Uraraka tries one last time to reach Toga.
Last time on My Hero Academia
the Todorokis faced off against their Black Sheep. The heroes learn that Dabi’s
been building up his internal heat since he woke up from his first fight with
Shoto. He’s building that energy up in an insane attempt to turn himself into a
high yield bomb that will not only kill Endeavor, but the civilian members of
his family, who are stuck in their UA Block nearby due to sabotage. All Might
calls up Shoto and Iida and tells the boys that they have to get out there and
stop Dabi, and that he got a hero on staff to face off against AFO. Iida and
Shoto combine their powers to travel at the speed of a fighter jet to get
across the island in time. He still would have been to slow, though, without
help. Endeavor did his best to lead his son away, but his injuries kept him from
going far. Dabi latches onto his father and Endeavor realizes Dabi has
completely lost his mind and is babbling incoherently. He grabs Dabi and tries
to fly upwards to try to be Dabi’s only victim, which he feels is his just
punishment for so breaking his son. He wouldn’t have gotten high enough, but he
was saved by the rest of his family. Rei, Fuyumi, and Natsuo use their ice
powers to reduce Dabi’s heat and also beg their son or brother to not do this.
Dabi has an epiphany that he doesn’t want to end like this, and he wants to
spend time with his family. He also is a bit heartbroken to realize they still
showed up for him. He nearly goes off, but Shoto rushes in and uses his Great
Glacial Aegir to take away Dabi’s heat entirely. The whole family is burned
after this, a visible scarring to match their internal ones. Endeavor drags
himself to Dabi and sobs over him, repeating that he’s sorry to him as well as
his wife and other children while a burnt-out Dabi mutters how much he hates
him. Enough Recapping. Let’s get to it, shall we?
After recapping Shoto’s defeat of
Dabi, we join with Toga. Still in Twice’s form, she sees Dabi’s fireball go out
and remembers his philosophy of living for the day. If life is going to change
and your options are to laugh or cry, you might as well laugh, basically. Toga
starts tearing up at realizing that her friend was captured and wonders if he
was able to laugh through that. We see her twice clones have captured Jiro, Tsu
and Uraraka and they seem to be piling themselves up to protect her. We see that
the Duplication of Twices are starting to overwhelm the heroes, who are all
beaten and badly injured from all the fighting. Narrator Present Mic tells us
that the heroes have no way of knowing what the time limit is to Toga’s
transformation, and if they don’t stop her soon, the whole nation will be
swallowed up by the clones. We get confirmation that Shoto and Iida are both
still down after their final freeze and mad dash respectively. Hawks, exhausted
and depowered, stands up and prepares to fight with his feather sword if he has
to. Uraraka frees herself for a moment with anti-gravity but the Twices tangle
her and pull her down.
Toga looks over at where she last
saw Dabi and wonders if he’s okay or if he’s leaving her too. She’s caught
off-guard when Uraraka gets one of her rope lines tangled around Toga’s arm and
yanks herself toward the main Toga. She tells Uraraka to back off and tries to
cut the line loose. Uraraka yells at Toga that she wants to understand the
other girl. She says that they’ve only known each other since last summer, but
Toga has changed her perspective on things. Toga tells her to shut up, Uraraka
refuses and says she knows that Toga was crying because she couldn’t fully
become Twice. She remembers Tsu’s theory that Toga can’t make clones of her
other friends because she didn’t love them enough, but Uraraka has a different
theory. Namely, that the murderous intent Toga is carrying in her heart is
keeping her from her full potential. The hate she feels towards everyone is
basically drowning the love she feels for her friends. Toga doesn’t want to
hear this and throws a wave of clones at her. Toga draws up Tsu and prepares to
cut her down, lashing out at Uraraka for daring to think she can understand the
life that Toga has led. She says that Uraraka has lived a life where she wanted
for nothing while Toga suffered. … I should point out that Uraraka lived with
poor working-class parents and for a while a recurring gag bit in the manga was
a series of one-page stories about the ways Uraraka would try to save money.
The Urarakas weren’t living in the lap of luxury… but I see her point.
Toga flashes back to her childhood.
From a young age people were offput by her Quirk and her desire to drink the
blood of things she likes. She was slapped as a child where her parents thought
she’d killed a bird to drink its blood, something Toga denied. She found it
injured and tried to drink it after. That’s still not great, but better than
what her parents thought. She was given counseling to try to ‘correct’ her
behavior, the psychiatrist telling her parents this kind of ‘perversion’ is
common in kids with strong quirks and they will correct her. We see that Toga
develops a nervous tick of gnawing at her fingers in this time and she’d
regularly chew it until she bled. We see a particularly traumatic moment where
her parents were shrieking at her for apparently trying to drink her friend’s
blood. She insists she was just trying to stop her friend from bleeding, so
what if she drank it? She asks why she has to lie to have a normal life and
can’t she have a life where she drinks blood because it makes her happy. They
both denounce their clearly pre-teen daughter as a monster. She remembers
Curious of the Meta Liberation Arm psychoanalyzing her and saying that she
tries to hide herself behind a mask.
