Shoto Todoroki: Origin

Shoto opens with ice and Izuku answers with a broken finger, a Delaware Smash, and the knowledge that he has eight of these and no more. Shoto anticipated it, bracing behind a pillar, and keeps the ice coming. All Might recognizes there was no other counter available. Watching from the stands, Katsuki dismantles the spectacle in a sentence: Quirks are physical, and physical things wear out. He built his own costume around outrunning that fact.

Izuku burns through his right hand entirely, then sacrifices his whole left arm to a full power smash just to break the ice creeping up his body. Shoto reads the pattern, notes his opponent is fighting to keep distance, and thanks him for helping annoy Endeavor by winning on ice alone. What Izuku sees instead is a shiver. Frost is stacking on Shoto's right side, and his own left could cancel it if he would let it. So Izuku goads him. Everyone else here is spending everything, he says, and you are competing at half. You have not managed to hurt me yet.

Cementoss wants the match stopped; Aizawa refuses, calling it a boy working at the ceiling of his current ability rather than recklessness. Fingerless, Izuku pulls his thumb back with his cheek to fire again, headbutts Shoto, and tells him that rejecting his father does not entitle him to the top spot without doing his best. The words drag up the abuse, the separation from his siblings, the mother who broke and burned his face, and finally a buried afternoon in front of the television, where All Might told children their Quirks were their own and Rei Todoroki told her son that his bloodline held no claim on him.

Shoto ignites. All Might understands the provocation for what it was: an attempt to keep a boy from amputating half of himself. Endeavor crows from the aisle about a birthright fulfilled, while Shoto tells Izuku that he is the one screwing around now, helping an opponent. They collide once, Flashfreeze Heatwave against a full power smash, and the shockwave shreds Cementoss's wall, flattens Midnight's stand and blows the crowd back. When the smoke lifts, Izuku is unconscious outside the ring, and Shoto advances.

Izuku destroys his right hand and left arm across the match, using individual finger breaks to negate Shoto's ice, and is stopped only by the final clash.

Provoked into confronting his past, Shoto recovers a forgotten memory of All Might and his mother telling him his Quirk is his own, and uses his fire for the first time in the tournament, debuting the Flashfreeze Heatwave.

Shoto Todoroki wins by ring out and advances, while Endeavor claims the moment as proof his son will surpass him.

The twenty-third episode and the tenth of season two, adapting the back of Chapter 38, all of Chapter 39 and the opening of Chapter 40 in the U.A. Sports Festival arc. It aired June 3, 2017 in Japan and October 20, 2018 in the United States. Flashfreeze Heatwave debuts here.

Most changes are expansions. The crowd is shown before the bout, with Kamui Woods, Death Arms and Class 1-A given extra reaction shots throughout, and additional fighting intercut with Cementoss and Eraser Head debating Izuku's condition. The punch that frees Izuku's foot from the ice is shown in full rather than only by its aftermath.

Sequencing shifts too. Katsuki explains the limits on Shoto's ice before the stomach punch rather than after, and the moment Izuku weighs his own ambitions against Shoto's plays while he runs instead of during the thumb fired blast. A censored expletive after his second Delaware Smash is dropped, as is a comedic beat where Shoto's first flames singe Izuku's hair and arm.