the very least do not care about consent, or are unable to control themselves long enough to get it.

But even without a queer reading what Toga did is wrong. It sucks that people don't get her way of showing love, but consent is still needed regardless. You can't just do what you want to someone because you were to afraid to ask them out. You can't just do what you want with someone after they tell you no. Even if the boy had called her a monster that would not make it ok for Toga to, essentially sexually assault him (yes, kissing someone against their will is sexual assault, which is what Toga sees her blood drinking as).

And I think that's why Toga's character is really hard to get behind for some people--because at the end of the day she's literally just saying "I can't help but sexually assault people (and animals apparently)', and the solution to this is to give her exactly what she wants and apologize for not seeing how much pain she was in when she was actively trying to sexually assault people.