Toga slashes at Tsu, but Uraraka
yanks her away at the last second. She kicks off using compressed air in his
boots to pull them both away. Kamui Woods grabs Jiro and pulls her free as Tsu
falls towards Jiro. Jiro tries to catch her, but Kamui tells her to stop as
that isn’t Tsu, he’s got the real one in his other branch. No, that’s a Toga
clone. Turns out, the Clones have been drinking the blood of the injured and
have started shifting forms to sew more chaos. Jiro sees a few of herself in
the mix and says that is so damn creepy. Kamui says that they need to gather
everyone together so they don’t get tricked by clones. The Duplication of
Twices start surging around them. Tsu tries to talk to Toga, telling one of the
clones that she used to have a very black and white mindset. Tsu follows rules,
and that makes her a hero, some people break rules, so that makes them
villains, sort of thing. She says that Uraraka doesn’t think like that and all
she’s trying to do is talk to Toga. She begs Toga to just have on honest
conversation with Uraraka. The real Toga lunges at Uraraka and stabs her in the
gut.
Uraraka spits up blood as Toga
tells her that she refuses to have them pity her based on the rules they made
up. She flashes back to when the League of Villains was on the run and Twice
asked her if she’d come up with a villain name yet. Twice, Spinner and Mr.
Compress pitch her a few that are objectively terrible. Dabi says that its kind
of pointless as Quirk registrations made aliases a moot point. Compress points
out that’s rich coming from “Dabi.” Tomura says that codenames are silly and
that they’re societies attempt to make the real world into a comic book. Toga
leaps up and says that’s why she joined the League, she’ll live her life as her
authentic self as Himeko Toga.
She tries to stab Uraraka again,
but Uraraka grabs her to make her float. Toga kicks off her and says that
Uraraka acts nice but what she wants is to cage Toga and sentence her to death.
Toga says that this is a win or lose, life or death scenario. Her Twice form
sort of melts, transforming into a costume reminiscent of his but is more Toga.
She says that one of them will die and Uraraka is bleeding out, and that Toga
has the numbers advantage. She calls up her redubbed Sad Man’s Legion. The
Twice clones climb to the sky forming a gray goo like situation. The Reporter
Yu watches from above and says that this is proof of the Quirk Doomsday Theory,
that powers will grow until they go out of control and that this one girl
proved it. Toga sends a wave of Clones at Uraraka, who uses her Gunhead Marital
Arts to touch and scatter the no floating clones. Toga says that’s no big deal
as she didn’t hurt the clones or her. Uraraka says that’s the point, she
doesn’t want Anti-Gravity to be used to hurt people. Toga remembers her earlier
fight with Uraraka when she claimed that she’d never enjoy hurting people.
Uraraka tries to make Toga see that she’s trying to understand her, but Toga
thinks its just more lies. Uraraka says that when they met, she was terrified
of Toga and thought that the other girl just liked causing pain. Toga remembers
Twice encouraging to do what she wants and her mother telling her she’s a
monster. She screams at Uraraka to just die already.
Uraraka says that she’s sorry for
pushing her away before. She says that she’s seen a lot of happy people, so
Toga can trust her when she said that the smile Toga had when she confessed her
feelings to Izuku was pure. There’s also a brief flashback to when as a child
Uraraka saw a hero save someone and she did an exaggerated happy dance. She
looked behind her and saw a very sad Toga watching as well. Not sure if this is
diegetic or not. Uraraka says she doesn’t want to pretend she never saw that
beautiful smile as she unleashes a huge wave of Anti-Gravity power, causing
everyone to start floating. She tells Toga that while there are things Toga has
done that she can’t forgive, she still wants to talk to her about love and life
and she’ll offer up all the blood she needs to get Toga to open up to her. We
see the child versions of them again, with little Uraraka offering up her arm
to Toga. Jiro is among the floating people and she’s clearly in awe that her
friend was able to use her Quirk like this.
A Twice Clone tries to make a fresh
copy but even the new copy floats as well. Kamui Woods grabs Tiger and anchors
him to the ground. Tiger is wowed by Uraraka’s display of power, as previously
had a limit of about three tons. Safe to say she’s surpassed that. He thinks
they’ve grown so much since the training camp.
