What Your Untouched Gifts Are Costing You

Shoto Todoroki won every single fight using half his power.

Not because he had to.

Because using the other half felt like letting his father win.

What’s up, Kam Fam! ⚡

Hope this week you’re letting yourself use everything you’ve got.

This week we’re breaking down Shoto Todoroki from My Hero Academia, and the half of himself he refused to touch.

On the surface, Todoroki appears to have everything.

But the whole time he’s winning, he’s carrying one of the most honest struggles the show ever put on screen.

🚨 Heads up, this post covers Todoroki’s backstory and his fight with Deku at the Sports Festival. Spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen it.

Quick refresher if you’re rusty: In My Hero Academia, most people are born with superpowers called Quirks.

Todoroki got two.

Ice from his mother’s side.

Fire from his father, Endeavor, the number two hero who spent years putting Shoto through brutal training to create the perfect successor.

Endeavor wasn’t raising a son.

He was building a weapon.

And Shoto’s response was the only rebellion available to a kid in that house.

He took the fire side of his power and locked it away.

Using the fire meant using the thing his father gave him.

And he refused to let his father win that way.

So homie goes through the entire early part of the series winning every fight with ice alone, telling himself it’s enough, while carrying the weight of everything the other half represents.

He wasn’t hiding a weakness.

He was hiding a strength, because of whose fingerprints were on it.

Todoroki is the most naturally talented student at UA.

And he’s been voluntarily operating at half capacity.

Not because he can’t use the fire.

Because every time he reaches for it, it feels like choosing his father.

Like conceding something he’s spent his whole life holding onto.

The ice side was his mother’s.

The one-half of his power he could use without dragging the past along with it.

The fire was Endeavor’s.

Complicated. Painful. A reminder of every morning spent training for someone else’s ambition.

And here’s the part that makes it hit: nobody watching him fight knows any of this.

They just see a prodigy winning with ice and assume that’s all there is.

But Todoroki knows exactly what he’s not using, and why.

That gap, between what you’re capable of and what you’re allowing yourself to access, is the real fight in his arc.

And it’s invisible to everyone who isn’t him.

The most expensive limits we carry aren’t the ones other people put on us.

They’re the ones we chose to keep because removing them feels like letting someone else win.

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During the Sports Festival, Todoroki gets matched against Izuku Midoriya.

Deku has no business winning this fight on paper.

Todoroki is stronger, more controlled, and has more than enough power to end it fast.

But as they fight, Deku starts screaming at him.

Not about tactics.

About Todoroki himself.

He tells him that no matter what Endeavor did, that power is Todoroki’s.

Not his father’s.

His.

And something in Todoroki cracks open.

For the first time, the right side ignites.

The fire comes out, and the whole arena shifts.

Not because Deku convinced him his father was wrong.

But because in that moment, Todoroki finally separates the two things he’d been fusing together for years.

The fire wasn’t Endeavor.

The fire was his.

It just lived next to memories of Endeavor for so long he forgot the difference.

You don’t have to love where a part of you came from to claim it.

Wherever the strength came from doesn’t determine who it belongs to.

Most of us aren’t splitting ice and fire.

But a lot of us have a version of Todoroki’s locked side.

A way of thinking we built to survive something hard, that we now can’t use without feeling like we’re back in that thing.

A strength we got from a painful season that we refuse to touch because touching it means touching the memory.

A part of ourselves that came from someone we’re still angry at, so we leave it unused rather than let them feel like they contributed to who we are.

Sound familiar?

That refusal makes sense emotionally.

It’s a completely understandable way to protect yourself.

But it costs you something real.

I got good at reading people because I grew up in an environment where I thought I had to. When I was young, I just didn’t want people to not like me or be angry at me.

Overall, I was afraid of “making a mistake” and making someone feel bad.

For years, because I was silencing myself and thoughts, I actually honed an insane skill that I honestly didn’t come to like because of how I formed it.

I wouldn’t let myself lean on that skill in business, because using it felt like admitting those years of not speaking my truth gave me something.

It took way longer than I’d like to admit to see that the skill was mine, even if where it came from wasn’t okay.

— Devin (Kaminari Cofounder)

Claiming a strength that came from a hard place doesn’t mean forgiving whatever produced it.

It doesn’t mean the origin was okay.

It doesn’t mean anything about the past changes.

It just means you stop punishing yourself for something someone else did, by limiting what you let yourself become.

And let’s keep it real: that’s not a fast process.

If the thing you’re holding back is tied to something genuinely painful, working through it takes time.

Sometimes way more than a motivational reframe.

Some weeks you’ll reach for that part of yourself and pull your hand back.

That’s not failure.

That’s what the process actually looks like.

The part of you that came from something painful still belongs to you. You get to decide what you do with it.

The Balanced Master doesn’t let the war inside dictate the performance outside.

Todoroki is this archetype mid-process. He hasn’t fixed things with his father. He hasn’t found peace with his history. He just makes one decision, in one moment, to stop letting the inner conflict decide what he’s allowed to use.

That’s the Balanced Master move. Not total calm. Not total resolution. Just choosing your response instead of letting the old wound keep running the show.

And it costs something. Staying grounded when the memory is loud is work, not a personality trait.

Apply this week: Pick one strength you’ve been leaving unused because of where it came from. Use it once this week, on your terms, for your reasons. The origin doesn’t have to be okay for the strength to be yours.

If you want structure behind this mindset, we’re building something called “The Anime Mindset.” Curious which archetype you are? Take the quiz here.

Todoroki didn’t fix his relationship with his father in that fight.

He didn’t suddenly feel okay about everything that happened.

He just separated two things he’d been treating as the same thing for years.

The pain of where the fire came from.

And the fire itself.

Once he could see those as two different things, he could choose what to do with each of them separately.

Maya Angelou, the legendary American poet, put it like this:

“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.”

Most of us have at least one version of this in our lives.

A strength we’re not using because it lives too close to something we’re still angry about.

A part of ourselves we’ve been rationing out to avoid feeling what comes with it.

You don’t have to resolve the painful part before you start using what you’ve got.

And if you’re reading this thinking “easier said than done,” you’re right. It is.

That doesn’t mean don’t try. It means give yourself room to be imperfect while you figure it out.

The version of you that uses everything you have, not just the clean parts, is the strongest version.

It’s also the most honest one.

Start there.

💌 Big love to the Kam Fam for showing up every single week.

Y’all bring everything, and this community feels it. ⚡

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This week, use one thing you’ve been keeping locked away.

It was always yours.

— Kaminari, Your Weekly Anime Plug ⚡