The Last Attack Post-Credits Scene Explained

The following contains heavy spoilers for the entire “Attack on Titan” anime and manga. Reader beware.

Even years after its ending, “Attack on Titan” continues to shock and surprise audiences. The hugely popular anime based on the best-selling manga by Hajime Isayama is a modern classic. This is a show where each season builds and improves on the previous one, delivering huge plot twists that recontextualize everything the audience thought they knew. It’s a show with stunning animation and epic action scenes, memorable characters, and one hell of a soundtrack.

If you’ve never got around to watching “Attack on Titan,” stop reading right now. There are (obviously) huge spoilers ahead, and we’ll just go straight in to discuss the ending of the show. Do yourself the favor of experiencing the defining anime of the 2010s — which also happens to be a perfect introduction to anime for newcomers.

After a nearly 10-year run, “Attack on Titan” came to an end in 2023 with a truly epic finale that saw protagonist Eren Jaeger unleash an army of thousands of Colossal Titans on the world, triggering a catastrophic genocide that killed 80% of humanity. Only the combined powers of Eren’s former friends and enemies managed to take him down, and in the process destroy the power of the Titans forever. The series then ends with an epilogue showing the cycle of violence continuing across the years, with Eren’s hometown of Shiganshina becoming a war-torn ruin and eventually a desolated forest.

Now the compilation movie “Attack on Titan: The Last Attack” which combines the final two episodes of the anime into an epic feature-length finale, gives audiences one final twist. This comes in the form of a post-credits scene that’s both a brilliant joke and one final sting for audiences to discuss and theorize over.

After the credits in “Attack on Titan: The Last Attack,” we cut to a movie theater where Armin, Eren, and Mikasa seem to be watching the same movie as the audience. Except, these are not the same Amin, Eren, and Mikasa we know — Armin is a nerd wearing graphic tees and glasses, Eren is a loner, and Mikasa is a goth. (We also see a dead Marco sitting behind them.)

The post-credits scene is full of clever nods to the anime as well as cameos. We see Levi as the movie theater janitor doing some impressive fighting moves while cleaning the walls. We see Niccolo outside of what appears to be his own lobster restaurant. We even see Ymir walking down the street with her three daughters, finally free of Fritz.

As they exit the theater, Armin and Mikasa talk about their thoughts on the ending of the movie they saw. Mikasa says she enjoyed how the ending paid off all the foreshadowing from earlier in the series, and praises the story for allowing the audience to say goodbye to the characters. Meanwhile, Armin argues that the ending was rather predictable if you were following the online discussion threads, and that it failed to subvert expectations. Eren, however, was just happy he got to see the movie with his friends.

Then, as they walk down the street, Armin shares his disbelief that Titans truly existed 100 years earlier, and the group wonders how much of the movie was based on historical fact and whether the main characters of the movie really existed. The movie ends as the camera pans up and we see the giant tree Eren is buried under in the background. This seemingly confirms that the post-credits scene really is set in the same timeline as the events from the anime and we were watching an in-universe retelling of events long past.

It is a fun and bonkers scene, one that pokes fun at the reaction to the anime’s ending — which was quite polarizing — while ending on a classic “Attack on Titan” plot twist. Or did it?

You see, the post-credits scene is not some out-of-nowhere gag, it is the culmination of a long-running bit in the manga — “Attack on School Castes.” This is a slice-of-life parody gag manga published at the end of every volume of Hajime Isayama’s original “Attack on Titan” manga about an alternate universe wherein every character of “Attack on Titan” is just a normal high schooler. The manga is very funny: a way for Isayama to comment on his own manga, poking fun at the topes he was using, at his own characters — all while teasing what was to come in the main story.

For years, fans hoped to get a proper answer on whether the parody was canon, given how closely related the two seemed to be — we even saw a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo of goth Mikasa in the anime from “Attack on School Castes.” Of course, the final issue of the parody manga does feel like a definitive answer if you take it at face value. The idea that, eventually, the story of the Titans and Eren unleashing Armageddon with The Rumbling would pass onto legend and kids would only learn about the event that killed 80% of humanity through a movie makes a lot of sense. It also makes for a nice little coda to Isayama’s story about the cycle of violence and hope persevering even in the worst of circumstances.

Still, given all the silly shenanigans in the rest of “Attack on School Castes,” audiences shouldn’t really take this final reveal at face value. After all, the issue immediately before it was all just a big gag about saunas being the best thing in the world. Instead, audiences should take the post-credits scene as just a final chance to see Eren, Mikasa, and Armin together again, and to follow Eren’s words in the scene: regardless of what you thought of the show and its ending, what matters is the relationships we formed along the way.