Uraraka is bleeding out and says
she’s feeling cold. But she doesn’t care about that, as she wants to reach out
and touch Toga’s cold heart. She reveals her backstory about her family’s
financial troubles and how she wanted to be a hero for them. But as she grew
older she understood that there are more people out there then her parents. She
fell in love with Izuku and met Toga and now she wants to help everyone. She
asks Toga what is on her mind. Toga is enraged by this and goes for the stab.
The mental image of the two shows Toga turning into a Venom like monster, but
when she tries to stab little Uraraka she doesn’t move. In the real world, a
sobbing Toga says that she falls in love too easily. She falls for people,
animals, and even heroes. She tells Uraraka about how Izuku reminded her of a
boy she liked named Saito, he was Izuku but Blue instead of Green. She says
that she couldn’t tell him she wanted to drink his blood as he’d lecture her
like Izuku and Uraraka would have about how that isn’t right. She says that is
the whole reason she joined the league, as it was the only place she could live
and love like how she wanted. She goes to stab at Uraraka, but it turns into a
hug. Uraraka says that Toga was sending her signs of what she wanted but she
just didn’t see it. Toga hits her time limit and Twice’s power starts to
disintegrate. She says that Jin is leaving her again.
They start to drift to the ground. Uraraka
tells Toga that if she’s being completely honest, she also thinks it’s
admirable to see someone work so hard they get bruised. She tells Toga that she
probably can’t take the place of the League, but she can try. Toga asks if
she’s cute while smiling her natural, somewhat sinister if I’m honest, smile.
And Uraraka says she’s the cutest in the world. We peel back to see a really
pretty skyline. It’s a mix of the pink energy of Anti-Gravity and the black
dust formed by the dissolving Twice clones.
Well, that was an emotional gut
punch. Uraraka as a character felt like she was stuck in place basically from
the moment she realized she had a crush on Izuku. Before that point, while she
was ‘the girl’ of Izuku’s friend group, she had a lot of combat skill and a
drive that just seemed to fade with time. More of her screentime was devoted to
being flustered that she’s got a thing for green-haired nerds. I think
Horikoshi just wasn’t sure what to do with her up until she set her sights on
helping/beating Toga, so he fell back on the old fiction stereotype that the
number one priority of teenage girls is their crushes. It’s a common trope for
a reason. Thankfully, after her one on one with Toga during the raid on Gunga
Villa, she seemed to refocus on helping Toga, this girl that she has a kindred
connection with that she can’t even fully explain. I liked how they brought her
desire to help Toga back to this childhood love of making people happy that she
wants to bring forward into her adulthood. I like Toga’s arc. When she was
first introduced, she was an implied psychopath dressed in a schoolgirl uniform
that likes cutting people and drinking blood. But as we went along, we learned
she’s actually a deeply empathetic person with just this unfortunate mental health
issue where she conflates pain with love. She’s someone that absolutely needed
a psychiatrist, but not the kind she received. Maybe I’m getting this wrong,
but I’d compare the help Toga got vs what she needed as like conversion
therapy. Her parents wanted her to conform to the strict social norms of Japan,
she was told how she felt and acted was wrong, monstrous, and she should be
ashamed by her desires. Sounds a bit like what a queer person might hear
from bigoted parents, now doesn’t it? She needed someone that could have helped
her find other ways to express her feelings, or how to approach someone where
she could eventually bring up her desire for blood. I’m not sure how this could
be done, all I’m saying is she needed to find ways to live closer to authentic
self than to try to bury her desires like her parents wanted. I also liked that
Uraraka never tried to trivialize Toga’s relationship with the League of
Villains. Like, we all know those guys were a bad influence on her, but at the
same time they represent her first real group of friends that didn’t judge her
or make her try to conform. They weren’t good for her, but they were hers. I
also felt a pang of sorrow when Twice’s power ran out. Toga and he had a
connection, proven by him being the only person besides Uraraka whose power she
could mimic. They cared about each other a lot, so seeing her have to say
goodbye to him again hurt quite a bit. So… Toga’s down. That’s the whole
original League of Villains defeated, killed or captured save Tomura and AFO.
The story ends how it began, with these two. I suppose Kurogiri is still out
there, but I don’t think he’s going to be a huge threat for a bit. We’ll have
to wait and see how All Might is going to challenge AFO. I’m so excited for
next month. Have a good night everyone, and stay safe.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/viewer-log-my-ep-159776748
Bluesky: @basicssuperhero.bsky.social
No comments:
Post a Comment