Soul Eater Ending Explained: the Punch, and What the Manga Did Instead

Soul Eater has two endings, and the one most people saw is the one the author did not write. Bones' anime ran for 51 episodes from April 2008 to March 2009 and caught up with Atsushi Ohkubo's manga, which was serialized in Monthly Shonen Gangan from May 2004 and did not finish until August 2013. So from roughly episode 35, where CBR's guide to the divergence places the split, the anime writes its own final act. This page explains that act, then what the manga did instead.

What happens in episode 51

Asura, the first Kishin, has been freed from beneath the academy and has grown into something that spreads madness by existing. The final battle puts Maka, Soul, Black Star and Kid against him after Lord Death has been beaten, and every weapon technique fails. Maka, separated from Soul and unable to fight as a meister, hits Asura with her fist. Asura is baffled: a fist is not a weapon, it is nothing special. Maka agrees. Bravery is not special, she says, and that is the point, because it means everybody has it.

Asura's last reply is the clever part of the writing, and it is easy to miss under the punch. He points out that if courage is in everyone then it is exactly like madness, which has been his argument all along. The episode is called The Word Is Bravery, and the title is the show's vote on which of the two universal things people reach for first. Asura, who cannot conceive of a fear that does not win, comes apart. The city is rebuilt, Kid warns that another Kishin will rise one day, and the cast goes back to school.

Why the punch is argued about

The complaint, which CBR's retrospective on the ending leads with, is that fifty episodes of soul resonance, weapon forms and Witch Hunter techniques are resolved by a girl hitting the villain and giving a speech about courage. As spectacle it is a letdown, and the animation of the moment does not help.

As an argument it holds up better than its reputation. Asura's case, made at length to Lord Death, is that fear is the truth under every human arrangement and that madness is what honesty looks like. Maka does not deny it. She concedes that her fist is nothing and turns the concession around: an ordinary quality everyone has is the one thing a god of fear cannot explain. The anime's writers, working past the manga, gave the villain a real reply and then answered it. Whether a punch was the right image for that answer is a fair question. Whether the answer was empty is not.

What the manga does instead

Ohkubo's ending is longer, darker and built around the characters the anime sidelined. Asura is not hiding on Earth; he is on the moon, and the last arc is a war fought there. Soul eats Arachne's witch soul and becomes a Death Scythe, the goal he and Maka set in episode one and the anime never lets them reach. Crona, who in the anime ends up as a student with a room and a friend, kills Medusa in the manga, absorbs the madness of the Kishin, and finally seals Asura inside the moon along with themselves. The black blood that was done to Crona becomes the thing that saves everyone, and Crona is not there to see it.

Lord Death dies. The manga reveals that he and Asura were far closer than teacher and pupil, and that Kid's Sanzu lines, the three stripes on one side of his hair that the anime uses as a gag, are the mark of an incomplete Shinigami. When Kid completes them he becomes the god of death in full, and his father's existence ends. Kid then makes peace with the witches, which the academy had spent the whole story hunting. Maka still lands the final blow, but the manga's ending is a succession, not a punch.

Which ending is better

The manga's, and not closely. It pays off Crona, Kid and Soul, and it makes the theme of fear cost something: the person who ends the Kishin's threat is the one who was manufactured out of fear and chooses to spend themselves. The anime's ending has one good idea, the exchange between Maka and Asura about what everybody has, and it is worth defending on that ground. It also has the virtue of existing. Bones finished the story in 2009 and the manga took four more years, and an adaptation that ends is worth more than one that stops.

Soul Eater Not!

The spin-off manga ran from 2011 to 2014 and Bones adapted it as a twelve-episode series in spring 2014. It is a school comedy about three first-year girls at the academy, set before the main story, with Maka, Soul and the others in supporting roles, and it has no bearing on either ending. Watch it if you want more of the school and less of the war.

The short version

The anime ends with Maka defeating Asura by hand, on the argument that courage is as universal as madness. The manga ends with Crona sealing Asura inside the moon, Lord Death dying, and Kid becoming the new Shinigami. Both are complete. Only one was written by the author, and this site's Soul Eater quotes note, line by line, which fate each character's words are heading toward.