The following contains spoilers for My Hero Academia Chapter 392, “Villain Name” by Kohei Horikoshi, Caleb Cook, and John Hunt, available in English from Viz Media.
While Himiko Toga hasn’t always been the most compelling member of the League of Villains, her psychopathic personality and versatile Transform Quirk have made sure that she stayed one of My Hero Academia‘s most memorable villains. As the series’ final war inches towards its end, and with it the completion of Toga’s character arc, her sustained contempt towards Uraraka Ochaco has put Toga in a unique position. Even with an arm outstretched, ready to help her finally integrate into society, Toga is choosing to embrace villainy instead, and her firm refusal is making her one of the series’ most important villains so far.
As her fellow League of Villains members continue to fall one after the other, Toga is left with fewer remaining allies. Impressively, despite not labeling herself as a villain at first but rather as someone who was just living life on her own terms, she’s now firmly embraced the villain identity even though the safer choice would be surrendering. Her version of the Sad Man’s Parade is continuing to expand despite the heroes’ best efforts to keep her contained and as it stands, is only a matter of time before she breaks through the mental block preventing her from accessing her teammates’ Quirks. Toga may end up being the one to make the League’s final stand, a perfect conclusion for one who’s only now embracing the title.
MHA 392 Expands On Toga’s Backstory
My Hero Academia has alluded to Toga’s tragic childhood several times, but never in more detail than Chapter 392. A large part of her unique personality can be summed up as “radical honesty” and for most people—including Toga’s parents—that was too much. Toga first began to attract negative attention when her Quirk manifested. Since her Transform Quirk allows her to shape-shift into anyone else for a period of time so long as she’s tasted their blood, it outfitted the young Toga with unique cravings, much to the dismay of her conservative parents.
While Toga’s compulsion to drink blood wasn’t borne out of any evil intent, the taboo act in and of itself was enough to be a cause of concern for her parents. Toga’s ability to transform into other people gave her a strange perspective of emotions like love and affection. According to her, it was natural for someone to want to emulate a person they admired; drinking another’s blood to turn into them was just her own way of demonstrating this love. Unfortunately, Toga couldn’t have articulated this sentiment properly in her youth, and doing so may have only horrified her parents even more. Desperate to “fix” their daughter, they never hesitated to reprimand Toga for any behavior they deemed out of the ordinary and eventually sent her to counseling in order to get straightened out.
Unfortunately, therapy could not take those urges away any more than it could have changed Toga’s Quirk. What she did learn however was that her “normal” personality would always be perceived as evil by polite society, so Toga learned to suppress those urges and put on a mask for everyone else’s sake. This allowed her to live out her childhood in relative peace, but after being repressed for so long, Toga’s true nature soon exploded out in the most violent manner possible. In her current state, Toga can’t help but wish to inflict bodily harm on those she claims to love. After realizing that no amount of masking would be enough to curb those urges, Toga left her life of comfort to live as her authentic self. She never embraced the villain title from the beginning. It was just the only one that applied to her.
Why Toga’s Sad Man’s Parade Didn’t Work
After being gifted a vial of Twice’s blood, Toga was given a very simple objective in the final war: to make doubles of herself and the League of Villains as fast as she could and use their various Quirks to wreak havoc across the battlefield. A timely Warp Gate from Kurogiri allowed her to be transported to the main battleground and achieve the first part of her objective but she ran into her first setback immediately after transforming. Toga realized that although she was able to access Twice’s Quirk, she couldn’t use the Quirks of the other League of Villains members even after transforming into them.
This setback gives a small glimpse into Toga’s perception of her teammates and her shaky allegiances. The Quirk Awakening she received during My Villain Academia allowed her to use the Quirks of those she’s transformed into, but only if she genuinely loves them. She’s used this new ability to imitate both Uraraka’s Float and Twice’s Double Quirks but her inability to use Dabi’s, Mr. Compress’, or Shigaraki’s Quirks suggests that Toga’s love simply doesn’t extend to these characters or another factor might be limiting her full potential. Desperate to connect with Toga, Uraraka deduced that her bloodlust was preventing Toga from operating from a place of pure love but was met with sharp rejection from the villainess.
Why Toga Is Now My Hero Academia‘s Most Important Villain
Toga’s rejection of Uraraka indicates a drastic shift in her character. While she had previously sought to highlight the similarities between herself and Uraraka, Toga has completely abandoned the possibility of a friendship in any form with the hero-in-training. Instead, she chose to highlight how starkly different their upbringings were. By sheer dumb luck, Ochaco was born with a Quirk that allowed her to pursue the Quirk-based society’s most coveted profession. That same luck had granted Toga a Quirk that would forever relegate her to the fringes of society. No matter what they shared in common, their lived experiences had set both girls on starkly different life paths.
Many of the League of Villains’ members have been victims of circumstance to some extent but none have been able to challenge the Hero Society’s status quo as well as Toga’s existence. For better or worse, the dichotomy between heroes and villains is clear-cut: the heroes are state-sanctioned actors that are allowed to use their Quirks for the good of the public while villains are anyone else that uses their Quirk. In the case of Toga, whose sense of self-expression is directly tied to a Quirk that necessitates the harm of another to be activated, there’s no way for her to survive in such a society.
Even though one of My Hero Academia‘s core themes has been that every individual deserves salvation no matter their background, this hasn’t applied to any of the series’ villains yet. While Spinner and Dabi did express some regret towards the end, they were both incapable of altering their destinies at that point since Spinner couldn’t resist All For One’s manipulation and Dabi was already at death’s door. Now that the story finally gets a chance to save a villain, Toga rebuffs the hand extended to her, just as the world rejected her several times over. By stabbing Uraraka, Toga is simultaneously confirming her love for the young heroine while cementing the fact that she’s past redemption. The question now is, how do the heroes intend to deal with a threat that can and will not be saved?
